{"id":27606,"date":"2026-05-12T09:36:19","date_gmt":"2026-05-12T09:36:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/27606\/"},"modified":"2026-05-12T09:36:19","modified_gmt":"2026-05-12T09:36:19","slug":"iran-trump-is-in-a-trap-of-his-own-making","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/27606\/","title":{"rendered":"Iran: Trump is in a trap of his own making."},"content":{"rendered":"

Sign up for the Slatest<\/a> to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.<\/p>\n

A rare thing happened on Sunday night: One of President Donald Trump\u2019s posts on social media was absolutely true. He said that Iran\u2019s response to the U.S. ceasefire proposal was \u201cTOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE<\/a>\u201d\u2014and he\u2019s right, it is totally unacceptable.<\/p>\n

But what is Trump going to do about it? What can he do about it? The answer, alas, is not much\u2014at least not much that is likely to have an effect on the Iranian leaders\u2019 behavior. Trump is caught in a trap, and it\u2019s a trap of his own making.<\/p>\n

Iranian spokesmen laid out their counterproposal<\/a> in a statement Monday morning. They demand an end to the war (including Israel\u2019s war in Lebanon), an end to the U.S. blockade, a pledge of no further U.S. or Israeli attacks, reparations for damages, a lifting of Western economic sanctions, the release of Iran\u2019s frozen assets, Iran\u2019s continued control over the Strait of Hormuz (which is in international waters), and a postponement of any negotiations over Iran\u2019s nuclear program until all of these demands are satisfied.<\/p>\n

These are the sorts of demands that the winner of a war would issue. By making them, Iran\u2019s leaders are proclaiming that they won this war\u2014and, in a sense, they are right. Victory in war means making an opponent bend to your will. In asymmetric war, the ostensibly weaker power wins by not losing. The Iranians have bowed to none of Trump\u2019s stated war aims (regime change, dismantling all nuclear assets and ballistic missiles, abandoning terrorist militia groups, or opening the Strait of Hormuz). Meanwhile, Iran\u2019s continued ability to keep the Strait closed to all but its preferred customers (mainly Russia and China) is squeezing the global economy, including that of the United States. The fact that it is able to do so, despite a massive U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign that destroyed or damaged more than 13,000 Iranian targets<\/a> and killed the entire top echelon of its political leaders, has bolstered Iran\u2019s image of strength\u2014and made the U.S. and Israel seem weak or aimless.<\/p>\n

Trump said last week that if Iran rejected his peace proposals, he would resume bombing\u2014but to what end? In an interview on Sunday<\/a>, Trump said that the 38 days of airstrikes, which began on Feb. 28, had destroyed about 70 percent of the structures on U.S. war planners\u2019 list of Iranian targets, but, he added, there are \u201cother targets that we could conceivably hit.\u201d<\/p>\n

The remark wasn\u2019t likely to make Iranian generals tremble. First, it\u2019s not a threat of high confidence to say we \u201ccould conceivably\u201d hit some targets. Second, if hitting the first 13,000 targets on the list didn\u2019t make the Iranians surrender, there\u2019s no reason to believe that hitting the next few thousand would clinch the contest.<\/p>\n

For all his talk of \u201cwinning,\u201d Trump doesn\u2019t know what the term\u2014or its opposite, \u201closing\u201d\u2014means. In his first televised speech on the war, back on April 1<\/a>, he boasted that \u201cour armed forces have delivered swift, overwhelming victories on the battlefield\u201d\u2014but, in fact, the armed forces had merely been destroying targets, which, as any military adviser could have told him and as we\u2019ve all since seen, doesn\u2019t mean the same thing. Similarly, in his interview this past Sunday, Trump said the Iranians \u201care defeated, but that doesn\u2019t mean they\u2019re done.\u201d Well, actually, if they really were defeated, it would mean precisely that they\u2019re done.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n Fred Kaplan
\n Putin\u2019s Fear Is Showing. There\u2019s Good Reason for It.
\n Read More\n <\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

The war has been a moral, political, and strategic failure for the United States. The strategic failure is threefold. First, Trump never expressed a consistent rationale\u2014never formulated a strategy\u2014for going to war. Second, to the extent he stressed a particular goal, it bore no relationship to the bombing campaign. For instance, he sometimes said that his main goal was to keep Iran from getting a nuclear bomb, yet few of the targets<\/a> he destroyed had anything to do with Iran\u2019s nuclear infrastructure.<\/p>\n

Third, and in some ways most critically, Trump\u2014and, perhaps even more, the prodding instigator of this war, Israel\u2019s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu\u2014made victory all but impossible on the war\u2019s first day by killing all the Iranian leaders who might have ended the war with authority and power. Most wars end in a negotiated settlement. In this war, there are no powerful, authoritative Iranians to negotiate with\u2014except, perhaps, for the senior officers of the Revolutionary Guard, Iran\u2019s most heavily armed and ideologically hard-line entity, who have little or no interest in surrendering.<\/p>\n

When he started the war, Trump said Iran\u2019s masses of anti-regime protesters should exploit the situation by taking power themselves\u2014a notion that even some of his top advisers derided in meetings as \u201cbullshit<\/a>,\u201d and for good reason. These protesters had no weapons; thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of them had been killed in recent protests; the survivors had no means of organization, since the Internet had been shut down; and their oppressors\u2014the Revolutionary Guard\u2014were left in firmer control of Iran\u2019s politics and society than before the war started.<\/p>\n

Trump also said early on that intelligence agencies had identified plausible successors<\/a> to Iran\u2019s supreme leader who would be more pliant to Western interests, but that the bombing campaign had killed them too. Perhaps more than any other single fact, this signifies just how stupid this war has been from the get-go.<\/p>\n

So what does Trump do now? One way to open the Strait of Hormuz would be to occupy the land around it\u2014but Trump seems, thankfully, unwilling to go that far. Such an operation would require massive numbers of armed forces\u2014the Marines that storm the beaches, the logistics troops to supply them (for who knows how long), more troops still to protect the Marines and the logistics teams, other crews to occupy nearby airbases where the supplies can be flown in, still more troops to stave off the Iranian soldiers who would no doubt be mobilized to repel the occupiers, etc., etc.<\/p>\n

As he has done before, Trump hinted at an apocalyptic solution. On Thursday, he said that if his peace proposal was rejected, the world would see \u201cone big glow coming out of Iran<\/a>\u201d\u2014which sounds a lot like a threat to hit Iran with a nuclear bomb.<\/p>\n

Trump has grumbled such threats before. In his April 1 speech, he threatened to bomb Iran \u201cback to the Stone Ages<\/a>\u201d if its leaders didn\u2019t surrender. Four days later, on Easter Sunday<\/a>, he warned them to \u201cOpen the Fuckin\u2019 Strait, you crazy bastards, or you\u2019ll be living in Hell.\u201d Two days later, he threatened to obliterate all of Iran, saying, \u201ca whole civilization will die tonight<\/a>\u201d if its leaders didn\u2019t give in.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Virginia Democrats Can Still Save Their Map. Republicans Already Showed Them How.
\n <\/a><\/p>\n


\n This Content is Available for Slate Plus members only<\/p>\n

Trump Is Right About Something for Once
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

What if It Were Possible to Pay Taxes Without Funding War Crimes?
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

He backed off those threats without asking Iran to do anything in return<\/a>, and there\u2019s no reason for anyone\u2014least of all the Iranians\u2014to believe he\u2019ll carry out these latest threats either. The nuclear threat is particularly unbelievable. The reasons are obvious: Iran poses no threats warranting a nuclear attack; the United States would become an irredeemable outlaw nation; an untold number of nations would start building nuclear arsenals to deter further U.S. aggression; more immediately, nuking Iran would spread radioactive fallout to America\u2019s allies in the region.<\/p>\n

Trump may think he\u2019s following the \u201cMadman Theory<\/a>\u201d that Richard Nixon tried out in the Vietnam War (if he acted crazy enough, Nixon thought, Ho Chi Minh would rush to the peace table). But it didn\u2019t work for Nixon (Ho and the North Vietnamese Army kept fighting), and it won\u2019t work for Trump either. In fact, the more often he makes such threats, and the more wild-eyed they become, the less believable any of his threats or promises become\u2014and the weaker he appears, and, by extension, the weaker our country appears too.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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