Trump 'Low-Key' Admits Defeat in Iran

Now begins the true forever-war stage of this conflict. PLUS: An important alliance emerges—one tied to all the great powers

Edited by Sam Thielman

"IT WILL WORK out. It always works out. It's like a chess game," President Trump told Axios on Sunday. It might be the closest we get to an outright admission of defeat. 

Practically as soon as the Trump administration launched the U.S.-Israeli War on Iran, the administration claimed it was won. "In the first hour it was over," Trump said less than two weeks into it. "Operation Epic Fury has delivered a decisive military result in just weeks," Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth boasted on April 24. On May 5, Secretary of State-plus Marco Rubio told the White House press corps, "Operation Epic Fury is concluded. We achieved the objective of that operation." 

Three months and one persistently closed Strait later, Vice President JD Vance is reduced to saying things like, "We’re in the middle of the game." 

Trump gave his interview to Axios to inaugurate a new phase of the war, one thrust upon him by hishis inability to achieve his objectives through force, his inability to control the ladder of military escalation, and his inability to reverse his losses at the negotiating table. "We are low-keying it," he said. Iran? I don't know her.

Longtime FOREVER WARS readers will remember all the way back to April 22, when we wrote that a frustrated Trump was moving into forever-war territory, making hope a strategy—specifically, the hope that some deus ex machina forces open the Strait. (That's what your FOREVER WARS subscription buys you: being nearly four months ahead of the news.) Now we've properly arrived at the Iran Forever War. Trump has, for now, opted against returning to bombing Iran, a decision compelled by his dire shortage of interceptors and precision missiles. When he was threatening a return to the bombing, Iran let the oil producing states aligned with the U.S. know that if the bombs started falling again, the basis of their economies would burn. Their pressure did the rest. 

The Iranians, whose post-assassination leadership transformations have predictably and understandably favored the hardest of hardliners, further informed the administration that there will be no reopening of the Strait of Hormuz until the United States meets their terms, which include reparations for starting the war. Trump is trying to hit them with an Uno-reverse move on the reparations—these are terms Trump cannot accept, after all—in an echo of the naval blockade around the closed Strait. 

Lacking a military mechanism for compellance, Trump's latest approach, to leave the Strait closed until something changes, is to, as Nixon once said about Allende, make the Iranian economy scream. The thing is, Iran (the leadership, that is; the people suffer) has learned to adapt to nearly two decades of expansive sanctions. The U.S., however, has not had to adapt to the persistence of gas being 35 percent more expensive than it was before the war. Policy Tensor has an interesting piece about how the U.S. can pull out a victory here, but it's predicated on oil remaining at $90 per barrel. At no point during the post-9/11 wars have Americans been personally exposed to such unceasing higher energy costs. Much of the Cheneyite logic behind military domination in the Middle East was about preventing precisely this. 

Another way time doesn't favor the U.S. here has to do with naval power. FOREVER WARS (via American Prestige) told you in March that naval sustainment was a huge challenge for a war primarily occurring in the sea and (ship-launched) air domains. Now family members of sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln are reporting food shortages and maintenance-related deteriorations aboard a carrier that's spent an astonishing 250 days without a port call on a combat deployment. To sustain the blockade necessary to bring Iran to an as-yet-unknown threshold of economic pain sufficient to them giving up their leverage against the U.S., the U.S. needs persistent naval power at a scale it hasn't summoned in generations. "I know there's Army guys that are like, look, I slept in a hole that was muddy underneath the tank and I ate MREs. But you didn’t do that for nine straight months," the father of a Lincoln sailor told NBC. The Iraq War came extremely close to breaking the Army through the strain of relentless deployment. (Some argue that it succeeded.) The Iran War threatens to break the Navy. It is much harder to rebuild a Navy than to rebuild an Army. 

Aside from all that, great strategy. We're aboard the Pequod, adrift without a plausible theory of victory—victory now being the fallback position of opening the Strait, not the nuclear-related or regime-collapse goals sought at the outset of the war—and all the while making Americans shoulder economic costs above anything they can remember. Each released barrel of reverse petroleum that suppresses costs today is borrowed against the costs of tomorrow. Meanwhile, expensive U.S. military hardware from high-altitude interceptors to destroyer hulls takes a long time to replace, another debt for the future. Show me a single chess game Trump has won. 

ON FRIDAY, Pakistan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia announced a defense pact that has potential to be a substantial geopolitical force in the coming decades. Its potential does not depend on a united military front emerging, where an attack on each is treated like a NATO Article V-style attack on all. I've been fascinated by it and spent some time over the past several days talking with knowledgeable people about it. Here's a sketch of what I've come to understand.