By Tom Nichols
Wednesday, June 24, 2026
Almost everything in the Trump administration seems like
an implausible pitch for a television show, containing so many oddball plot
devices and weird twists that even the most creative showrunner would veto most
of them. Wait, what? The president wants to invade Greenland? Marco Rubio is
clomping around in the wrong-size shoes? And what’s this about Bobby Kennedy
and a dead raccoon?
But nothing compares to “the Iran war” as an
off-the-rails subplot that defies comprehension: A major military operation
that began with thunderous promises of regime change in Tehran and the remaking
of the Middle East is now fizzling out with Vice President Vance gamely standing
around in Switzerland while Donald Trump proclaims that Iran needs missiles
and the new ayatollah’s emissaries demand more reparations. The whiplash is so
extreme, the outcomes so ludicrous, that no sensible screenwriter would attempt
to sell any of this as a coherent story.
Four months ago, Trump promised the people of Iran that
he was going to bomb their oppressors out of power, and that once the smoke
cleared, they could take their government from the mullahs who have ruled them
since 1979. Destroying the Iranian regime was clearly the goal from the outset,
and Trump—spurred on by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—probably
envisioned himself as the honored liberator of Persia.
At least a few people in Trump’s inner circle tried
to temper the president’s enthusiasm, but glory is a seductive drug, and Trump
decided to forge ahead. In a video
released during the first night of bombing, Trump affirmed that the regime
would never be allowed to obtain a nuclear weapon. But the final part of the
message suggested that Iran’s past transgressions and future ambitions were all
beside the point: The regime would cease to exist.
Finally, to the great, proud
people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand. Stay
sheltered. Don’t leave your home. It’s very dangerous outside. Bombs will be
dropping everywhere. When we are finished, take over your government. It will
be yours to take.
For many years, you have asked
for America’s help, but you never got it. No president was willing to do what I
am willing to do tonight. Now you have a president who is giving you what you
want, so let’s see how you respond. America is backing you with overwhelming
strength and devastating force. Now is the time to seize control of your
destiny and to unleash the prosperous and glorious future that is close within
your reach. This is the moment for action.
The regime, of course, did not fall, and soon the
administration was casting about for new goals. Trump and his aides began
cycling, as my colleagues Marie-Rose Sheinerman and Isabel Ruehl noted, through
a
“buffet” of explanations for the war, including terrorism, nukes, and even
the will of God.
Trump, for his part, started denying that regime change
was ever a goal—“I never cared about regime change,” he said
a few weeks ago—while asserting at the same time that he had, in fact, effected
a change in regime by killing a lot of top Iranian leaders. Trump has since
left even that argument behind: He is negotiating with members of the same
Iranian regime that existed four months ago, but now Trump calls
them “very rational people” who are “nice to deal with,” who are “not
radicalized,” and who are “you know, looking to help their country.”
Trump has engaged in an equally stunning abandonment of
his other ostensible war aims. For weeks, Trump claimed that Iran’s missile
capability—the arsenal that rightly worries Israel and the Gulf States—had
been, like so much else in Iran, “obliterated.” But Iran, as it turns out,
managed to save the bulk of its missile forces, along with the drones that
patrol (and menace) the Strait of Hormuz. So Trump rapidly pivoted from
obliterating missiles to rationalizing them. Iran, you see, should have missiles;
everyone else has them, after all. “I mean, they have to have some,” he said
while in France more than a week ago, “because other people have some. You
got to have some.” Besides, the president added, “missiles aren’t the problem.”
Comparing missiles with nuclear weapons, Trump said: “Missiles, they hurt a
little location, but they don’t blow up the planet.”
A little location? Where, one wonders, would count
as a little location getting hit by Iranian missiles? The Israelis didn’t have
to guess, because Trump soon abandoned another putatively important part of the
American casus belli: Iran’s support for terrorism in the region. As the United
States went to war in Iran, Israel went to war against Iran’s proxy Hezbollah,
in Lebanon. But now Hezbollah—at least according to Trump—is just an annoying “pinprick,”
and Trump thinks the Israelis need to get over it all and take a deep breath.
When Netanyahu continued to launch attacks in early June, Trump said
the prime minister “is a very difficult guy, and to be honest with you, he
should be very thankful to us for doing this.” In effect, the president of the
United States is siding with Iran and telling the Israelis that they must stop
retaliating against Hezbollah.
***
While the Americans were bringing conventional war to
Iran from the air and sea, the Iranians engaged in an asymmetrical strategy and
closed the Strait of Hormuz—something anyone paying attention knew that Iran
would do except Trump and his secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth. Not only had
Iran’s regime stayed intact; it was now wrapping its hands around the throat of
the global economy. Trump accordingly added a new war aim, declaring that
America would force the strait back open for all to use, with no tolls or fees
or anything else going to the wicked regime in Tehran. The strait, Trump said—which
of course was toll-free before the war—would be “permanently toll-free.”
Not so fast. A few days ago, Iran and Oman announced
that they would form a working group on “the future administration of
navigation in the Strait of Hormuz and the services that will be provided in
this regard and the costs associated with them in accordance with international
standards.” The Omanis are still sticking to Trump’s line that passage will be
free, but the Iranians are effectively asserting ownership of the strait—a
level of control over the waterway they didn’t have four months ago—and Trump
doesn’t seem to know or care that any of this is happening.
So much, as well, for the idea that the Iranian regime
could be kept in its cage by bombing it into poverty. At the outset of the war,
Trump and his lieutenants crowed that Iran was being “obliterated,”
“decimated,” and other words from a thesaurus that did not reflect the
situation on the ground. And although Iran has sustained major damage to its
military and general infrastructure, it’s about to get a huge cash infusion to
help it make a comeback.
Trump has now swallowed the condition that Iran will get
some $300
billion, with a b, in investment as part of a
reconstruction program. The money will not come directly from America—thank
heaven for small favors—but the Iranians have tacked on the proviso that what
they do with the money is up to them and that the Americans can go and mind
their own business.
Again, to be clear: A war that was launched to destroy a
terror-supporting theocratic dictatorship is ending with the president meekly
nodding at a regional plan to rebuild that terror-supporting theocratic
dictatorship with billions of dollars that no one but the mullahs and the
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps will control.
When pushed about all this, Trump resorts to the nonsense
claim that the Iranians were “two weeks” from developing a nuclear weapon. They
were not. Neither
Trump nor anyone else presented evidence that Iran was creating a nuclear
device; “two
weeks” is a standard Trumpian timeline for almost anything.
Still, let us accept that Iran was somehow closer to a
bomb than America could tolerate. Supposedly, this program was destroyed
(again, in Trump’s favorite word, “obliterated”) last summer. Weeks ago, Trump
demanded that all of the “nuclear dust”—his weird term for fissile material—be
handed over to the United States. He even considered
an operation to go into Iran and get it, a disastrously stupid idea that
his advisers, for once, talked him out of pursuing. Now, however, Trump doesn’t
care: He’s basically willing to accept something like President Obama’s Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action (the so-called Iran nuclear deal). But at least
international inspectors will go back into Iran to verify the location and
status of Iran’s nuclear stockpile.
Or maybe not. The Iranians are already balking at
the idea of inspectors, while remaining open to talking about
inspections. In other words, Trump—who pulled America out of the JCPOA—is now
poised to sign on to a far worse incarnation of the same deal while other
nations pay much more money to Iran than Obama’s deal ever conceived.
***
War, as the great Prussian military theorist Carl von
Clausewitz once wrote, is an act of violence to compel the enemy to do our
will. The Iranians are the ones imposing their will on us, suggesting that Iran
has won this war; Trump is accepting terms from the victor. The question
remains why he would so quickly abandon the maximal aims he committed himself
to at the outset of the conflict.
The answer is that Trump is utterly transactional, and
displays no guiding principles beyond his own self-interest. Just as Trump
jettisons friends and allies if they become an annoyance or a burden (often
with a declaration that he never liked them anyway), the president also dumps
policies and initiatives for much the same reason. If something looks like it
will benefit him in some way—glory, adulation, money—he’ll do it. And if a
scheme goes badly, he will do anything to get out of it, regardless of the costs
to others.
Trump’s shallowness means that the United States has no
actual foreign policy. The American nation—with all of its considerable
economic and military resources—is now like a massive robot that has had its
programming deleted and its memory wiped. Trump, the new owner who did not
bother to read the instructions, twiddles the knobs of its remote control,
spinning dials and jabbing at buttons while the gigantic and powerful United
States of America lumbers about, walking in circles, bumping into walls, and
smashing things, without direction or purpose.
Trump does not think he surrendered, because surrendering
means abandoning important beliefs. He has none. For Trump, capitulation to
Iran is just another deal. For the rest of us, it will be something a lot more
dangerous.
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