Might Donald Trump travel to Tehran this spring to open an American embassy and declare that he’s fallen in love with the new Iranian leadership? His volte-face on Tuesday night – announcing a two-week ceasefire with Iran – suggests that Trump is embarking upon a new course in the Middle East. After threatening to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age, Trump announced that it’s time to call the whole thing off: “We received a 10-point proposal from Iran, and believe it is a workable basis on which to negotiate.”
What that negotiation will look like is an open question. Early reports suggest that Trump, not Iran, caved on everything from Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz to acceptance of uranium enrichment, from the lifting of sanctions to a commitment to non-aggression. This doesn’t look like a victory for Mr. Big. Rather, it looks like something else entirely – a triumph for the hardliners in Tehran and a stinging loss for Washington’s. The much-ballyhooed war, in other words, has strengthened rather than weakened Iran. The once-proud gang of war hawks, you could say, have ended up in straitened circumstances.
Trump’s eagerness to extricate himself from the conflict is palpable. His leverage over Iran over the next several weeks will be nugatory, particularly given that he literally cannot afford a resumption of a conflict that was costing the cash-strapped US Treasury over $1 billion a day at a moment when the federal deficit hovers close to $40 trillion. To bail himself out of the disastrous war, it appears that Trump employed Pakistan Prime Minister Shabbaz Sharif as his wingman. Sharif appears to have copied and pasted in full a message that he received from Trump, urging him to urge Trump to seek a peaceful resolution of the conflict. The one country that Trump did not include in his maneuverings was Israel, which has steadfastly sought to prolong the conflict and, in many ways, helped to embroil him in it in the first place. Reports are that Israel continues to bomb Iran even after Trump’s announcement.
If Trump genuinely wants to move on from this debacle, he needs to turn his gunsights on the ship of fools that constitutes his cabinet. He needs, most urgently, to fire his popinjay Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, who is battling Army Secretary Dan Driscoll. Driscoll’s principal sins, at least in Hegseth’s eyes, are that he is possessed of competence and sound judgment. On Tuesday, Driscoll released a statement indicating that he wasn’t about to give in to Hegseth: “I have no plans to depart or resign the Secretary of the Army.” Good for Driscoll. Trump should replace Hegseth with him posthaste.
The likelihood is that Trump will also reassess his relations with Israel. A significant rift has opened up in MAGA world over America ties to the Jewish state. Trump, who has no permanent alliances or enemies, may well seek to finger Netanyahu as the culprit for the Iran debacle.
But Trump will not be able to discard his own maladroit conduct of the war. In battling Trump – not merely to a standstill but defeat – Iran has ruthlessly and systematically exposed the hollowness of his pretensions to dictate the course of global events. The bully bullied.
Already Trump had forfeited a good measure of American power. He antagonized Europe. He severed American aid to Ukraine, diminishing Washington’s ability to enforce a peace on it. Now, on the eve of a visit to China, he arrives not as a swaggering conqueror but a supplicant whose economy has suffered a brutal buffeting. The economic aftershocks of the war will linger on for months, vitiating Republican electoral prospects in November. It should thus come as no surprise that the Cook Report has announced that five more House races have moved into the Democratic column.
With his appeasement of Iran, Trump has already passed the meridian of his power. There will be no control over a gusher of oil from Iran. There will be no acquisition of Greenland. There will be increasing murmurs of discontent among House and Senate Republicans. His military defeat will more than likely be followed by a political one in November.
