When I read history, I often wonder what it must have felt like to live those events in real time, as I’m sure you do. Did it seem an ominous moment in June 1914 when Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz-Ferdinand? If I were a Briton in September 1938, would I have had an uneasy sense of foreboding watching the newsreel of Neville Chamberlain stepping off that plane from Munich?
I think such thoughts this week because I have no doubt that future historians and readers of history will surely wonder what the ever-living fuck we were all thinking when Donald Trump both started and then lost his immoral and pointless war with Iran. What we have just witnessed is almost beyond belief, and would be beyond belief if we didn’t all know going in that Trump is such an aggressively and willfully stupid human being, utterly impervious to knowledge and facts, serenely cocooned in his carapace of ignorance, surrounded by flatterers who patronize him as one does a child and who scream at Americans about his nonexistent genius, courage, and virility. They exist in a fantasyland.
But we live in the real world, and in the real world, this war was a disaster in every imaginable sense. Let’s tally up the damage:
People can debate the above. I’m counting Vietnam, obviously; there’s no doubt about that one. I reckon the War of 1812 and the Korean War as stalemates. Under the Treaty of Ghent, the United States and Britain just agreed to go back to the way things were before the war, and with respect to Korea, the line was the 38th parallel pre-bellum and postbellum.
Some will say Iraq was a loss, but I rate it, too, as kind of a draw. It sure wasn’t a win of the sort Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz told us to expect. It cost many trillions of dollars and killed hundreds of thousands. To a mixed result: Today, Iraq is a democracy, of a sort, but it’s a long way from being free. But I perhaps charitably call it a draw because the U.S. did achieve the core stated aim: It deposed Saddam Hussein.
Here, though, we have not achieved any of Trump’s shifting stated claims. There’s no regime change—or, to the extent that Trump has managed to change the regime, it’s even more hard-line and more powerful in the region than it was before the war!
And that’s before we and other nations fork over the infamous $300 billion, just a mind-boggling figure. Conservatives wanted Barack Obama impeached over the money he agreed to pay Iran (which was Iran’s money, frozen in U.S. banks), which was $1.7 billion. Trump is going to hand Iran 176 times that amount. And it’s going to end up being more, because the $300 billion is separate from whatever frozen assets Trump decides to unfreeze. Word around the campfire is that we are talking about another $25 billion or so.
Some perspective on how much $325 billion is. The total U.S. foreign aid budget for 2025 was about $60 billion. More pointedly: Estimates vary, but it seems that Iran spends around $1 billion a year propping up Hezbollah. Imagine how much they’ll be able to spend when their Trumpy ship comes in!
The one slender thread on which the Trump administration is now hanging its hopes is that in the coming negotiations, it’ll get Iran to surrender its current stockpile of enriched uranium. That, admittedly, would be something that the JCPOA didn’t do. If they pull that off, even I will say good for them.
But for Iran, of course, this is a nearly inconceivable concession. What seems more likely to happen is that the two sides will agree to terms calling for Iran to dilute its highly enriched uranium under international supervision. Trump will sell this as a great victory. But this “down-blending,” as it’s called, was also in the JCPOA!
Above, I called this war immoral and pointless. The pointless part speaks for itself. It has accomplished nothing except making Iran stronger and the United States weaker. If Barack Obama or Joe Biden had done this, not only would they have been instantly impeached if the Republicans controlled the House, but the entire Democratic Party would have been discredited on foreign policy matters for a generation at least.
But the immoral part is worse. Trump started a war, killed a few thousand people, got tired of it, and surrendered to one of the most reactionary regimes on earth, which went on a gleeful killing spree of its own citizens earlier this year. Since the commencement of these hostilities in February, Iran has executed 44 more people and detained another 6,000. That’s the regime Donald Trump just strengthened and is about to hand many billions of dollars to. “Immoral” barely scratches the surface.
This is an epic failure. It’s not quite September 1938. But that’s only because Iran’s mullahs don’t have Hitler’s global ambitions. Morally, it’s a Neville Chamberlain moment of a sort the United States has never experienced. The icing on the cake would be Trump taking to Truth Social and boasting about “peace in our time.” A man who signed a treaty at Versailles is ignorant enough of history to not even know why that phrase resonates.