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Young people won’t remember this, but there was a distinct point at which George W. Bush started to lose the country. In August 2005, a giant hurricane swamped New Orleans, killing over a thousand people and washing away whole parts of the city. Bush displayed startling incompetence and tone-deafness during the cleanup, which began a process of general disillusionment with his presidency that intensified with the financial crisis of 2008 and the long slog in Iraq.
I don’t know whether Trump’s debacle in Iran will be a similar moment for his presidency. For one thing, unlike Bush, Trump’s approval ratings were already very low before Iran:
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Compared to the other stuff people hate about Trump — the blasé attitude towards inflation, the tariffs, the unprecedented corruption, the ICE raids, the various abuses of power — the Iran War may end up being a minor footnote. But there is one similarity with Katrina: This is the point at which even many of Trump’s defenders will be forced to admit, in private if not in public, that the man and his administration are grossly, pathetically incompetent.
The details of the deal that Trump is trying to make in order to withdraw from the war he started are still murky and unclear — probably because as soon as those details are released, people will realize that the U.S. has effectively been defeated by Iran. Here’s what the deal is rumored to contain:
Plenty of people, looking at these details and observing the conduct of the war, are ready to speak the plain truth that the U.S. lost the war to Iran. Tom Nichols, a former professor at the U.S. Naval War College, had this to say:
Trump and his team, in record time, just lost a war to a militarily mediocre—but nonetheless extremely dangerous—adversary…[E]ven before we have the details, it is clear that Trump has failed to achieve every one of the goals he put forward for this war of choice, and now he is determined to sign, seal, and deliver America’s capitulation as quickly as possible.
The New York Times editorial board concurs, with the headline: “Trump Lost the War He Started in Iran”. The WSJ Editorial Board is slightly nicer, writing “Trump Stages an Iran Retreat”.
As regular readers of this blog know, I’m very skeptical of claims that America has “lost” this or that war: