Trump would escape his endless war with Iran in a food truck if he could | Editorial
For America and the world, though, there’ll be no quick escape from the consequences.
The nation just learned that last month, when we thought President Donald Trump had fled his Qatari-donated luxury plane for the relative safety of a proper Air Force One, he was actually on a third plane out of Turkey. Fearing an Iranian assassination attempt, military and security officials had secreted him off the official aircraft and onto an Air Force C-32A inside a catering container.
That left a plane full of staff and press to fly to England — and potentially into the ayatollah’s crosshairs — as his unwitting sacrificial stand-ins.
Trump’s non-daring escape is an apt analogy for his self-defeating war with Iran. The president has reached a point of desperation to retreat from the conflict and save what little is left of his political hide. The rest of us, meanwhile, will be the unwilling targets of whatever consequences may come.
Trump’s frenetic ricocheting among ordering air attacks, leveling idle threats, and engaging in half-hearted diplomacy with the Islamic Republic has increasingly given way to a palpable apathy about the whole losing endeavor. A week after his latest empty vow to unleash more shock and awe, he told Axios that the administration is “low-keying” the conflict and “only semi-negotiating” with Iran, whatever that means.
His gambit in this “chess game,” he added, is to bide his time while the economic pressure on Iran does the work for him — never mind that the extremist regime has weathered such stresses for decades.
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In reality, as Trump has essentially acknowledged in confessing his fear of becoming the next Herbert Hoover, it’s he who has been economically checkmated. Tehran underscored the strength of its position last weekend by demanding Washington meet a series of additional conditions before it loosens its choke hold on the crucial Strait of Hormuz, sending oil prices upward.
Handing Iran this powerful weapon is the chief achievement of Trump’s war — and the main reason he hasn’t given up despite his fervent desire to do so. Bereft of international allies and domestic support, he has no solution to a problem he created.
A ground invasion to secure the strait, which could dramatically compound the cost of a war that has already wasted tens of billions of dollars and thousands of lives, is politically untenable, and the only alternative in the short term is continued Iranian control of the strait. The region’s fossil fuel producers have recognized as much by accelerating spending on pipelines and other means of circumventing the route, with further consequences for the price of oil and everything that relies on it.
It’s a dramatic deterioration from the international order that allowed about a fifth of the global oil supply to routinely transit the waterway before Trump undertook his second unauthorized war with Iran.
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He has also exacerbated the threat of an Iranian nuclear bomb, the weapon that most worried the world before the regime could hold the global economy hostage.
While Trump’s twin wars have degraded Iran’s nuclear sites, it still has substantial supplies of enriched uranium and no foreseeable international restrictions like those in place before the president dismantled them. And while Trump has continued to insist that preventing nuclear proliferation was the war’s primary purpose (among several other proposed rationales), he seems to be “low-keying” that mission, too, lately. The Wall Street Journal reported that he has told aides he is prepared to end the war without any agreement on the nuclear issue.
Another oft-stated goal of the war, degrading Iran’s capacity to wage war and sponsor terrorism, looks similarly unrealized given the recently demonstrated ability of the regime and its proxies to endanger ships in the strait, U.S. bases and allies in the region, and even Trump himself.
The image of the president of the United States being smuggled out of a NATO country in the back of a snack truck hardly suggests it’s the Iranian regime that has been humiliated.
We should hope the administration gets our troops, as well as Trump, out of harm’s way by ending this war soon. The security and economic repercussions for America and the world, however, are bound to be far-reaching and long-lasting.
