Trump in Retreat

Forced there by his inability to see beyond his nose

Credit: Getty Images

We have reached an important moment in the president’s war with Iran. It needs to be fully understood.

After telling the American people that Iran was a nuclear threat, that a large contingent of the American military needed to be dispatched to the region to deal with that threat, and that tens of billions must be spent to bring a land to heel, Donald Trump is now reportedly willing to walk away from the war altogether with no deal on Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

To do that, he may be forced to leave Iran in charge of the Strait of Hormuz and to supply them hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild.

If this deal goes through, it will come to be known as one of the most catastrophic failures by a president in American history.

Trump is terrible at so many things, but one of his worst attributes is his inability to understand — or disinterest in — consequences. Consequences are often messy and inconvenient. When making almost any decisions, Trump ignores them. At his peril. And ours.

Trump’s decision-consequence conundrum is evident in just about everything he does. Some have more dire outcomes than others. Almost all cost the American taxpayer.

Take the reflecting pool. He wanted to quickly fix the pool before July 4th. So without proper vetting or bidding, he hired the wrong companies, which, to no one’s surprise, made the problem worse.

Now, take the war with Iran with its vastly bigger decisions and significantly worse possible consequences.

Many of them were predictable: a patient and determined enemy causing the war to drag on, American casualties, Iran taking control of the Strait of Hormuz, oil and gas prices rising, inflation spiking.

Some consequences may not have been enumerated at the start of the war but were nonetheless foreseeable once the conflict did not end in Trump’s promised four to five weeks.

And now here we are more than five months later, and we read of unimagined consequences. For example, it’s unusual anytime members of the modern United States military do not have adequate supplies or food in a combat situation, or complain about it.

But service men and women aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln say conditions on the aircraft carrier are deplorable. According to MS NOW, which spoke with more than a dozen family members of those serving onboard, the service men and women are contending with food shortages, broken toilets, moldy showers, and a lack of hot water and laundry facilities. The commissary, where lines are said to be up to an hour, can’t keep basics like soap and toothpaste in stock.

The more than 5,000 members of the U.S. military on the Lincoln have had two days of shore leave since deploying from San Diego in November — one in Guam on the way to the Middle East and one in Oman in July, after 208 continuous days at sea, a modern-day record for carriers.

According to family members, morale for many on board, whose deployments have been extended twice, is understandably low.

This morale and public relations disaster hasn’t stopped the president from reiterating his broken-record promises: that we are winning the war, that the Strait of Hormuz is basically open, or that a deal with Iran is imminent.

None of those things are true. Not only are we not winning the war, and not only does Iran continue to control the strait, but it has also caused billions of dollars in damage to U.S. bases. At least 20 sites in eight countries have been hit, according to The Wall Street Journal, making us and the world demonstrably less safe. Did Trump not think Iran would retaliate? Was there no realistic plan to safeguard U.S. assets?

And then there’s the matter of munitions. The U.S. military is reportedly running out of them. Five months of war have badly depleted needed munitions, like Patriot missile interceptors, by as much as 80%, according to CNN. As a result, The Washington Post reports that the Pentagon is demanding faster timelines for weapons manufacturing. Why were these shortages allowed to happen? And what kind of message does it send to friends and foes?

“Years-long development cycles are not acceptable. We must dramatically accelerate our program schedules and expand our production capacity now,” Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg wrote in a letter to contractors. Those contractors currently make 600 Patriot missiles a year. The U.S. military reportedly has already used 1,500 against Iran.

America’s military is at risk because Trump and his former Fox News weekend anchor of a Defense Secretary appear to be clueless as to how to run a war.

Trump’s inability to accept that the war could take longer than he wanted is thwarting his hopes for negotiating power. Last week, he pulled back from ordering massive new strikes on Iran after learning of the munitions shortage. The president has also conceded that getting the strait reopened, not a nuclear deal, is now the primary goal.

Trump downplayed this alarming reversal, considering he has long claimed a nuclear deal was the reason for going to war. The Wall Street Journal reported he told senior aides that Iran is unlikely to rebuild its nuclear program during his presidency and that U.S. intelligence would likely catch any attempts to do so.

So now, according to reports, Trump is willing to settle for Iran continuing to control the Strait of Hormuz. Let us mark well: The Strait of Hormuz was open when the U.S. and Israel opened war on Iran; now it is closed and in Iranian control.

The Iranians have played Trump like the proverbial fiddle. They know he needs an off-ramp. They know he needs to get the strait opened. And now they know he doesn’t have the arsenal to sustain military threats. They were quick to use their new leverage.

Over the weekend, Tehran sent an updated list of demands including: permanently ending the war, billions in reparations, unfreezing all assets, removal of U.S. troops from the region, ending the naval blockade, and stopping military action against Iran’s allies.

The lack of munitions isn’t only a U.S. problem. It could also have deadly consequences for Ukraine, which needs the Patriot interceptors to fend off long-range Russian attacks. After five years of war, they too are running low.

The munitions shortage opens a strategic door for international adversaries like China, North Korea, and Russia.

“It’s impossible for that not to have a significant effect on the decision calculus of Russia and China. They may do something quite deliberate and at the time of their choosing, because keep in mind — we’re going to take years to reconstitute,” Tom Karako, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told The New York Times.

For a man obsessed with his legacy, Trump has played fast and loose with his choices. He hasn’t considered the long-range consequences of so many of his decisions for himself, or his party, or, most importantly, for the country.

Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA), who is running for reelection, gets right to the heart of it. “There’s something uniquely despicable about lying a nation into war. Treating citizens as fools and the selfless patriots who serve as pawns… Five months later, we’re still bombing, Americans are still dying, Iran still has its uranium, the Strait of Hormuz is still closed. I challenge anyone to defend this: a war built on lies told by a White House that is utterly absent any figures of integrity to dissuade this president from his delusions.”

With this in mind, Americans may want to pay especially close attention in coming days to news of the war. Often it takes many sources to piece together the big picture. Major developments like the ones in this article often get pushed aside for the latest clickbait from Trump and his allies desperate to change the subject.

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Stay Steady,
Dan