Trump's Alternative To The Iran War Is A Forever War

The absence of bombs is not the end of conflict, still less the presence of peace. The end of the Iran War must be forced on Trump

Edited by Sam Thielman

WEDNESDAY! VETERANS' DAY! Come out to Bulletproof Comics & Games at 2178 Nostrand Avenue—right off the 2/5 at Flatbush Avenue, to say nothing of the B44, B41, Q35, B103 and (a bit of a walk) the B11. I'll be signing NO ONE ESCAPES THE DIALECTIC #1 (and anything else you bring) and hanging out from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.! And now onto what we promised in the headline:

DOES THIS SOUND like a war that's "militarily effectively over" to you? 

"Iran militarily is effectively over. We’re just keeping it the status quo, and we’re doing that really at the behest of countries that are their neighbors." [Trump] added, "We just had, just in case, another aircraft carrier. We have many. Sailing over and just arriving in the Middle East, so we have three. And they’re all locked and loaded, and hopefully we don’t have to use them."

Beware any attempt at describing "the status quo" as the alternative to the Iran War. The status quo is the Iran War. Absolutely nothing, from the United States' perspective, is resolved. No strategic effect sought by the United States has been achieved. What we can say instead is that a state of hostilities has instead been entrenched. Welcome to forever. You've been here awhile. And you've been in the neighborhood for much longer.

Trump's rationale for the war—transparently pretextual but, still; his stated rationale—was to permanently eradicate Iran's nuclear-weapons capabilities. The U.S. has not achieved that. Between the 2025 Twelve Day War and this one, it's undeniable that the nuclear complex—much different than a nuclear weapon, which the Iranians have not developed—has suffered degradation. But there is no finality achieved. That's why Adm. Cooper of U.S. Central Command was floating the idea of attacking Pickaxe Mountain. Meanwhile, the Iranians were negotiating potential new arrangements over its nuclear capabilities with the United States through intermediaries when the U.S. and Israel attacked them instead. 

More central to the strategic situation, the war prompted the Iranians to seize and throttle the Strait of Hormuz. That transformed the status quo in the region profoundly, and showed the world that Iran possessed leverage over the global economy to impose costs on Washington like it hadn't seen since 1973. (Though Pahlavist Iran refused to join the oil embargo.) That led to higher fuel and commodity prices in the U.S., and then the wipeout of the Trumpist coalition in last week's congressional elections. Iranian control over the crucial energy chokepoint remains, regardless of the bald-faced lie told by Secretary of "War" Pete Hegseth in his Tuesday morning press conference. To underscore the distance between Hegseth's claims and reality, three tankers were on fire in the strait on Tuesday, according to the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), after either hitting IRGC mines or attempting to pass through the strait without authorization.

Trump, Hegseth and Cooper's response to the Iranian control of Hormuz has been to maintain an expensive and substantial commitment of naval power to enforce a blockade on Iranian oil exports. As Trump indicated, in another week or so, the U.S. will have three aircraft carrier strike groups in-theater for the blockade. He thinks of the blockade as an alternative to war. He wants you to think of the blockade as an alternative to war. 

But the blockade is instead an assurance that a war which has resolved nothing the U.S. launched it to resolve remains in place. Keeping the blockade in place also keeps in place the pressure to escalate. The blockade has been effective in damaging Iran's economy. With no pathway to a negotiated settlement—Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday called "outrageous" Iran's negotiating position that the U.S. should return to the Memorandum of Understanding it insincerely signed in June—the hardliners in the IRGC, who run Iran after the U.S. and Israel's decapitation strikes empowered them, will find themselves tempted to lob their still-substantial magazine of ballistic missiles at one or more of the ships in the three strike groups, or at the Indian-Ocean base on Diego Garcia from which the blockade is staged and resupplied. And it has to be staged and resupplied from there because the Iranians cratered much of the U.S.' Gulf basing infrastructure and still threaten what remains. 

Read that again: The status quo, which Trump is again pitching as the alternative to war, is one in which escalatory pressures remain that endanger the lives of thousands of sailors and tens if not hundreds of thousands of Iranian civilians. Less spectacularly but currently manifesting, the U.S. is actively attacking Qeshm Island. That doesn't count as a return to war, either, apparently. Nor will commodity prices—whether oil, diesel, petroleum products like fertilizers, or all the stuff that makes its way to market on diesel-powered trucks—return to what they were on February 28. This is not a conclusion. This is a normalization. 

While I've heard a lot in the days after the midterms about how oh, no, the Foreign Policy Blob rejected this war this time around, I noted yesterday that the respectable defense intellectuals at the Rand Corporation are sure on board with this kind of permanent-blockade. They, like Trump, don't register this as a forever war; and don't count forever wars as real wars. 

But as long as the United States remains an imperial power, it will continue to wage and often lose forever wars. Forever wars are imperial police actions. Their inconclusive nature accommodates the imperial project, for the imperial project is to remain; and while remaining, dominate, extract and punish noncompliance. They may be unpopular with the people—in both parties, as this Institute for Global Affairs poll shows—but that only underscores the insulation from democracy that imperial foreign policy enjoys. Hegseth can insist all he likes that Epic Fury "ended," but he, Trump and the foreign-policy elites comfortable with the current status quo off Iranian shores are enjoying a last-page-of-Animal Farm moment. 

All of this underscores that if the United States is to get itself out of its latest forever war, the Democrats have to force an end to it. They were elected to Congress as part of the backlash to both the war and the status quo it represents. They have to zero out funding—not only for the strikes that can resume at Trump's whim; but for the naval blockade—and relentlessly pressure Trump to return to the MOU as a basis for a negotiated settlement. 

One final thing. The reason Trump can claim surface plausibility for the status quo not being a war is because after Iraq and Afghanistan became debacles in the 2000s, both parties pushed an understanding of war that narrowed the perception of capital-W War to large-scale ground occupations and their accompanying air operations. Although standoff precision strike has been central to the American Way of War since the Revolution in Military Affairs, Barack Obama, Trump and Joe Biden alike have all portrayed drone strikes, manned air strikes, leadership decapitations and naval embargoes that aren't in support of ground combat as operations other than war. All that stuff has its own acronym: OOTW, or "ooh-twa," and it used to be a derogation for operations like peacekeeping that generals considered peripheral to capital-W War. Today, this misrepresentation of war has deeply distorted our political discussions around military commitments and warfighting. Ironically, it has done so in a way that makes what Pete Hegseth means by Victory less achievable, since it's only encouraged dipshits like Cooper to conduct warfare by rounds of inconclusive infrastructure bombing. Didn't work when we called it Rolling Thunder; didn't work when we called it Shock & Awe; doesn't work today.

Instead, all military force commitment must be thought of on a spectrum. The commitment of military force in pursuit of an objective is very rarely a static commitment. It creates its own pressures, and those pressures change not only as the result of specific engagements, but with duration. Among the ongoing malign legacies of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is the manipulative portrayal of warfare as looking only like that. I say malign because the purpose is to make the each forever war even more frictionless than the last. 

THE HEGSETH IMPEACHMENT. As you're no doubt aware, hours after we published yesterday, Rep. Thomas Massie—a Kansas antiwar Republican defeated in a stunningly expensive primary after Massie demanded Trump release the Epstein files—re-introduced articles of impeachment against Hegseth. His counts center on three violations of the War Powers Resolution concerning the Iran War; ignoring laws on civilian casualties; unlawfully retaliating against Sen. Mark Kelly (a retired Navy captain who recorded a video urging troops to resist unlawful orders); the boat murders; unlawfully kidnapping Nicolas Maduro; and illegally waging war on Yemen in 2025.

Hegseth, as mentioned above, held a rare press conference to respond. Conspicuous to me was Hegseth, waging unambiguous defense of every action of his tenure, calling Vice President JD Vance "a critical partner of the team in every aspect of this" while Vance attempts to distance himself from the war. 

But Hegseth also reaffirmed why I wrote yesterday that he's a creature of Donald Rumsfeld's wars. He brought out classic tropes security officials relied upon during the War on Terror to evade responsibility for their disasters. Holding me accountable is a slander on the troops. It signals weakness to our enemies. It's a treasonous criminalization of domestic politics. My critics hate and seek to weaken America. Hegseth has been doing this since he was a Hill lobbyist for the Iraq surge. He drew an important lesson: these politics so often work. Throughout Hegseth's adult life, War on Terror politics successfully intimidated critics and deterred them from imposing consequences. That brought us to a situation where Pete Hegseth could be defense secretary and order the murders of random fishermen on boats that they don't even bother to sprinkle coke on afterward. Will they work again?

MY LORE, YOU'RE ONE OF THEM! Mikey Kent of the hardcore bands Private Hell and Ghouli—Ghouli just opened for Ink & Dagger in Richmond—today published a really fun interview with me. If you're interested in who I was as a teenager and you want to read about my version of Al Bundy scoring four touchdowns in a single high-school football game, here it is. There's also a lot of stuff about my journalism and comics work. But really we're here for me to talk about booking Converge and Los Crudos and why single-band compilations should be treated as albums.