Donald Trump built his entire life and career on denial of reality, convinced he could counter every adversary with some combination of cajolery and charm or, if that failed, threatening and bullying.
In his first presidential term, Trump hit the wall because a pandemic virus is not susceptible to such techniques, and attempts to slow down testing or speculate about injecting bleach seemed utterly absurd. His failure to manage the COVID-19 crisis led to his loss in the 2020 election although, paradoxically, it also gained him some support among those who were most harmed by activity shutdowns and therefore also most invested in his denialism. In 2018 long before the pandemic, I warned about his reliance on denial of reality:
Trump has broken all bounds of precedent in lying: he lies about everything, so flagrantly and so often, that no one believes him about anything, anyway. This is going to lead to a major catastrophe of national scope in the future when trustworthy leadership will be essential but unavailable, Trump having squandered the credibility he would need to survive a crisis.… Trump is a man in way over his head, denying he is drowning rather than trying to swim. The unanswered question is how much of the country and the world he can take down with him.
In his second presidential term, Trump is now entangled in a war against Iran that had no goal, no measure of success or failure, no estimate of cost, and no exit strategy. Trump seems to have expected a very short conflict, with a decapitation strike removing the “supreme leader” and much of his closest staff and advisers, expecting a collapse of the government making it amenable to regime change. To his apparent surprise, Iran is not Venezuela. Trump seems to be slowly cracking up in full public view. Instead, the result of eliminating the top civilian leadership seems to have handed increasing weight of control to the elite and politicized military, essentially the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), rapidly accelerating a years-long trend favoring hard-liners.
Now Trump has few options. Repeated attempts to declare victory have so little credibility as to seem ridiculous, as Iran is continuing to fire missiles at US allies and halting nearly all commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, thereby pushing energy costs to levels unprecedented since at least the 1970s and possibly quite a lot worse. Consumer prices in the US tracked by the federal government Energy Information Administration (EIA) have reached about $3.91 per gallon for gasoline (as of Mar 23), up $0.85 from one year ago; and $5.38 per gallon nationally (as of Mar 23) for diesel, up $1.81 from one year ago, a major factor in the shipment and supply of nearly all goods. The US Postal Service announced a temporary 8% fuel surcharge. A further increase of about $1.00 per gallon would be enough to trigger “demand contraction,” where activities stop because fuel is unaffordable and consumer behavior changes, such as deciding to take public transit instead of private vehicles.
Trump seems to have assumed that if the war started to go badly, he could cut and run, but that now seems unlikely, as a reported US cease-fire proposal was summarily rejected. US withdrawal would not stop attacks by Iran, as occasional asymmetric attacks on cargo vessels, even as simplistic as a sole attacker with a rocket-propelled grenade and a speedboat, would be sufficient to deter attempts by ships to pass through the strait and spook insurers.
Trump threatened to “obliterate” electrical power stations in Iran, despite such deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure constituting a war crime. He then backed off from that threat, partly as a result of Iran vowing to retaliate against the civilian infrastructure of US regional allies. He claimed Iran agreed to negotiations, a claim denied by Iran.
Whatever nebulous and fuzzy goals Trump may have had when starting this war, he is being forced into an overriding and likely defining goal now: reopening the Strait of Hormuz to restore the status quo ante, protecting the world supply of energy and other critical commodities such as agricultural fertilizer, and he has only a few weeks to accomplish that. Entire countries in Asia face not only inflationary economic collapse, but famine for the coming year. There is no alternative.
Without a negotiated settlement, which seems highly unlikely given the irreconcilable demands of the belligerents, Trump will be compelled by circumstances to a maximalist, high-risk strategy of ground invasion. Reports of deployment of at most 50,000 Marines and Army special forces suggest plans for a limited action, probably focused on Kharg Island, which is the departure point for 90% of Iranian oil exports, apparently with the intention of strangling the Iranian economy. Holding Kharg Island would be enormously more challenging than capturing it in the first place, as troops stationed there, only a few miles from the Iranian mainland, would become easy targets. Trump simply cannot free himself of the mindset that everyone is vulnerable to extortion if he causes them enough pain: To stay in power, the government of Iran is willing to shoot thousands of its own people on the street, so it seems unlikely to be moved by Trump starving the population to death.
Full-scale land invasions are incredibly costly. Many remember D-Day, the World War II landings on the beaches of Normandy in 1944 that paved the way for the reconquest of Europe from the Nazis, but it was by no means a “day” at all: It took nearly three months employing two million Allied soldiers who suffered a quarter of a million casualties, and – it is well worth emphasizing – a year of thorough and careful planning.
Congress will be asked for a $200 billion supplemental appropriation as a down payment for the war, a staggering amount of money consistent with a massive invasion of Iran initially on a scale comparable to the war in Iraq from 2003–2011 that involved 300,000–600,000 troops in a coalition of the US and its allies, after which the US had to re-enter Iraq in 2014 before finally leaving in 2021, causing hundreds of thousands and possibly up to one million deaths. Iran is a vast country, 17th largest in the world, with just over 1.6 million km2, three times the size of Iraq, much of it mountainous and hard to traverse, so hard that parts of the country were effectively isolated from each other until the 20th Century. Iran has a population of about 92 million, including nearly one million soldiers under arms, about twice that of Iraq. Congress, so far, was not consulted about the Iran war, in violation of the War Powers Clause of the Constitution, and is expected to view the huge monetary request with severe skepticism.
Indeed, Iran and Iraq fought each other in a long and nightmarish war, 1980–1988, that killed about 500,000. At first, Iraq made significant gains against what they expected to be an Iran in chaos after its 1979 Islamist revolution, but within a few years, Iran reconquered all of its lost territory and eventually achieved a stalemate. It remains one of the deadliest wars ever between regular armies.
Given the absolute need to reopen the Strait of Hormuz to prevent worldwide economic collapse and the corresponding willingness of the Islamist government of Iran to turn its own population into martyrs, we seem on an inexorable path toward a full-scale invasion of Iran sufficient to dislodge the regime, possibly on a scale unseen since the invasion of Europe needed in World War II to dislodge the Nazis.
Trump has put himself into a terrible dilemma. Allowing Iran to retain control of the Strait of Hormuz would represent a political defeat for the United States, with Iran keeping a stranglehold on one of the most critical components of world commerce and able to impose de facto tolls on cargo passing through, discriminating via extortion among allies and enemies, coercing economic fealty. Wresting control of the strait from Iran would require an enormous investment of military resources, possibly even enough to require a military draft – which the White House press secretary on Mar 8 carefully declined to rule out, saying only it is “not part of the current plan right now.”
Are we willing to pay that cost? Even if we are, are Trump and his sycophants, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, citing Christian nationalist religious fervor, and military leaders reportedly telling those under their command to expect “Armageddon,” capable of successfully leading such a campaign?