A Forever Defeat

By Abe Greenwald

Monday, June 15, 2026

 

For two decades, we’ve lamented that George W. Bush launched two wars and never quite achieved American victory in either one. I have expressed this frustration to some degree myself.

 

But as I look at the American surrender that Donald Trump is engineering in Iran, I’m not even sure why I ever entertained the thought that we lost in either Iraq or Afghanistan. Today, we are leaving the enemy regime in place with access to a new tool of global blackmail, billions of dollars, and the knowledge—I wish I could say “impression”—that the U.S. doesn’t have what it takes to stop it. 

 

It’s true that Trump didn’t get us into a “forever war”; he just got us into a lost one. This is defeat.  

 

In Iraq, the U.S. didn’t topple Saddam Hussein only to hand over the Baathist tyranny to one of his sons or Tariq Aziz when we couldn’t find any weapons of mass destruction. When the Sunni insurgency arose, we didn’t declare a cease-fire and negotiate the terms of our departure (despite many Americans hoping we would do just that). And we didn’t depose the Taliban only to leave Afghanistan once we couldn’t find Osama bin Laden.  

 

Nope. We stayed and, yes, we won. Say what you want, but Iraq is now a parliamentary democracy. And its leaders haven’t made trouble for its neighbors or the United States in decades. And before Joe Biden did give Afghanistan back to the insurgent Taliban, the country was governed, however fitfully and fragilely, by a pro-American technocratic reformer. 

 

I know that the promotion of human rights is now for sissies, but the U.S. also facilitated miraculous progress in alleviating mass suffering for the people of both countries. Scoff at that if you must, but Donald Trump is the one who told the Iranian people that help was on the way. Which means he’s now notched a total defeat for them as well. 

 

You may think that the cost of victory in Iraq and Afghanistan was too high—and you may very well be right. But don’t tell me that our current surrender to the Iranian regime was worth tens of billions of taxpayer dollars (with billions more soon to come) and the lives of 15 American service members. If we wanted to tell Iran (and the world) that it finally won its near-50-year battle with the U.S., we could have done that for free. 

 

Of course, the total cost of a consequential defeat is unknowable in the moment. We don’t know what Iran will do with its forthcoming billions or the nuclear “dust” or its dug-up missiles or its demonstrated ability to close the Strait of Hormuz at will. And we don’t know what will follow the actions the regime will take. At the time of Biden’s effective surrender in Afghanistan, we didn’t know that Russia would read it as a signal to invade Ukraine six months later. And we still don’t know the ultimate cost of that war.

 

Because the price of defeat is compounded by an unpredictable series of chain reactions. The costs accrue as history continues to play out. Or, one might say, forever.