Trump’s Persian War
The Gulf of Oman near the Strait of Hormuz. Photo by Matthew Stevenson.
I don’t think there is anything that gives Donald Trump quite so much pleasure as failure, perhaps one of the reasons why he is so enjoying blowing through $50 billion in taxpayer money on his way to numerous defeats in the Strait of Hormuz.
I realize Trump has taken out primetime copyrights on various brands of success—all those “arts” of the deal—but at the end of the day what Trump likes most is to measure himself by the size of his failures (no doubt the only time his remote father ever paid him much attention).
Maybe in the 1980-90s he got a rush from screwing over plumbers in Atlantic City or bilking Wall Street investors on their bonds, but now he needs a little more skin in the game. (“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again…”)
After a lifetime of bankruptcies, failed ventures, sexual transgressions, and Wall Street con jobs that bled dry various banks and investors, how nice for Trump that he can cap his career with (to paraphrase Saddam Hussein, who also foundered in the Persian Gulf) “the mother of all defeats.”
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Imagine the good fortune of the Iranians emerging from their bomb shelters amidst the rubble only to find that Trump has declared a cease fire based on Tehran’s ten-point program, which reads as though the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had landed long boats in the Chesapeake and marched overland to Washington to burn the Capitol.
As a premise to the negotiations, the Iranians get to keep their enriched uranium, evade all sanctions, and charge $2 million for every ship transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Advising the Iranians might well be Napoleon himself, who was known to quip: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”
The self-defeating Trump also agreed to 1) peace talks in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital and 2) the appointment as his chief negotiators three men of stunning incompetence: Jared Kushner (Trump’s son-in-law, who has no role in the U.S. government); Steve Witkoff (an inside-trading crypto Trump buddy and real estate developer, also without a government portfolio); and Vice President JD Vance (fresh from barnstorming for the Hungarian fascist and Russian stalking horse, Viktor Orbán).
The only reason to send property promoters Kushner and Witkoff to Islamabad is to come away with a few golf courses on Kharg Island.
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If Trump had any hopes for the Iranian peace talks to succeed, the last person on earth he would send to head up the U.S. delegation would be the papal nuncio (and U.S. Vice President) JD Vance, who otherwise only gets a mention these days in the context of invoking the 25th Amendment and removing Trump from the presidency on the grounds of insanity. But you only send Vance to Islamabad to be done with him.
Note the long report in the New York Times that takes readers on a tour of the White House situation room as Trump and his inner circle debate whether to attack Iran (imagine Kremlin heads nodding “da”…).
In the Times piece, the heaviest leaking comes from the office of the vice president, who is in paragraph after paragraph is described as warning Trump that the Iranian invasion is a mistake (although he still supports and loves his dear leader).
No doubt the leaking was done to bolster Vance’s presidential chances in 2028, especially with the isolationist, Tucker Carlson wing of the (moribund) Republican Party.
Even the demented Trump would have been able to figure out from the piece that it was a vice-presidential letter opener that was being plunged into his back. Hence Vance’s one-way ticket to Islamabad in the company of two Gulf state remittance men.
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If there is anyone planning a Trump victory parade for the Hegseth Legions returning from the Persian wars, it has to be the Russian president Vladimir Putin, for whom the showdown at the Hormuz Corral arrived as manna from heaven.
Before Trump fell on his sword in Isfahan, Putin’s Life Guards and North Korean Cossack regiments were getting unceremoniously thrown out of Ukraine and the Russian economy was reverting (at least for non-oligarchs) to its bread lines.
As if on orders from Karla (John le Carré’s Soviet spymaster), Trump then rolled back the sanctions against Russia and encouraged Putin to sell his oil at new (extortionate) world market prices—while ignoring the fact that the Kremlin was assisting Tehran in targeting Americans in the Middle East. (Treason anyone?)
Even better for Russia is that Trump has broken with NATO and is restoring Russia’s lost influence in Tehran, such that Trump called the proposed Strait of Hormuz shipping toll booths (no doubt run by Moscow) “a beautiful thing.”
I can only assume that the Vance mission to Budapest (grotesque at many levels) was to inform various Kremlin cutouts of Trump’s progress in dismantling western civilization.
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To date, the United States has spent about $1 billion a day on its “short-term excursion” in Iran, and at this juncture there’s no way out.
The US can agree to Iran’s ten-point plan for American surrender or it can fight on until— sooner rather than later—the war stores of the American arsenal run dry. (So much for Trump “rebuilding” the army.) For the moment all the king’s horses and all of his B-1 bombers haven’t figured out how to prevent Iranian drones from closing the Strait.
Or the United States can follow an earlier Trump model and convert this string of defeats into a new reality show. This one can be called “The Commander” and it will feature a tough-talking Trump in his many situation rooms (alongside co-stars Pete Hegseth and Benjamin Netanyahu) vowing to “take out” whomever is in his way.
The camera can cut to American hostages in Tehran (I know, dated, but it’s about all we have) or oil tankers riding at anchor outside the blocked Strait of Hormuz. Trump can be shown shouting: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH!”, or Hegseth can be filmed firing a few of his black generals.
The drama of “The Commander” isn’t that Trump saves Israel from marauding Iranians or restores the price of gasoline to $2 a gallon; the point is to show that the world must take note of Fred Trump’s abused little boy who seems only to live for what might be called the attention of failure.
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