The U.S. will emerge from the war with Iran as a lesser power

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By the time you read this, U.S. armed forces may well have launched a ground war in Iran. Or they may have begun to withdraw from the region and go home. There could be a ceasefire, in exchange for Iran’s agreement to open the Strait of Hormuz. Or the war could have escalated further, with stepped-up U.S. attacks on Iranian civilian infrastructure met with Iranian attacks on oil and gas assets across the region.

All of these and more could be read into Donald Trump’s brief, disjointed “address to the nation” Wednesday night, a speech that might well have been cribbed from his late-night social-media posts for all the wisdom, sense or even intelligibility it contained: a pastiche of every verbal tic (“like never before … nobody’s seen anything like it”) and self-serving lie in the President’s repertoire, but not the first clue of a plan to get America, and the world, out of the disaster he has created.

This is what you get when you hand the keys to the world’s most powerful military to an insecure, deeply ignorant, endlessly manipulable, pathological narcissist. If an actual nine-year-old were in charge of the Iran campaign, and not a 79-year-old man with the intellectual and emotional range of a nine-year-old, it would be indistinguishable from the actual result.

The war may well come to be seen as a turning point – for Mr. Trump, but also for the United States. For Mr. Trump, it has the singular disadvantage of being viscerally, inescapably real: Unlike many of his previous misadventures, it is not something you can lie and bluff and bamboozle your way out of, however much he may try. The consequences of the war, and the hubris and incompetence that gave rise to it, are spelled out across the region and around the world, in blood-red letters big enough for everyone to see.

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As for the United States, we may now be dealing with a very different problem than seemed likely even a month ago. Until now, the emerging diagnosis of the United States under Donald Trump, with its lawlessness and its unilateralism, its preference for military over diplomatic means, its disregard for America’s traditional allies and affinity for its traditional enemies, its willingness to exchange “spheres of influence” versus a broad commitment to the international order, its open pursuit of pecuniary, even personal gain as the guiding principle of its foreign policy, was that of a “predatory hegemon,” or perhaps “rogue superpower.”

The problem, that is, was American power, no longer subject to congressional oversight or bound by international law, inspired by no higher commitment to democracy or freedom but transactional and amoral, at best, expansionary and dictator-friendly at worst. Those remain the best description of Mr. Trump’s motives, to be sure: the collection of grievances and resentments, lusts and vanities, as well as the personal projects of the various fanatics and grifters around him, that together make up his foreign policy.

What has changed is the quantum of American power, either in reality or perception. The Iran war has the makings of a historic military disaster, the kind that forever alters the international balance of power. We were just getting used to calling America a predatory hegemon. We may well come to wonder whether it is any sort of hegemon at all.

We need not rehearse the massive shambles the Trump administration made of the launch phase of the war: the multiple, shifting, sometimes contradictory objectives; the absence of any preparation or strategy to achieve them; the failure either to consult their allies or to understand their adversary; the inability to think even one step ahead, or to anticipate the most obvious responses from the Iranian side; the cretinous disregard for how the Ukraine campaign, and the rise of the drones, has changed the face of modern warfare; the sublime overconfidence, the arrogant disdain for Congress, the fatal misreading of, if not contempt for, that most important of all military forces, public opinion.

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Look, rather, at what have been the consequences. Compare what has happened to what might most charitably be described as the objectives of the war – not the easy, almost automatic ones, like “destroying the Iranian navy” (if you were unaware Iran had a navy you are not alone), or the unstated, probably decisive ones, like the opportunity it afforded to manipulate the markets, but the best possible face on the war, the ones the administration trots out for a time whenever it feels a need to court public opinion, before returning them to the memory hole lest anyone ask what became of them.

How fares, for example, our old friend, regime change? You remember: the bit where Mr. Trump tells Iranians to rise up, that help is on the way, that they were being offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take control of their own government? The war has more than failed to achieve this. It has entrenched the regime still further, and the most hardened and hostile elements of it most of all.

The aerial bombardment campaign did not, as Mr. Trump expected, bring it down (“in three days,” he was good enough to admit the other day); neither has the assassination of the 86-year-old cleric at its head, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, done much to destabilize what remained. Mr. Khamenei was simply replaced by his son. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard consolidated its position around him. The Iranian forces carried on, lobbing missiles and drones at neighbouring states at will, along a prearranged plan wherein command was dispersed among 31 autonomous units: the so-called Mosaic Defence.

Thus the embarrassing spectacle of the Trump administration declaring that Iran cannot continue to fight because “it has been defeated,” even as Iran, notwithstanding its supposed defeat, continues to fight – conduct Mr. Trump plainly feels is dirty pool (“a little unfair” was the exact quote), as if this were a game of cops and robbers and a playmate had failed to acknowledge they were “dead.”

The specific object of Mr. Trump’s complaint was Iran’s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, an event “nobody predicted” that in fact everyone predicted. Here again the war has been entirely counterproductive, allowing Iran to exercise control of the strait in a way it would never have dared before the war.

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This is a direct consequence of the failure to dislodge the regime. The strait was always vulnerable to Iranian attack. It just wasn’t worth it to the Iranians, given the massive counterattack that would surely follow. The war has fundamentally changed that calculus. The U.S. and Israel have thrown everything they had at them, and they have survived. So why not take out the strait? What do they have to lose?

So now the U.S. war aim has shifted: to reopening the strait. That is, to returning the strait to the state of affairs before the war the U.S. started. At least, that was the aim for a couple of days, as described in anonymous press briefings. But this left the U.S. in a quandary. It could hardly “declare victory and get out,” as many were advising, if that meant leaving Iran with a stranglehold on much of the world oil supply.

But that fleeting conventional wisdom did not reckon with Mr. Trump’s brazenness. Lately he has taken to demanding that other world powers should move to reopen the strait themselves – to clean up the mess that he made. With a massive recession looming, talks are now under way among 40 nations, including Canada, to do just that, though whether this would involve military action is unclear. Which is at least preferable to Mr. Trump’s proposed remedy, that China should patrol the strait.

What, last, are the prospects of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, which Mr. Trump has lately resurrected as a casus belli? We are at this moment no closer than we were at the start of the war, which is to say after Mr. Trump had “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program in last year’s mini-war. Perhaps a U.S. commando raid may yet successfully extract Iran’s supplies of enriched uranium, buried as they are under a mountain (or probably several) and protected by half the Iranian army.

But it can hardly have escaped notice that the demands for Iranian compliance contained in the administration’s list of 15 conditions for a ceasefire bear a striking resemblance to the conditions Iran had already agreed to under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Obama-era agreement between Iran, the U.S., and a host of other world powers – the agreement Mr. Trump tore up in his first term.

Iran now rejects those conditions – again, what does it have to lose? If anything, it has even greater incentive to dash for nuclear weapons than it did before. The calculation, probably well grounded, is that Mr. Trump will at some point tire of the exercise. Whereas the mullahs are more determined than ever. After all, if they had nukes the U.S. would never have attacked.

To sum up, then, the result of the Iran war has been to expose U.S. security guarantees, such as those it gave to its Gulf state allies, as worthless; to divide the U.S. even further from the other NATO countries, already on edge after Mr. Trump’s threats to invade Greenland, but now facing the near certainty that Mr. Trump will not live up to his treaty obligations in the event of a Russian attack; to greatly enrich Russia, not only in the form of higher oil prices but the relaxation of sanctions; and to leave Iran, whose subjugation was the point of the exercise, intact, angrier than ever, and in control of the Strait of Hormuz, and the tolls accruing thereto.

Its reputation diminished, its credibility shattered, even its military force dented, at least in perception – for if it cannot bend a non-nuclear middle power like Iran to its will, who can it? – the U.S. will emerge from this war a lesser power. No one trusts it. No one will work with it. Worst of all, after this, fewer will even be afraid of it.

This, on top of a galloping fiscal catastrophe, bitter political and social divisions, the decline of mediating and stabilizing institutions under Mr. Trump’s relentless assault, all culminating in this fall’s elections – Mr. Trump is sure to try to steal them, with a probable breakdown in civic order, if he is successful. How long the U.S. dollar can maintain its position atop the world financial system, under these kinds of pressures, is now a matter of open speculation.

So the world we must now plan for – the world after Mr. Trump, but most certainly after the Iran war – is one in which the U.S. is not only not much of an ally, or even something of an adversary (in the aftermath of the Iran humiliation, who can say how he might lash out?). It is a world in which the U.S. has ceased to be much of a factor – a post-American world.

Not so long ago, we talked of an alliance of the middle powers as a counterweight to American power. Before long, we may need it as a replacement for American power.

Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Donald Trump delivered his 'address to the nation' Thursday night. It occurred on Wednesday night.