Donald Trump has always considered himself exceptional—that is, an exception to the rules. As a tycoon, he has demonstrated that multiple bankruptcies and an utter contempt for business associates have not hindered his accumulation of wealth. As a politician, he has shown that the same outrageous statements and scandals that have sunk other careers have only made him stronger, at least according to his base.
And now, in his second term as president, he has set out to prove that he can intervene militarily in the Middle East and emerge with yet another win.
Perhaps Trump is exceptional in this regard as well. The president lauds his recent ceasefire agreement as an “unconditional surrender” by Iran. The fighting has more or less ceased; the Strait of Hormuz has begun to open; the price of oil has dipped.
But no amount of presidential spin can obscure the extraordinary mess into which Trump has dragged the United States. A more hardline government is now installed in Tehran, and it can reclose the Strait of Hormuz at will. A disgruntled Israel, which wants to wipe out Hezbollah as well as precipitate regime change in Iran, can disrupt peace negotiations by simply continuing its attacks in Lebanon. The upcoming negotiations around Iran’s nuclear program promise to be an enormous challenge, which throws the entire ceasefire into question.
And all of this has come at a Pentagon price tag of at least $40 billion, with the administration asking for $80 billion in supplemental funding from Congress to cover the war. Through higher prices for gas and airline tickets, the war has already cost U.S. consumers around $132 billion. That’s a whole lot of money to spend to make a not very good situation a whole lot worse.
“YOU’RE WELCOME,” Trump posted to his social media account. For what exactly?
As with the Gaza ceasefire, Trump has declared a premature victory when, in fact, any durable peace is contingent on something around which the other side is reluctant to compromise. Iran is as likely to give up its entire nuclear program as Hamas is willing to give up all of its arms.
Maybe a nimble and modest leader could successfully negotiate these multiple challenges. Trump, by contrast, refuses to acknowledge that the war has demonstrated the limits of his power. “I haven’t learned that lesson yet,” he told Axios. “I know there are, but there are no limits.” He remains, in his own mind at least, exceptional.
As with most things, Trump is wrong. The Iran War has turned out to be the same Middle East sand trap that has ensnared all presidents going back to Jimmy Carter. The consequences of those earlier traps have predetermined the maneuvering room that Trump currently has. As a result of his self-inflicted war, that space for achieving enduring peace is practically zilch.
Middle East Morass
Jimmy Carter did not go out in search of quagmires. Rather, he had one thrust upon him.
The 1979 revolution in Iran dislodged the Shah, a U.S. ally, and led to the takeover of the U.S. embassy. The resulting hostage crisis, along with Carter’s failed attempt to send in the cavalry on a rescue attempt, effectively doomed his presidency. The Iranian revolution has cast a long shadow over U.S. foreign policy, a shadow that only deepened when Trump tore up the initial nuclear agreement with Iran in his first term and then teamed up with Israel to attack Iran twice in his second term.
Ronald Reagan discovered the painful consequences of yoking U.S. policy to Israeli objectives. Reagan ordered the U.S. military to support Israel in its 1982 invasion of Lebanon to defeat the Palestinian Liberation Organization. U.S. efforts to secure a ceasefire and then send U.S. Marines for a multinational peacekeeping force did little to offset those initial military actions. In 1983, an attack on the U.S. embassy in Beirut was followed by an even more devastating bombing of the Marine barracks, which was the largest single-day loss of U.S. service personnel since the Vietnam War and the biggest terrorist attack the United States would suffer until September 11. Subsequent revelations pointed to an Iranian hand in the bombings. That knowledge didn’t prevent National Security Council staffer Oliver North from selling arms to Iran and using the proceeds to fund the Contras, a scandal that produced a dozen convictions of various officials but, alas, no presidential impeachment.
Reagan also decided to supply the regime of Saddam Hussein with weapons and intelligence to prevent Iraq’s defeat in its war with Iran in the 1980s. Iraq not only survived the war, it went on to invade Kuwait in August 1990, probably emboldened by a statement by an assistant secretary of state in front of Congress that the United States had no obligation to defend Kuwait against attack. Nevertheless, in the wake of the invasion, President George H.W. Bush sent U.S. forces to push Iraq out of Kuwait. He did not, however, support the forces that subsequently rose up inside Iraq against Saddam Hussein, who crushed them. A no-fly zone to protect Kurds did, however, manage to avert genocide in the north.
The legacy of the Gulf War trapped Bill Clinton as well. Attacks on Iraq bookended his presidential tenure. He ordered strikes in his first year in office, in June 1993, in retaliation for an alleged plot to assassinate Bush, Sr. The second attack, Operation Desert Fox in 1998, was the culmination of international efforts to force Iraq to comply with weapons inspections mandated after the first Gulf War. Clinton, however, avoided drawing the United States into a major conflict in the Middle East, which allowed him to focus on other international crises (Ireland, Yugoslavia, Russia) and rescue some measure of U.S. credibility in the global arena.
George W. Bush was not so lucky. As a result of the September 11 attacks, he intervened not only in Afghanistan but also Iraq. The second war, an Oedipal effort to finish what his father started, took an unprecedented toll on the U.S. army, the finances of the country, and the population of Iraq. Nearly half a million Iraqis died as a result of the war, the vast majority of them civilians. The cost to the United States has been estimated to be nearly $1.8 trillion. The torture of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib and other facilities, massacres of civilians in Haditha and elsewhere, and the extraordinary corruption associated with the reconstruction of the country further tarnished an already sullied U.S. reputation in the region.
When confronted with the uprisings against authoritarian regimes during the Arab Spring, Barack Obama held back from intervening. Chastened by the historical record and already tied down in both Afghanistan and Iraq, Obama decided that discretion was the better part of valor— until, of course, the rebellions spread to Libya. In March 2011, Obama authorized the use of force to prevent Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi from attacking his own people. Here, however, Obama promised to fulfill an international mandate—the newly minted “responsibility to protect.” He was also committed to “leading from behind,” so that the United States was not the only country to assume responsibility and take the heat.
Large-scale massacres were indeed averted. But the ouster of Qaddafi and the descent of the country into civil war represented yet another quagmire for which the United States was at least partially responsible. The killing of the U.S. ambassador and three others in a terrorist attack on the U.S. embassy in Tripoli in 2012 engulfed the Obama presidency—and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—in a political scandal largely engineered by congressional Republicans. Nevertheless, Obama himself rated the failure to plan for the aftermath of the intervention in Libya the “worst mistake” of his presidency.
Given this dubious record of U.S. military interventions in the Middle East, it’s no wonder that Trump as a candidate running against Hillary Clinton, the foreign policy establishment’s favored candidate in 2016, denounced the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. “We made a terrible mistake getting involved there in the first place,” he said of the conflict in Afghanistan. “Obviously the war in Iraq was a big fat mistake, alright?” Trump said in the Republican presidential debate. With the United States still embroiled in both conflicts, Trump’s rhetoric against “forever wars” proved quite popular (even if he in fact supported the Iraq War at the outset).
And yet, despite the lessons of history and his own critical comments, Trump dragged the country into a war with Iran. He followed Reagan’s error of aligning U.S. policy too closely with that of Israel. He made Obama’s mistake of not planning for the aftermath of the intervention. He even considered following an ill-advised Carter-like plan to send a force into Iran to extract its processed uranium. In the end, just like the presidents he derided, Trump decided to embark on yet another potential “forever war.”
When confronted with his earlier criticisms of these wars, Trump pointed out that the Iran War had only been going on for a few weeks, then a few months, but not the many years that the United States was involved in Afghanistan or Iraq. Now, with a ceasefire in hand, Trump is proclaiming a “forever peace” for the region.
It took many hundreds of years for the hubris of Ozymandias to proclaim itself from the sands of the Middle East and through the poetry of Shelley. Trump’s arrogance will be on display for all who care according to a much more compressed timeline: in the quick sands of the Middle East and through the haiku of social media.
Trump’s Very Own Quagmire
Just as Obama was caught by surprise by the aftermath of the Libya attacks, the Trump administration was woefully ill-prepared for Iran’s recourse to drone attacks against Gulf nations and, more so, its closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Iran retains that option, even though oil-exporting countries in the region are quickly trying to set up other ways of getting their product to market. Over the weekend, Iran threatened once again to close the strait in response to Israeli attacks in Lebanon. This move forced the Trump administration to send Vice President J.D. Vance to Pakistan to keep the ceasefire deal alive. Mission complete, Vance announced that Iran was open to international inspections; Iran thereafter said that it wasn’t; and Trump replied that Iran was wrong about its own policy. The bottom line, however, is that the leadership in Tehran knows that it can wrest major concessions from the United States because it can deploy the Hormuz option whenever necessary.
If the United States were in control of all the dynamics in the Middle East, perhaps Trump could confidently predict peaceful outcomes (though even then it would be a stretch). The major challenge is that the United States has long been incapable of controlling its principal ally Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu cajoled and manipulated Trump into supporting this most recent war by understating the risks of military engagement and overstating the likelihood of regime change. Israel has subsequently pursued its own campaign to annihilate Hezbollah regardless of the impact on Trump’s efforts at negotiation. Netanyahu doesn’t want peace with Iran; he doesn’t want a nuclear agreement; he doesn’t want accommodation with Iran’s allies in the region. He will sabotage any “forever peace” if he perceives it as disadvantageous for Israel.
Then there’s the nuclear file. Iran may well be willing to compromise on a number of issues, especially if it gets immediate sanction relief, the return of some of its frozen assets, and access to the pot of money promised in the $300 billion reconstruction fund. But it is not likely willing to meet the Trump administration’s core demands: give up all of its enriched uranium, shut down all its nuclear facilities and all enrichment activities, and permit inspectors anywhere and anytime. Getting to yes on these issues within 60 days would be difficult even in the best of circumstances. Given the above pressures—along with a hawkish administration in Tehran and a corps of inexperienced negotiators from Washington—these are not the best of circumstances.
There are other flies in the ointment. Trump is a master of self-sabotage. Iranian allies in the region do not want to sign their own death warrants. The Iranian leadership’s ruthless suppression of criticism—it has stepped up its execution of dissidents—will make selling any agreement at home and with allies a harder lift.
Trump believes that he will not be subject to the same failures of U.S. policy in the Middle East as his predecessors. Instead, he has walked into an entirely new trap, one of his own making. The ceasefire might hold for a while. Shipping through the Strait of Hormuz might indeed return to some semblance of normalcy. But there is so little trust between the United States and Iran—and so little credibility in the words and promises of Donald Trump—that a future of “forever peace” seems as empty as all other MAGA fantasies. To state the obvious, Trump is not exceptional, either in his talents or in his ability to escape the traps of history.