There is no good way to call off a war that you started but which hasn\u2019t achieved what you\u2019d hoped. On Wednesday night, Donald Trump, in his address to the nation on the Iran war, sought to counter reality with hyperbole. \u201cWe\u2019ve beaten and completely decimated Iran,\u201d the President said. \u201cNever in the history of warfare has an enemy suffered such clear and devastating large-scale losses in a matter of weeks.\u201d Of course, Iran\u2019s Revolutionary Guard retains control not just of the country but of the Strait of Hormuz, and therefore of an alarmingly constricted global oil supply. A month of air strikes had killed many leaders but had not changed the regime. Even so, Trump suggested that the mission was \u201cnearing completion,\u201d and that the U.S. military would soon be pulling back. But if Tehran did not accept a deal, he added, \u201cwe are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We\u2019re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.\u201d<\/p>\n
Big talk. But the announcement also sounded like a concession, since two to three weeks probably isn\u2019t enough time for Trump to follow through on some of his prior threats: an armed invasion of the oil ports of Kharg Island, or an even more ambitious raid to extract uranium likely stored in tunnels near nuclear facilities. The morning of Trump\u2019s address, media reports had suggested that he was considering withdrawing the United States from NATO. Instead, the President taunted America\u2019s allies, some of whom had been pleading for a settlement over Hormuz. \u201cBuild up some delayed courage,\u201d he told them. If they want the oil to flow again, they should \u201cgo to the strait and just take it.\u201d<\/p>\n
It has been a central conviction of Trump\u2019s second term that the nations of the world now operate on self-interest and brute force, rather than on principle or alliance, and the White House has been eager to spread the news. The mockery that the Administration directed at its own, less warlike allies this week (\u201cLast time I checked, there was supposed to be a big, bad Royal Navy,\u201d the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, said on Tuesday) recalled its jeering of Volodymyr Zelensky in February, 2025. \u201cYou\u2019re buried there,\u201d Trump told the Ukrainian President about his nation\u2019s battlefield prospects.<\/p>\n
This penchant for what Saul Bellow called reality instruction\u2014the cynical delight taken in explaining to idealists how the rough-and-tumble world really works\u2014extends from Trump throughout the Administration. But perhaps the most eager reality instructor has been Hegseth, one of the Administration\u2019s more politically fragile figures, who, when he\u2019d been picked to join Trump\u2019s Cabinet, was a co-host of \u201cFox & Friends Weekend.\u201d Hegseth is so committed to a vision of the world defined by winners and losers that he once wrote that Joan of Arc was a \u201closer\u201d because her last battle \u201cended disastrously and eventually with her execution.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hegseth came out of his own service, in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the seeming conviction that what had stood in the way of a fuller victory in those wars had been the restraints supposedly placed on how soldiers could kill. (In 2019, he successfully lobbied Trump to pardon two soldiers charged with or convicted of alleged war crimes.) \u201cWe unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy,\u201d Hegseth told a large gathering of senior military officials, whom he had summoned to Quantico, in September. \u201cWe also don\u2019t fight with stupid rules of engagement\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. just common sense, maximum lethality, and authority for warfighters,\u201d he said. \u201cYou kill people and break things for a living.\u201d<\/p>\n
On Iran, Hegseth has led the Administration\u2019s periodic press briefings, at which he has called on Americans to pray to Jesus Christ for the military\u2019s success; his slogan has been \u201cmaximum lethality.\u201d But even in the first hours of the war it was clear that this approach could backfire. The initial strikes, which began on February 28th, killed the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but were so indiscriminate that, as President Trump noted, they also killed many of the political figures who the White House had hoped would form a new, more amenable cadre of leaders. \u201cMost of the people we had in mind are dead,\u201d he said a few days later. The ones remaining, even if Trump didn\u2019t want to acknowledge it, were generally described as more hard-line. One of the President\u2019s stated aims has been to inspire a popular uprising among those Iranian citizens sick of the repression and the autocracy enforced by the Revolutionary Guard. Yet that requires taking care to distinguish between the regime and its civilians, and to avoid collateral damage. But, according to a preliminary investigation, on the same day that U.S. forces assassinated Khamenei, they also dropped a bomb in the wrong place, inadvertently killing nearly two hundred people in an elementary school.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There is no good way to call off a war that you started but which hasn\u2019t achieved what…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":49814,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[2618,34,503,2620,2619],"class_list":{"0":"post-49813","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-iran","8":"tag-comment","9":"tag-iran","10":"tag-magazine","11":"tag-splitscreenimagerightfullbleed","12":"tag-the-lede"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116340330513031087","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49813","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=49813"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49813\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}