Trump Is Finding Out About Forever War

The U.S. and Iran are back at war again, less than a month after agreeing to a cease-fire deal that was supposed to be a pathway to permanent peace but was more like a memorandum of misunderstanding. The U.S. has launched expansive waves of air strikes on targets in Iran for six consecutive days and is once again blowing up bridges. Iran is once again using missiles and drones to target nearby U.S. bases, and as in part one of the war, we may not learn the true extent of the damage for weeks. The Strait of Hormuz is once again closed, and the U.S. naval blockade is once again imposed. Bluster and belligerence reign while negotiations still just seem like a tease.

The now-defunct agreement’s ambiguities, interpreted differently in Washington and Tehran, created too many opportunities for each side to take actions that the other would interpret as a breach and a rationale for abandoning their own commitments. The breaking point came, unsurprisingly, over the countries’ sharply contrasting visions of how the Strait of Hormuz would be reopened to international shipping. The Islamic Republic’s battered-but-not-defeated leaders interpreted the memorandum as ratifying the de facto sovereignty they had exercised over the strait since its closure in the early days of the war. The latest round of fighting began last week when Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps fired on commercial ships that were transiting the strait through Omani waters and, with U.S. help, evading that control. President Trump, clearly agitated and impatient, decided it was time for a disproportionate response. Wanting to offset the war’s enormous ongoing financial cost, he even briefly announced, then backed off, a U.S. military-protection racket that would have crippled Gulf trade with fees in addition to fighting.

His frustration is as understandable as it was inevitable. This is a very unpopular war that Trump reportedly thought would be over in days, then claimed would be over in four to six weeks, then insisted was actually over and fully won when anyone could tell that it wasn’t. Five months later, amid an alarming escalation, there’s still no end in sight. From everything Trump has said over the past few weeks, he’s apparently still under the impression that the war is under his control, the U.S. is winning and Iran is overwhelmed and desperate to negotiate, and the costs are not only bearable for Americans, but negligible. His original war goals, from the threat of a nuclear Iran to the Israeli regime-change schemes he bought into, seem almost anachronistic. The war is over something else now (the state and fate of the strait), which was the direct consequence of his misguided and misrepresented preemptive attack.

Welcome to a forever war, in other words.

The Iran war is not guaranteed to become a costly, yearslong bloodbath like Iraq, Afghanistan, or Vietnam, but it is starting to show a familiar pattern of ominous signs: The U.S. entered the war with unclear, unrealistic objectives, lacking both an articulate theory of victory and an exit strategy to follow, either when we achieve our strategic goals or when it becomes clear that we cannot. As the war drags on, it is creating new problems, which beget new war objectives and create their own logic for continuing to escalate the conflict. The president is personally and politically invested in projecting strength and resolve, and perhaps even more invested in avoiding the humiliation of defeat. Meanwhile, the war’s unpopularity at home and abroad puts pressure on the administration to either cut its losses and withdraw or double down and attempt to salvage some kind of victory. Escalation is unlikely to get results, but diplomatic solutions are unpalatable to the administration.

As Trump is now discovering, the U.S. didn’t get bogged down in past wars because his predecessors were “dumb,” but rather because they suffered from historical, political, and ideological blind spots that prevented them from acknowledging the realities on the ground that made these wars unwinnable. Having entangled themselves in intractable cycles of violence, they could not find a way out that didn’t risk making the problems the war was meant to solve even worse. Finally unwinding forever wars can take years, and exiting one is a chaotic and humiliating process. Just ask former president Joe Biden, who implemented the agreement Trump made in his first term to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan only to see that country fall immediately back into the hands of the Taliban. (And Trump’s 2020 election defeat spared him the ownership and firsthand lessons of that embarrassment.)

Passing over whether Trump is or is not the world-historic genius he perceives himself to be, he has yet to demonstrate a brilliant new strategy to prevent the Iran war from turning into an extended debacle. On the contrary, he disdains expertise and has put negotiations with Iran in the hands of two complete amateurs whom their Iranian counterparts don’t trust and whose only accomplishment so far has been a crappy deal for the U.S. that fell apart in weeks. Meanwhile, our armed forces are currently under the direction of a right-wing television personality and televangelist whose latest manosphere-inspired innovation is a policy to test U.S. soldiers for low testosterone. The diplomatic corps has been hollowed out and politicized, Iran experts have been lost to budget cuts and ideological purges, and at this rate, Marco Rubio may soon be the only person left working at the State Department.

Past presidents managed to trap themselves in forever wars even while fielding full staffs of expert advisers and experienced professionals. Trump is unlikely to find a way out of his war with Iran through self-belief alone, especially given his impulse to lash out when he doesn’t get his way. And he’s not going to get his way with Iran, whether through continued war or negotiations. Neither will the Iranian regime get everything it wants out of this crisis, and just like Trump, Iran’s leaders are frequently dishonest, unreliable, and intransigent.

Perhaps the escalation in U.S. air strikes will put enough pressure on Iran to force concessions. Perhaps Iran will succeed in its gamble to force the U.S. back to the negotiating table by squeezing global markets and causing economic pain beyond what Trump can bear politically. At this point, however, the fastest end to the war may come if both sides feel just enough pain to recognize that there is nothing to be gained from carrying on fighting. Unfortunately, innocent Iranians will bear the brunt of that pain, trapped between American bombs and a government that doesn’t much care if they live or die. In forever wars, regular people always pay the highest price.