The Way Out of Trump’s Iran Trap? We’ll Find Out in 2029
By Gerard Baker
President Donald Trump during a Cabinet meeting in Camp David, Md., July 31. Anna Moneymaker/Getty ImagesHow do you end a fiasco?
It is never as easy as it sounds.
But when it comes to something you started through a combination of your own hubris, miscalculation and ineptitude, the challenge is especially daunting.
To the pain of the debacle itself you must add the humiliation of self-admission, even if it is only implicit.
That thing you insisted would be a great success not only has caused great harm, it’s been an indictment of your own judgment and a vindication of everyone who told you not to do it.
Few of us have the humility to make that kind of mea culpa, so the temptation is always to double down.
If we just keep going we’ll be proved right in the end.
Occasionally, it works.
More often it’s how mistakes turn into fiascoes.
Most Americans thought from the start that the Iran war was a mistake.
Now, five months later, they can see it is a fiasco.
It has not only failed to achieve any of its principal objectives; it has weakened America’s strategic position, enhanced Iran’s regional and economic power, drastically depleted our weapons stocks, weakened our economy, and dealt a heavy blow to our prestige and global leadership.
The initial temptation is to say that how it ends is less important than that it ends, that when you’re in the middle of an unfolding calamity, getting out is your only priority.
But just as you can blunder into a war, you can blunder out of one.
Ask Joe Biden, for whom the overriding objective of getting out of Afghanistan led to a disastrous withdrawal five years ago this month and continuing damage since then.
But we know too that to double down is to fall prey to the timeworn seduction of the sunk-cost fallacy: We’ve invested so much in this effort that to abandon it now would be worse.
In war this fallacy is especially, tragically persuasive.
The “sunk costs” in this case are the lives of men and women.
Who wants to tell their families they died for a mistake?
So since he won’t withdraw and can’t advance, President Trump seems to have locked himself into a particularly fruitless paralysis of inertia.
In his “Devil’s Dictionary,” Ambrose Bierce defined peace as “a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.”
This roughly describes what has happened during the “peace” since the original cease-fire with Tehran four months ago: Iran has been deceiving us by cheating, and we keep cheating ourselves through self-deception.
This weekend Mr. Trump announced (again) that he was calling off a planned escalation because Iran had agreed (again) to a deal that would open the Strait of Hormuz.
Estimates vary, but it seems the president has backed off escalatory strikes half a dozen times now and claimed the war was over more than 30 times.
That is only a fraction of the heap of self-deception we’ve been amassing these past five months.
Among other things, we have been told the new leaders in Iran are “reasonable” and “desperately want a deal,” but that they are “scum” and can’t be trusted.
We’ve been told the U.S. would charge a toll for shipping in the strait, and then told we wouldn’t.
Allies have been told they weren’t needed and then attacked for failing to help out.
Some see this endless back and forth as the enigmatic work of a pure genius: the cunning of Mr. Trump’s calculated unpredictability, bamboozling his enemies, keeping them off balance and forcing them into mistakes, all the while enabling the U.S. to regroup and rearm.
Others see it as the derangements of a trapped and helpless man, one with a longstanding reputation for impatience and inconstancy, a leader incapable of making up his mind whether to move forward or back.
I’m an Occam’s razor man myself.
The dizzying twists and turns of the past four months remind me most of all of a line from the movie “The Death of Stalin,” Armando Iannucci’s darkly brilliant farce about the chaos and infighting that erupted in Moscow in the days after the Soviet ruler’s sudden demise in 1953.
At one point, amid the bewildering turmoil, one of the Politburo members simply shakes his head and says: “I’ve had nightmares that made more sense than this.”
To be fair to Mr. Trump, he isn’t the first to find himself trapped in a nightmare like this.
He is only the latest U.S. president to be mired in a war in Asia from which he can’t find a way out.
Unlike in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, at least he has had the wisdom so far to resist a greater mobilization and commitment.
In each of those cases the war was ended only by a new president.
It seems increasingly likely that this is how this one ends too—sometime after Jan. 20, 2029.
Despite the grand claims made for Mr. Trump’s decision to go to war, the struggle we find ourselves in with Iran—over its nuclear program, its stranglehold on the world’s shipping, its ambitions for regional hegemony—won’t be resolved by this president.
How do you end a fiasco?
You leave it to the next guy.
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