6 hours ago
9
Donald Trump has lost his Iran war. He is the Iranian hostage. Unlike the US embassy personnel captured as hostages for 444 days, Trump threw himself into Iranian hands. Less than a month into his “short-term excursion”, his stated objectives have been scattered to the winds. There is no regime change, no uprising and no access to oil wealth along the Venezuelan model. The decapitation gambit – assassinating Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and senior Iranian leadership – has failed to destroy the regime. Despite the massacre, it is Trump who stands exposed to slings and arrows for the rashest military adventure since Custer at Little Bighorn.
Iran maintains a chokehold on the strait of Hormuz and, through its narrowest passage of 21 miles, on the global economy. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development forecasts a spike of inflation to 4.2% in the US, a 40% increase since Trump returned to office. The stock market has dived into correction territory. Iran has also demonstrated its capacity to wreak existential destruction on the Gulf states whose rulers’ delusion of their invulnerability and US protection has been shattered. “I’m the opposite of desperate,” Trump declared on 26 March. “I don’t care.”
Trump’s self-defense is feigned indifference to his fiasco. His denial is too vehement to be remotely convincing. He calls out to Nato countries to rescue him while he insults them as “cowards” and says that he “no longer needs” their help. In 1990, when Trump’s Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City was headed off the cliff into one of his six bankruptcies, Donald’s father, Fred Trump, appeared as a stealth white knight to buy $3.35m in chips, which the New Jersey Casino Control Commission a year later ruled was illegal. Now, there is no one to arrive to enable a miraculous escape.
If there is any consistency to Trump’s policy, it is a series of frantic attempts to justify his original blunder and extricate himself from its dire consequences. His latest 15-point proposal to the Iranians has dispensed with regime change and focuses instead on restarting the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program that he unilaterally broke off. He wishes to trade that in exchange for opening the strait. “Mission accomplished” would apparently be to return to square one, where things stood before he careened into war. The Iranians, however, deny there are any negotiations and have rejected his latest offer “until complete victory”.
Iran has proved the victor in the art of the deal. On 6 March, already frustrated by the refusal of the regime to concede, Trump demanded “unconditional surrender”. On 20 March, Trump raised his white flag. Iran leveraged its control of the strait by lobbing a few drones to scare Trump into lifting oil sanctions, which were first clamped on in 1995. With that, Trump’s bluff was called and he was the one who folded. On 26 March, Iran offered Trump safe passage for eight oil tankers.
Trump is bound, but he is not gagged. His spin cycle revolves hour by hour from vague threats to invisible olive branches. He has declared “victory” more than eight times, that he has “won” more than 10 times, “winning” more than five times, and Iranian forces have been either “obliterated” or suffered “obliteration” more than six times. After stating on 16 March that the Iranian military had been “literally obliterated” and their leaders “gone”, he issued an ultimatum on 21 March that threatened “obliteration” of Iran’s power grid if the strait was not opened within 48 hours. “You’ll find out what’s gonna happen,” he said. “You’re gonna find out soon. It’s gonna be very good. Total decimation of Iran.” Trump has used the words “decimate” or “decimation” at least six times.
This threat was followed on 23 March by his sudden announcement of peace negotiations. But it was not a surprise to some. Fifteen minutes before Trump’s posting of the news, traders bet more than a half-billion dollars in oil futures. A week before this betting surge, the enforcement director of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Margaret Ryan, resigned. Then, on 25 March, Trump threatened to “unleash hell” if the Iranians don’t do exactly what he says. He has used the word “hell” at least four times. The next day, after the stock market plunged again, he extended his deadline to “obliterate” another week. Then it emerged that the US was considering sending 10,000 more troops to the region.
Trump is acting out the “madman theory”, but without the theory. The “madman theory” was devised by Richard Nixon one month after he became president, in February 1969. As a carefully premeditated ploy, Nixon suggested that the North Vietnamese be informed he was dangerously out of control. “We can’t restrain him when he is angry – and he has his hand on the nuclear button,” Nixon said in giving instruction, “and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.” But Nixon’s threats of “knockout blows” did not deter the North Vietnamese leadership, much less intimidate them, and they launched a new offensive. Bombing campaign after campaign never won the war for Nixon. He left office in the disgrace of Watergate about a year before the last helicopter took off from the roof of the US embassy in Saigon.
Unlike Nixon, who brooded upon everything, Trump is brazenly ignorant, impulsive and unconcerned with consequences. His basic instinct is immediate self-gratification. He has no horizon except short-term gain.
Trump’s administration consists of blackout tragicomic scenes of bedlam. His White House is a madhouse. His secretary of state clogs into the Situation Room in black wingtip Florsheim shoes several sizes too large that Trump bought for him and that Marco Rubio and the other cabinet officers and JD Vance must wear to prove their fealty.
“We are jujitsuing the Iranians,” said secretary of the treasury, Scott Bessent, adopting the nonsensical philosophy of Humpty Dumpty, who explained in Alice in Wonderland: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” When Bessent was asked on NBC’s Meet the Press on 22 March whether Trump is “winding down this war or escalating the conflict”, he answered, remaining within his Lewis Carroll character: “Again they’re not mutually exclusive. Sometimes you have to escalate to deescalate.”
If there is ever a version of the Pentagon Papers of the Iran war, two episodes that clarify the origin of Trump’s decision-making process should receive particular attention.
On 2 April 2025, Trump invited the far-right influencer Laura Loomer into the Oval Office to unveil a dossier depicting staff experts of the National Security Council as treasonous to Trump. Vice-president Vance, chief of staff Susie Wiles, secretary of commerce Howard Lutnick, and other officials stood by. “You don’t want to be Loomered,” Trump said. “If you’re Loomered, you’re in deep trouble. That’s the end of your career in a sense. Thanks, Laura.” She played the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland: “Off with their heads!”
Six experts were summarily fired, including Nate Swanson, the senior adviser on the NSC on Iran. On the eve of Trump’s war, Swanson wrote articles for Foreign Affairs and the Atlantic Council warning about the closing of the Strait of Hormuz and that “Iran may seriously consider targeting the Gulf Arab states’ energy infrastructure directly.”
After Gen Dan Caine warned him about the possibility that the strait would be closed, Trump claimed that he would probably win his Iran war before it could happen. “So they hit Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait. Nobody expected that. We were shocked,” Trump said on 16 March. “Nobody, nobody, no, no, no. No, the greatest experts, nobody thought they were going to hit.”
Trump’s narcissism made informed insight and expert advice not only unacceptable but also a sign of disloyalty. He sent his trusted agents Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to negotiate with Iran. Recordings and transcripts of their meetings were obtained by the non-partisan and professional Arms Control Association. “Witkoff’s failure to comprehend key technical realities suggests he misunderstood the Iranian nuclear proposal and was ill-prepared to negotiate an effective nuclear agreement,” the ACA reported.
Witkoff’s “puzzling and factually-challenged statements” were fundamental. Essentially, lacking any expertise, he appeared to misunderstand every aspect of the status of the Iranian nuclear program and its proposal. On that basis, Witkoff advised Trump there was an “imminent threat” when there was none. “Witkoff’s failure to learn the nuclear file and surround himself with the technical expertise necessary to negotiate an effective deal was a diplomatic disservice to U.S. and international nonproliferation goals,” the ACA report concluded.
Witkoff, with his son and the Trump family, is a partner in the cryptocurrency venture World Liberty Financial in which the United Arab Emirates purchased a 49% stake for a half-billion dollars days before the 2025 inauguration, receiving “access to tightly guarded artificial intelligence chips”, according to the Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, Kushner was trolling for business in the Middle East while serving as an envoy, in talks “raising $5 billion or more for Affinity Partners, his investment firm”, according to the New York Times.
Whether Witkoff’s and Kushner’s Middle East financial interests played a role in their advice remains a matter for speculation. But there can be no doubt that their ignorance and incompetence were decisive. The negotiations were a sham. Trump gleefully went to war on the word of bunglers.
In the history of war, there has been war by sleepwalking blindly into it, the subject of a deep literature on the first world war. There has been war by the march of folly, chronicled by the historian Barbara Tuchman, from the American Revolution to Vietnam. But this war ranks in the annals of war among those launched willfully through ignorance and sheer stupidity.
-
Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist
