{"id":255906,"date":"2026-08-19T10:08:28","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T10:08:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/255906\/"},"modified":"2026-08-19T10:08:28","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T10:08:28","slug":"trump-would-escape-his-endless-war-with-iran-in-a-food-truck-if-he-could-editorial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/255906\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump would escape his endless war with Iran in a food truck if he could (Editorial)"},"content":{"rendered":"

The nation just learned that last month, when we thought President Donald Trump had fled his\u00a0Qatari-donated luxury plane<\/a>\u00a0for the relative safety of a proper Air Force One, he was actually on a\u00a0third plane out of Turkey<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

That left a plane full of staff and press to fly to England \u2014 and potentially into the ayatollah\u2019s crosshairs \u2014 as his unwitting sacrificial stand-ins.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s 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 \u201clow-keying\u201d the conflict and \u201conly semi-negotiating<\/a>\u201d with Iran, whatever that means.<\/p>\n

His gambit in this \u201cchess game,\u201d he added, is to bide his time while the economic pressure on Iran does the work for him \u2014 never mind that the extremist regime has weathered such stresses for decades.<\/p>\n

In reality, as Trump has essentially acknowledged in confessing his fear of becoming the\u00a0next Herbert Hoover<\/a>, it\u2019s 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,\u00a0sending oil prices upward<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Handing Iran this powerful weapon is the chief achievement of Trump\u2019s war \u2014 and the main reason he hasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s fossil fuel producers have recognized as much by\u00a0accelerating spending on pipelines<\/a>\u00a0and other means of circumventing the route, with further consequences for the price of oil and everything that relies on it.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

While Trump\u2019s twin wars have degraded Iran\u2019s nuclear sites, it still has\u00a0substantial supplies of enriched uranium<\/a>\u00a0and no foreseeable international restrictions like those in place before the president\u00a0dismantled them<\/a>. And while Trump has continued to insist that preventing nuclear proliferation was the war\u2019s primary purpose (among several other proposed rationales), he seems to be \u201clow-keying\u201d that mission, too, lately. The Wall Street Journal reported that he has told aides he is prepared to end the war\u00a0without any agreement on the nuclear issue<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Another oft-stated goal of the war,\u00a0degrading Iran\u2019s capacity to wage war and sponsor terrorism<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s the Iranian regime that has been humiliated.<\/p>\n

We should hope the administration gets our troops, as well as Trump, out of harm\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u2014 The Philadelphia Inquirer<\/p>\n

To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online<\/a> or check out our guidelines<\/a> for how to submit by email.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The nation just learned that last month, when we thought President Donald Trump had fled his\u00a0Qatari-donated luxury plane\u00a0for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":255907,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3],"tags":[9014,34,2440,649],"class_list":["post-255906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-iran","tag-editorials","tag-iran","tag-latest-headlines","tag-opinion"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/117121627171929235","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=255906"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255906\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/255907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=255906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=255906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=255906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}