Apr.24

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Iran: The War Is Not Going Well

We get this question a lot from readers, and (Z) gets it a lot from students: How the hell is this mess in Iran going to end? We wish we had a good answer to that, but we don't.

We've written it before, and we'll write it again, but Donald Trump has backed himself into a corner worse than any president except, maybe, Lyndon B. Johnson. Consider the President's basic options:

• Shock and Awe: The U.S. could bomb the living daylights out of Iran, with an eye towards causing... surrender? Regime change? Something else? The goal of such a campaign is not clear and, even if it were clear, the administration has already tried shock and awe without success. And now, the U.S. military is running out of munitions. Even while the bombing was underway, we wrote several times that it would not work, and that no nation ever won a war JUST with bombs. We could take a victory lap right now, except that everyone else was writing that, too. Pointing that fact out required very little insight, and only a rudimentary grasp of 20th century history. Unfortunately for America, Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth have zero insight and no grasp of history.
  
  
• Ground Invasion: The point at which LBJ was really stuck was when he committed vast numbers of troops to Vietnam, in the latter months of 1964. Once American soldiers have bled and died, the voting public demands to see some meaningful benefit from that. And when there is no benefit, you just have to keep going... and going... and going. As Vietnam vet John Kerry memorably put it, way back in 1971, "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"
  
  The Trump administration appears to be savvy enough to know that "boots on the ground" would be disastrous. From a political standpoint, the American people would be furious, since the White House has done absolutely nothing to make the case for war. From a military standpoint, the only way that deploying soldiers can work is if you have a clear plan with a clear objective. For example, "capture Berlin and force Hitler from power" is a clear plan and a clear objective, and the military professionals can strategize ways to make that happen. By contrast, there was no clear plan and no clear objective in Vietnam or Afghanistan, beyond vague hand-waving about stopping communism/stopping terrorism, and those wars were disasters. We really don't believe it's possible to formulate a coherent strategic plan AFTER you've already commenced hostilities, and even if it somehow is possible, we really, really don't believe the people running this administration have the ability to pull off such a miracle.
  
  The upshot is that we do not think Trump would be stupid enough to invade Iran with ground troops. But even if he is that stupid, all it will do is make a quagmire into an even bigger quagmire.
  
  
• Declare Victory: For some period of time, we tended to think this would be the endgame: Trump would tire of the war, would tire of the impact it's having on his approval rating and his political capital, and would just declare victory and be done with Iran.
  
  We don't think this option is on the table anymore, at least not in its original form. Trump's shenanigans have taught the Iranians that they can effectively strangle the world economy through their control of the Strait of Hormuz. This gives them enormous economic power (they can shake down ships that want to pass through the Strait) and enormous political power (they can hurt/help favored nations, say by demanding that oil transactions be conducted in Chinese yuan rather than U.S. dollars).
  
  If Trump were to declare an end to the Iran War today, the Strait of Hormuz would not reopen under the same conditions as existed before the U.S. started bombing. Either the Iranians will keep it closed until they get concessions, such as security guarantees and unfrozen assets, or they will open it and start leveraging their newfound economic and political power, to the detriment of the United States.
  
  At this point, the "Declare Victory" option is still the most likely outcome, we suppose, but it's now become "negotiate with the Iranians, give them some stuff, declare victory, and claim that the new agreement is way better than what Barack Obama came up with." The Obama part of that will be a clear-cut falsehood, albeit one that the MAGA cultists will accept. Will anyone else? We doubt it, and with nearly 70% of Americans disapproving, Democrats would be committing political malpractice if they did not point out early and often during this campaign season that "Trump Diplomacy" equates to "Give Iran [JUICY THING X] and [JUICY THING Y] while burning through hundreds of billions of dollars and getting nothing in return."
  
  
• Besiege Iran: It would appear that the administration's current strategy is to blockade the Strait of Hormuz, and in so doing, somehow bring Iran to its knees.
  
  As a Civil War historian, (Z) knows a thing or two about blockades and sieges. Starting with the former, making a blockade work takes both a lot of time AND vast naval superiority. The Union blockade of the Confederacy took a couple of years to become at least somewhat effective, and that was despite the South's near-total lack of offensive firepower in its navy. The Strait of Hormuz is rather smaller than "the entire Southern coastline," so an effective blockade might come together a bit more quickly. However, that is counterbalanced by the fact that Iran, unlike the Confederates, has drones, mosquito boats and other sorts of headaches-for-admirals that will make it much harder for the U.S. to assert its naval superiority.
  
  Meanwhile, the thing that blockades and sieges both require is time, and lots of it. When it comes to the Civil War, the big land battles—Gettysburg, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Shiloh, etc.—tend to get the lion's share of the attention. But the truth is that the real drama was in the two major sieges of 1864: Atlanta and Petersburg. Both sieges were in place by the (late) summer of that year, and the critical matter was that one of them simply had to work before November 8, 1864—Election Day. If one (or both) of the South's two most critical cities fell, then it was a message to Northern voters that the war effort was making progress, and could succeed, and it was worthwhile to let Abraham Lincoln finish the job. If both cities held on, then it would send the opposite message. Lincoln himself was pessimistic enough that in late August 1864, he made his Cabinet sign a promise to cooperate with the incoming presidential administration. Of course, Atlanta did fall (in early September), Lincoln's political fortunes turned around, and the rest is history.
  
  The point of today's history lesson is that a siege only works if the besieging power has time on its side. The Union, as it turned out, had JUST enough time on its side to prevail. Trump, by contrast, does not have time. As we have pointed out many times, the oil/fertilizer economy is already screwed up, and will take months and months to get un-screwed (and it may never be fully unscrewed, if "money for Iran" becomes a permanent part of the cost of doing business). Meanwhile, Election Day is drawing closer and closer and closer, and the less space there is between the Iran War and the elections, the more voters will make Republicans pay at the polls.
  
  You would think that someone who became President of the United States would be able to understand the dynamics of blockades and sieges, since it's really not all that hard. But Trump apparently does not. If you want to read more, and you have access to The New York Times, defense policy expert Jennifer Kavanagh just published an op-ed headlined "Blockades Don't Work the Way Trump Thinks," laying out that Iran has more at stake here than Trump does, and that it has a much higher tolerance for pain than Trump does, such that it's got the upper hand and then some in a siege/blockade situation.

This week alone, Trump has said there would be no extension on the ceasefire, has then extended the ceasefire, has bloviated about bombing Iran back to the stone age, and has said he's happy to wait for however long it takes to bring Iran to its knees. So, taking note of what he has to say about the Iran War on any given day is a waste of time, since his message will almost surely be different within 24 hours.

On the other hand, Trump's actions do afford some amount of insight. And yesterday, Trump fired Secretary of the Navy John Phelan. In contrast to the various high-ranking generals that Hegseth has fired, the Secretary of the Navy is a civilian, Senate-confirmed post, and so Trump had to approve the axe being swung.

Phelan was plenty Trumpy; he did not get his job because he was qualified, he got it because he donated lots of money to Trump's campaign, super PACs and inaugural fund. The reason he got fired was that, like "AG" Pam Bondi, he proved unable to do the impossible. In Phelan's case, the impossible was delivering the supposed Trump-class battleships by 2028. We write "supposed," because we are not sure they will ever be built, inasmuch as battleships are obsolete, or nearly so. If they somehow ARE built, it will be well after 2028, and Trump's name will not be on them.

But the real point here is that you don't fire high-level leadership in the middle of a war, unless the war is not going well. It's not being reported, but it's not hard to imagine that there were other points of tension between Phelan and the White House, like "This blockade is going to take a while to get in place" or "Blockades work very slowly, Mr. President," or "We don't have a great way to deal with Iranian drones or mines, right now."

Phelan will be replaced by Undersecretary of the Navy Hung Cao. The good news is that Cao has 25 years' experience serving in the Navy, as compared to the 0 years Phelan had. The bad news is that Cao, who ran for both the House and the Senate in Virginia, is nuttier than a fruitcake. One of his signature issues, as a politician at least, was that the U.S. is being overtaken by paganism, and that Christians need to fight back—violently, if needed. Presumably, Cao will not actually be able to act on that, even from his new, high posting. But you never know; after all, no one expects the Spanish Inquisition. The one thing we do know is that Cao might be more willing to polish Trump's apples than Phelan was, but he is not going to be able to deliver a new battleship by 2028. So, if he's smart, Cao won't sign any long-term leases on his residence in Washington. (Z)