How could it be any worse? The United States has lost a war to Iran. It has made itself a global laughing stock, empowered Russia and China, and very possibly wrecked NATO. Perhaps worse still, it has shown that it has no mechanism to use against an obviously deranged president — at least, no mechanism it is willing to activate.
To measure the extent of the defeat — a defeat for the entire West — we can do no better than to recall President Donald Trump’s own commentary.
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March 11: “We’ve won. Let me tell you, we’ve won.”
March 21: “If Iran doesn’t FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT, the Strait of Hormuz, within 48 HOURS from this exact point in time, the United States of America will hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST!”
March 23: “I HAVE INSTRUCTED THE DEPARTMENT OF WAR TO POSTPONE ANY AND ALL MILITARY STRIKES AGAINST IRANIAN POWER PLANTS AND ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE FOR A FIVE DAY PERIOD.”
March 24: “We’ve won this, because this war has been won.”
March 30: “If the Hormuz Strait is not immediately ‘Open for Business,’ we will conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!)”
March 31: “I had one goal: They will have no nuclear weapon, and that goal has been attained.”
April 5: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F***in’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”
April 6: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
Read those last two posts aloud and then try to tell me that the chief executive is fully in control of his faculties. Trump has somehow succeeded in making the ayatollahs, who preside over one of the most wicked and repressive states on the planet, seem the more reasonable party. He howls like King Lear: “I shall do such things, what they are yet I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the Earth!” They respond with mocking memes.
I had hoped that Trump would pull off a second Venezuela. Restoring democracy to the Iranian people would be an unambiguous good. When the strikes began, everyone in the British intelligence world told me that the moment was wrong, that the regime would survive. I tried to give Trump the benefit of the doubt. Surely he would not have launched a war on a whim, I told myself.
It is now clear that the spooks were right. Iran had been preparing for this moment for 50 years; the U.S. blundered in — and lost. No amount of coping about the Iranian navy being degraded can hide what happened. Trump threatened hellfire if Iran did not reopen the strait. Iran ignored him. Trump backed down.
This is the American equivalent of the 1956 Suez Canal debacle, when British prestige in the Arab world was permanently lost. Except that it is worse. Suez was militarily successful: British and French forces swatted Egyptian resistance aside in Sinai. It was President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s hostility, not Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s guns, that did in the operation. By contrast, the U.S. did not secure a military victory. The Iranians have held on, handing out as much punishment as they have taken.
Incidentally, do you remember Vice President JD Vance’s leaked text about Suez? The one where he moaned that European powers ought to take responsibility for keeping the canal open, because “3 percent of US trade runs through the suez, 40 percent of European trade does”? Hmm. I wonder why Britain and France no longer have responsibility for the canal. Which country forced them out in a doomed attempt to ingratiate itself with Arab nationalists?
DAN HANNAN: LET MUSLIMS PRAY IN PUBLIC
Trump whines that NATO allies did not help. Perhaps that was because he had insulted them, done deals with Russia over their heads, and, in the cases of Denmark and Canada, threatened annexation.
How does this end? The Democrats made two premature impeachment attempts, blunting that weapon. Yet, by any definition, Trump has proved himself incapable of discharging his responsibilities. His lies beat Bill Clinton’s, his abuses beat Richard Nixon’s. He has used his public office to enrich himself. Now he has started a war and lost it. As Alexander Hamilton put it in Federalist No. 65, impeachment is the remedy for “those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.” If Trump’s recent behavior does not match that definition, what does?
