Trump Is Winning a War in His Head
Donald Trump announced yesterday that the people leaking information about depleted American munitions are "being hunted down." Treasonous statements, he called them. Long prison sentences for whoever is responsible.
This would be more impressive if the depletion of American munitions had been a secret. It wasn't. The Washington Post reported on March 4, less than a week after Operation Epic Fury began, that the Pentagon was already burning through thousands of expensive precision weapons and air-defense interceptors at an alarming rate. Two days of fighting cost an estimated $5.6 billion in munitions. By April, the Center for Strategic and International Studies was publicly estimating huge reductions in Patriot, THAAD, Tomahawk, and other inventories. I wrote about the depleted American magazine on June 1. Now it's August, and Trump is hunting the leakers. Apparently somebody just told him.
I blogged about this June 1. So everybody knew this already Donald. Jesus man, wake up. You fired too many toys, Settle down.
I don't know what Donald Trump knows from one moment to the next. Neither does anyone else. He receives military briefings. He's been told about munitions expenditures. Vance and General Dan Caine have reportedly discussed the problem with him directly. Trump himself now admits some American weapons are running low while insisting we have almost unlimited supplies of others. Defense contractors are expanding production. The administration wants tens of billions of dollars to replenish the stockpiles. So what is Trump actually going after? The truth?
Trump does not seem capable of prioritizing the realities in front of him. Everything becomes enormously important the moment it enters his field of attention, then something else enters and becomes enormously important instead. The problem yesterday was not that the United States has depleted a significant percentage of difficult-to-replace weapons in a five-month war with Iran. The problem was somebody said so.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump says the war will end "pretty soon." Again. I've heard some version of that for five months. We already won this war, remember? Iran was "obliterated." Victory was "total and complete." Trump encouraged the Iranian people to take back their government. The Strait of Hormuz would "open itself." Then none of those things happened.
Iran certainly got its ass kicked. That has never been in doubt. Israel decapitated virtually the entire upper leadership of the Islamic Republic and devastated much of Iran's nuclear infrastructure. The United States destroyed the Iranian Navy, bombed thousands of targets, eliminated air defenses, command centers, missile installations, drone facilities, radars, coastal infrastructure, and almost anything else it wanted to destroy.
The people did not take back their government. The IRGC did. They filled the enormous vacuum because somebody had to. Ali Khamenei was dead. Much of the government was dead. The command structure had been shattered. Mojtaba Khamenei, apparently wounded in the original attack, became Supreme Leader and then almost vanished from physical existence. He still hasn't appeared publicly. Iran has a Supreme Leader nobody sees. The IRGC has guns. Guess which one became more important.
The war stimulated exactly the kind of institutional consolidation I worried about when it began. The Guard didn't need to overthrow the Iranian government. Epic Fury removed much of what stood above it, and the IRGC simply survived, spectacularly badly from a military perspective. Its navy was obliterated. Missile launchers were destroyed. Commanders were killed. Radars vanished. Air-defense systems were wiped away. And the organization itself became more important, because almost everything around it became less important. Trump talked about Iranians taking back their government. His war may have helped the IRGC take over theirs.
I covered the stupidity of the IRGC's present strategy in my last post. It's already proven it can choke the Strait of Hormuz. It keeps reproving the point by hitting ships. Every new attack damages the Iranian economy, keeps Iranian ports dysfunctional, alienates neighboring governments, raises internal pressure, and gives the United States another excuse to pulverize something. The IRGC lives in its own reality too. Every surviving missile proves resistance works. Every frightened tanker proves Iran controls Hormuz. Every American pause proves the United States lacks resolve. Every bombing campaign it survives becomes another victory, simply because there are still Guards around afterward. Myopic. Also working. The Strait remains choked.
On July 23 oil moved back above $100 after renewed Houthi attacks on Saudi shipping and continued Iranian pressure in Hormuz. Iranian Guards announced again that no tanker would move without coordination with Iran. Trump promised "major military punishment." More things were blown up. The Strait remained choked. Iran then rejected Oman's proposal for regional management of the corridor, a deal that would have given Iran influence, participation, maybe revenue, but folded the Strait into a wider regional arrangement. The IRGC apparently wants more. Of course it does. Why negotiate away something you believe you've already won?
Then came another round of Trump negotiations that seemed to exist mainly for Donald Trump. On August 3 Trump said talks with Iran were happening "right now," called it Iran's "last chance," and said the discussions were taking place at the request of Iran and several Gulf countries. Iran said there were no talks. Not stalled. Not difficult. None. The only negotiations underway were with Oman, over temporary passage through Hormuz. Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi wasn't even available for American negotiations, because he was on a religious pilgrimage in Iraq. Trump kept talking about negotiations anyway.
We've been here before. The famous twenty-one hours in Pakistan back in April got treated like some great diplomatic effort. Twenty-one consecutive hours to resolve a war, nuclear enrichment, sanctions, missiles, Hormuz, oil, regional proxies, and the political future of Iran. Sure. The 2015 nuclear agreement took years. Twenty-one hours in Islamabad was a stage show. Both sides could say they negotiated. Everybody could get on a plane afterward. Nothing fundamental got solved.
Five months later Oman is doing most of the actual work. The latest proposal is revealing: Iran wants control over ships entering the Gulf and some ability to monitor or interfere with outbound traffic, plus fees worth 5 to 7 percent of cargo value. Oman has floated something closer to 3 percent. The United States opposes tolls altogether. Shipping companies say the arrangement may not even be workable, because the Iranian authority collecting the money is under American sanctions and insurers can withdraw coverage from vessels making prohibited payments. Wonderful. We may be negotiating a shipping agreement ships can't use.
Meanwhile, actual shipping through Hormuz is getting worse. Only 33 vessels crossed from Monday through Thursday this week, down from 50 the week before. Only four crossed Thursday. Before this war something like 130 vessels would have crossed in a comparable stretch. Iraqi oil is being offered at enormous discounts and shipowners still don't want to go get it. There's your status quo.
Iran cannot defeat the United States militarily. The United States blows the shit out of Iran at will. Iran has no functioning conventional navy capable of challenging the United States, and American aircraft can operate over Iranian territory with little opposition. And Hormuz remains choked. They hit an oil tanker. We hit twenty things. They hit another tanker. We hit twenty more. They demonstrate they can threaten Hormuz. We destroy another collection of military targets. And so on...
Hormuz remains choked. This has basically been the war since Epic Fury supposedly ended: the United States keeps proving something everyone already knows, that we can destroy Iran, and the IRGC keeps proving something everyone already knows, that it can make Hormuz unsafe. Neither demonstration solves the other one.
University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape recently called this "the most wicked escalation trap in history." A little dramatic, but his central point is right: the United States has been tactically successful while failing to achieve its strategic objectives. Pape put it plainly: "President Trump is already seeing the limits of air power." He's also seeing the limits of naval power.
That leaves the thing Trump doesn't want to discuss because the American people don't want it. Ground power for another “limited” ground war in the Middle East. Even a lot of MAGA voters don't want this war. (Which is all the more reason for liberals not to see this as their strength, it isn’t.)
Trump certainly doesn't want tens of thousands of Americans committed indefinitely to Iran while Republicans are trying to win the midterms. But if you refuse to accept Iranian control over Hormuz, and bombing doesn't force the IRGC to surrender that control, eventually you arrive at the question nobody wanted to ask when this began. Who physically takes it away from them? There are islands. There's coastline. There are ports, missile positions, surveillance sites, and people controlling all of that geography. Someone has to occupy something if the point is to make Iranian denial physically impossible rather than merely expensive.
Trump has never explained how that happens. He's never really explained how anything happens. Trump has no plan. He states conclusions. Iran is defeated. The nuclear program is obliterated. The people can take their country back. The Strait will open itself. Negotiations are going very well. The war will end soon. A mind that thinks in absolutes, with no coordinated effort behind any of them.
We are losing this war because we cannot make a navyless country, already bombed into submission, submit to opening a few miles of water to the rest of the world.
A strategy prioritizes. First we do this. Then this. If this fails, we do this instead. We preserve this amount of ammunition because China is the larger strategic threat. We accept this temporary compromise because opening Hormuz matters more than humiliating Iran. We destroy these targets because doing so produces this political result. We withdraw when these conditions exist. I have searched for Trump saying anything like that during this war. I can't find it. Trump has no priorities. Bomb them more. That's all folks.
The military has priorities, of course. Attack missile sites. Suppress air defenses. Destroy naval capability. Protect American bases. Maintain air superiority. Those are military tasks. What's the political task? Opening Hormuz? Destroying what's left of the nuclear program? Removing the IRGC? Protecting Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states? Preserving munitions for China? Ending Iranian proxy attacks? Getting oil prices down? Bringing forces home? Stopping Iran from charging tolls? Getting some kind of Iranian government to sign something? Trump has never established a hierarchy among these things, because I don't think he possesses one.
Whatever's directly in front of him becomes the priority. Iran won't give us what we want in nuclear negotiations? Netanyahu had wanted this attack for years, Trump finally gave him the green light, and the attack itself was magnificent. Within days Trump was declaring victory and talking about Iranians taking back their government. The IRGC filled the vacuum instead. Hormuz closed. Threaten power plants. Threaten bridges. Threaten annihilation. Announce talks. Cancel them. Iran says there are no talks. Announce more talks. The IRGC hits another ship. Now American ammunition stocks are seriously depleted. Find the leakers.
This is Trump's reality. The IRGC has one of its own. The Guards believe survival equals victory. Their military power has been devastated, but they still hold the one piece of geography the entire world needs, and they're using it repeatedly, perhaps stupidly, because every use reinforces the belief that it's working. Trump believes destruction equals victory. If the United States has destroyed Iran's military, Iran has lost. If Iran has lost, the Strait should open. If the Strait doesn't open, Iran needs to be hit harder. Each side keeps producing evidence for itself. The IRGC fires something and says: see, we're still here. Trump blows twenty things up and says: see, we destroyed them.
The Strait does not give a shit.
This could last a while. Iran is under serious pressure to get its economy moving again, and the IRGC can't indefinitely wreck its own ports and expect the country to celebrate revolutionary endurance forever. Regional pressure is building too. Saudi Arabia now says it expects coordinated attacks by Iraqi militias and the Houthis, under IRGC direction, against Saudi economic infrastructure. The Saudis, Turks, and Pakistanis are building closer defense ties. The Gulf states have had enough of being Iranian target practice. The IRGC has reasons to stop. It also has every reason to make stopping look like victory.
If I were the IRGC, I'd sign a temporary agreement. Ninety days sounds about right. Open the Strait. Stop shooting tankers. Let the ports operate, let Iranian exports move, let insurance rates start falling. Kick the toll question down the road. Give Trump his victory. He'll take it. He desperately needs an ending, and he can proclaim that Iran surrendered, that Epic Fury was one of the greatest military victories in history, that he opened Hormuz and American strength produced peace. He can start bringing forces home. Oil prices fall. Gas prices fall. The Republican campaign heads toward November with returning troops and another enormous Trump victory celebration. Everybody gets their own mythology.
Ninety days later the IRGC still has the coastline. Still has missiles, drones, boats, whatever mine capacity survived. Most important, everyone now knows what it can do. Before this war, Iran could theoretically close Hormuz. After this war, the world is negotiating what kind of Iranian role in Hormuz everyone can live with. Quite an achievement, for a country that got obliterated.
Iran has lost its senior government. Its nuclear infrastructure has been devastated. Its military has been hammered for five months. Its economy has suffered enormously. Thousands of targets have been destroyed. The United States and Israel have demonstrated military dominance at a level Iran cannot remotely match. Yet Iran may win this war.
That sentence sounds ridiculous until you define winning. If the United States eventually withdraws without eliminating the IRGC's ability to control passage through Hormuz, if Iran retains some internationally tolerated role in managing the Strait, and if the IRGC emerges as the dominant institution inside Iran, the strategic situation will be worse for the United States than it was before February 28th. The nuclear program will be weaker. Iran will be militarily weaker and poorer. And the IRGC will hold more geopolitical power. Epic Fury stimulated exactly that.
This war started because Trump didn't like the way negotiations over Iran's nuclear program were going. Iran wouldn't give him what he wanted. Netanyahu had been waiting years for the opportunity, and Trump allowed the attack because American and Israeli military power could solve the problem. Except military power solved the military problem. The political problem got bigger. Trump now needs negotiations more than he did before he started the war, except now he's negotiating around the Strait of Hormuz, oil prices, regional attacks, American stockpile depletion, sanctions, shipping insurance, Iranian tolls, the future of the IRGC, an invisible Supreme Leader, and whatever remains of the original nuclear question.
Vietnam grew out of a similar inability to distinguish military pressure from political result. Kennedy inherited something manageable and gradually made it less manageable. Johnson kept applying more force because previous force had failed to produce the expected political consequence. Bombing became an argument with itself. We could always destroy more. The question was what destroying more actually accomplished. Trump is not Johnson and Iran is not Vietnam. History doesn't repeat that neatly. But the trap looks familiar.
Pape thinks Trump will oscillate and creep toward some kind of ground operation, because eventually there's nowhere else to go. I agree. Commit ground troops or effectively lose the war. The IRGC has power in Iran now, and it'll soon have toll revenue too. Trump needs a symbolic victory badly enough that taking an island or a piece of coastline might start looking attractive. That opens another world of possibilities entirely.
Or the IRGC can give him 90 days.
I think Trump takes the 90 days, declares total and complete victory again. There will likely be an attempt at a big parade.
And the Strait still won't have opened itself.
Late Note, August 8: The situation may already have moved beyond the argument above. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has now publicly distanced itself from the apparent 90-day arrangement being negotiated with Oman. The IRGC says reopening the Strait of Hormuz does not depend upon the Oman talks at all, but upon the United States accepting Iran’s broader conditions which include (I'm serious here) not insulting Iran in public rhetoric in any way. Iran has simultaneously said that even an agreement with Oman would not, by itself, reopen the Strait.
That raises an obvious question about the Iranian negotiators. What exactly are they negotiating that the IRGC is bound to honor?
The proposed 90-day period had seemed to offer a bridge between war and a larger settlement. That bridge now looks increasingly imaginary. The Iranian diplomats may still be talking with Oman, but the institution actually controlling Iran and the Strait has effectively announced that it is operating according to another set of terms.
The negotiators have no clothes.
Unless the IRGC is brought back under the same agreement, there may be no meaningful 90-day interim period at all. There may simply be continued war, accompanied by negotiations that cannot stop it.
For decades, Iran benefited from free navigation through Hormuz. It did not need to charge the world for using the Strait; it made money because the Strait was open. Iran's economy boomed from its busy ports. The IRGC is trying to exchange that for the romance of a tollbooth.
Unless the IRGC is brought back under the same agreement, there may be no meaningful 90-day interim period at all. There may simply be continued war, accompanied by negotiations that cannot stop it.
For decades, Iran benefited from free navigation through Hormuz. It did not need to charge the world for using the Strait; it made money because the Strait was open. Its oil moved, its ports functioned, and its economy remained connected to the world. The IRGC is trying to exchange that for the romance of a tollbooth.
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