Among the many gifts the Watergate scandal gave us was Nixon’s White House press secretary declaring: ‘This is the operative statement. The others are inoperative.’ That was after months of sticking to increasingly threadbare denials. In Donald Trump’s White House, operative statements become inoperative from one day to the next. That’s especially true of Iran. In 24 hours, from Tuesday to Wednesday this week, Trump went from ‘a whole civilisation will die tonight’ to ‘this could be the Golden Age of the Middle East!!!’. Taco: Trump Always Chickens Out, as the meme has it.
The two-week ceasefire agreed this week with Iran is a lesson that you can win every battle but lose the war. (This is the lesson the United States learned in Iraq and Afghanistan, only to forget it again.) What Trump calls his ‘total and complete victory’ leaves Iran in control of the Strait of Hormuz, the 21-mile-wide channel through which a fifth of the world’s oil flows. It can even charge $1 million a ship. The deal gives the mullahs the power they always had but never quite dared to use with impunity – leverage over the world’s oil supplies and, by extension, the global economy.
America’s 47th President once said: ‘There’s a certain unpredictability about Trump that’s great.’ Speaking of yourself in the third person is usually a sign of delusional narcissism. The question with Trump is always whether there is method in the madness, or just madness. On Monday, Trump stood on the south portico of the White House flanked by the First Lady, Melania, and a seven-foot Easter Bunny with huge floppy ears. He told an audience of bemused schoolchildren that we would ‘soon’ find out just how tough the Iranian regime was.
Instead, we found out how tough Trump is. Tuesday was supposed to be ‘Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran’. The day before he had posted on social media: ‘Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.’ As China, Russia, and North Korea have all noticed, Trump blusters and retreats. Taco. Whether or not Trump’s erratic behaviour is deliberate – ‘strategic ambiguity’ – it is certainly difficult for the troops of whom he is Commander-in-Chief. America’s fighting men and women generally like to know what they are fighting for.
A friend of mine, Elliot Ackerman, was an officer in the US Marine Corps. He’s now a successful novelist and has written to criticise the lack of a coherent Iran strategy. First, the war was to topple the regime, next it was to stop Iran from getting a nuclear bomb, then it was to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, though the waterway was functioning perfectly well before Trump started bombing. It is open again, but with the Iranian military deciding which vessels can pass through. ‘Trying to predict Trump’s next move is hard because it’s divorced from strategy,’ says Ackerman. ‘It’s mostly tethered to his ego and his bottomless need for self-aggrandisement and validation.’
‘Trying to predict Trump’s next move is hard because it’s divorced from strategy. It’s tethered to his ego’
Only two weeks ago, Trump was hinting he might invade Iran. Unlike other presidents, he didn’t have the ‘yips’ about using ground troops, he said. Five thousand Marines were put to sea, apparently ready to seize Kharg Island, which exports 90 per cent of Iran’s oil. I’ve known Ackerman since following his battalion, the 1/8, into the battle of Fallujah, in Iraq, in 2004. He once described the house-to-house fighting there as ‘like a knife fight in a telephone box’. The Marines in the Persian Gulf could expect the same thing if they were to be sent ashore.
Kharg Island and the coast along the Strait of Hormuz are the same ground over which Iran fought a bloody war with Iraq during the 1980s. Then, the Iranian regime used suicide bombers and sent waves of child soldiers advancing across minefields. As Ackerman tells me, Trump – despite his apparent insouciance – knows full well how risky using ground forces would be. It is presumably one reason for accepting a ceasefire on such humiliating terms. But Ackerman says: ‘That doesn’t mean he won’t do it.’
Sheer vanity might yet drive Trump to do something dramatic – especially if the peace talks over the next week rub his nose in the Iranian triumph. The worst thing you can be in Trump’s universe is a Loser; the worst thing you can do is to ‘choke’ over a big decision (like bombing a country ‘back to the stone ages’). The ceasefire does not permanently end hostilities; it only pauses them. What will Trump do next?
On past performance, the most likely outcome is that he will construct his own alternative reality to avoid facing up to what he has done. Trump’s reality distortion field has sucked in the moral and intellectual pygmies who surround him in his administration – it’s why they went to war in the first place. For a time, the Trump distortion field threatened to suck in the US public and the rest of the world. Except that fantasies die on the battlefield. ‘Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth,’ as the boxer Mike Tyson said, more or less.
The Iran campaign has shown once again that air power is terrifying but cannot break a determined enemy. It couldn’t keep the Strait of Hormuz open. Trump had to ask Britain and other western allies for help. But if the US couldn’t do it, there’s no chance we can. As Trump found, the Iranians don’t have to stop all traffic through the Strait; they just have to hit an oil tanker from time to time with a drone or a missile. Destroying a single tanker sends insurance premiums soaring so most shipping stays away.
Trump’s reality distortion field has sucked in the moral and intellectual pygmies who surround him
The US under Trump is a frustrated, impotent giant. Tucker Carlson, the commentator most admired by Trump’s voters, told his viewers the US was at a turning point. ‘What’s happening in Iran is the end of the American empire as we understand it,’ he said. He went on: ‘That’s sad, boo-hoo, the empire’s ending, but it’s not the end of the United States.’
Not the end, but US influence around the world will be much diminished after this war. The man responsible will be branded with the scarlet L on his forehead. He desperately needs a win, any win, however symbolic. Does he retreat further into a fantasy of victory, or if the dissonance is too much, give the order to ‘Send in the Marines!’ No one knows what Trump will do, least of all Trump himself. The only constant is chaos.
My money is on Taco. But despite the ceasefire announcement on Tuesday, none of us can be certain that Trump will not, once again, render all previous statements inoperative. And perhaps – given the risks of a ground war – render his presidency inoperative too.
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