Trump, Sensing that He Can't Win In Iran, May Be Looking for an Exit Strategy
There is a scenario in which he can end the war and spin it as a victory
[1, 751 words, a seven-minute read.]
It’s Clear Trump Wants Out
Donald Trump, according to yesterday’s Guardian, apparently instructed Steve Witkoff, who has been his Middle East envoy and representative (along with the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner) to the Geneva nuclear talks with Iran to put out feelers to the Iranian leadership about ending the war. And in recent statements, Witkoff, while he has praised Trump’s strength and raised questions about whether talks would succeed, has not reiterated Trump’s demands for “unconditional surrender” and claims that Iran’s regime was near death. Instead, Witkoff said yesterday that “the president is always willing to talk.”
Plus, Trump himself stated yesterday that he’s “not happy” with Iran’s leaders but that talks remain possible. (He added that Tehran wants to talk, but, in public at least, Iran’s top officials have repeatedly rejected that option.) That’s a big change, even though Trump said some version of the same thing as early as the day after launching the war—but thereafter stuck to his hard line.
More importantly, yesterday, Trump, in effect, blamed Witkoff and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth—even Kushner—for telling him that he had to attack Iran first or that Iran would attack the US. He implied that Secretary of State and National Security Adviser, Marco Rubio, had said that as well. He lent credence to this bizarre claim by saying that he was “100%” certain that Iran would have struck the US first had he not beaten it to the punch.
The president is looking for scapegoats.
Trump Erred in Thinking that US Superiority in Raw Power Ensured Victory
We’re not even two weeks into this war and the US is already using up its stocks of expensive missile interceptors rapidly. Iran not only appears to have plenty of drones left, the Patriot—which cost $4 million-plus— is 50-150 times as expensive as an Iranian drone, depending on the drone’s model. Iran is no doubt getting hit hard by the US and Israel, but Iran has fired ballistic missile barrages at Israel and some have penetrated Israel’s superb air and missile defenses and created damage.
The United States has not, of course, been defeated militarily by Iran. No one believed that was possible, certainly not Iran’s leaders. Trump’s mistake was to assume that the power to kill more people and destroy more things than the adversary would be decisive. (The same mistake was made by the US in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, as well as by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and Russia in Ukraine.) But the use of military power is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Trump has failed to use his advantage in raw power to achieve any political outcome that can reasonably be defined as success. He has been unable to topple the regime by decapitating it: dead leaders were replaced and the Islamic Republic institutions proved sturdy and did not crumble. Nor were there any defections from the army, the IRGC, or the intelligence services. There was no Iranian Maduro or Delcy Rodriguez.
Israel had plans for Reza Pahlavi, the former Shah’s son, taking power but, to use a football metaphor, having not set foot in Iran since 1987, he had no “ground game.” And it did not help that Reza lamented the loss of a few American soldiers while saying nothing about the 1,200 or more Iranians, including 80 or more school children, who were killed by US-Israeli airstrikes. Trump tried to make that happen by insisting, after Khamenei’s death, that he would have a say in who the next Supreme Leader would be, but no serious Iranian thought that possible and the demand made Iranians wonder whether Trump knew what he was doing or understood anything about Iran.
Trump Bet on Regime Change and Lost: Regime change has never been achieved by airpower alone; it must be supplemented by opposition on the ground. The state and the ruling elite must be besieged by a nationwide uprising or an armed insurgency, perhaps both. Neither proved feasible. Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on Iranians to rise up against the regime. But their appeals fell flat—save for the momentary glee expressed in some cities after Khamenei’s assassination. The lack of an uprising wasn’t surprising: Trump betrayed Iranian protesters in January; they were not about to let him do so a second time and risk being slaughtered by the regime, which this time would be even more vicious because it was fighting for survival. Besides, once the US and Israel bombing campaign ramped up, Iranians had survival on their mind, not running out into the street to protest and risk being killed by US and Israeli airstrikes.
US and Israeli efforts to organize the Kurds (of Iran and Iraq and Syria) went nowhere. They, too, recall past American betrayals. Moreover, in shifting from the goal of “regime change” to an apparent effort to break up Iran, Trump discounted the power of Iranian nationalism. The regime is deeply unpopular, but even the many Iranians who despise it don’t want to see the fragmentation of their country.
Had the Kurds served as ground troops in America’s regime change gambit, Iran’s Arabs, Baloch, and even the Azeris (who account for about a fifth of Iran’s population and are well integrated into Persian society: Khamenei was half Azeri, as is President Pezeshkian) might have had to make their own calculations. As an American-Israeli expert on the Middle East wrote in the Times of Israel on the day before the war: “If Kurdish groups align with Baloch insurgents, if Arab unrest coincides with Azeri mobilization, the regime no longer faces protests—it faces converging fronts.”
Iran’s Leaders, Unlike Trump, Did Have a Strategy
They knew that to win (in the sense that I’ve defined victory) they just needed to survive—that is, to prevent state institutions from crumbling and insurgencies and uprisings from emerging. The Islamic regime proved to have institutions that were strong and deeply-rooted enough to remain standing; and the army and security service stood by the regime.
The other part of Tehran’s strategy was to prevent the war from being confined to a contest between Iran on the one hand and Israel and the US on the other. Iran’s leaders immediately widened the war by striking Washington’s Gulf Arab allies to ensure that they would feel the pain and press the US to consider a ceasefire.
More importantly, Iran struck Persian Gulf refineries, ports, and other energy infrastructure. Iran’s widening of the war also brought traffic in and out of the Gulf to a halt. Before long, the price of oil, LNG, diesel, and urea (essential for making fertilizer) skyrocketed. With inflation lurking, Trump’s dream of the Fed lowering interest rates evaporated. It did not take long for Americans to experience the pain. Trump doesn’t care about Iran’s future, but he does care about his and knows that if the Democrats win the midterm elections, his political future will be perilous. His problem is that the longer the war lasts, the worse the economic fallout will be—not just for the US but also Europe and Asia, where the US has important allies.
So Trump’s biggest advantage—superior firepower—became, in this sense, a disadvantage. The harder he and Israel hit Iran, the more likely that oil and LNG would be blocked from being exported through the Strait of Hormuz to world markets. In short, Iran’s leaders knew how to exploit Trump’s vulnerabilities to the maximum.
Trump Misjudged Iranian Nationalism: The Islamic Republic government wouldn’t win a popularity contest in Iran, but by making Tehran all but uninhabitable—the air so saturated with soot that it became hard to breathe, prices skyrocketed and basic goods became all but impossible to find—Trump’s war began to look like a war on all Iranians, not just their government. That helped the regime, as may have the fact that some American commanders—as well as, apparently Senator Lindsey Graham—framed Trump’s military campaign “a religious war.”
Where Are We Now? Trump is looking for an exit. The Guardian reported on Tuesday, that Steve Witkoff—presumably authorized by the president—approached the Iranian government about discussing a ceasefire (only to be spurned). And in an extraordinary statement, Trump said that Witkoff, Rubio, and even son-in-law Kushner, led him to believe that unless he attacked first Iran would attack the US—a preposterous claim, but one Trump’s base could be induced to believe.
In short, Trump is already seeking scapegoats.
Can Exit Trump Exit By Trump Spinning Defeat as Victory? In theory, yes. Imagine a press conference in which Trump, using slides, puts on display the massive damage he has done to Iran, boasts about destroying much of its ballistic missile arsenal and its entire navy and hitting Iranian nuclear enrichment sites even harder. He then declares that the US military has demonstrated, yet again, that, under his leadership, it’s the world’s best. He ends by saying that Iran has been reduced to a shadow of itself and will never again threaten the US or “our ally, Israel.” He can, in this way, end the war and claim success. That will lower the price of oil, natural gas, fertilizer, and diesel (70% of all cargo in the US is hauled by diesel-burning trucks) and avert a big increase in inflation and interest rates—all in time for the midterms.
Iran continues to rule out negotiations with the US, but it might help Trump’s exit plan work if it concludes that, despite its mistrust of the US, it stands little to gain by continuing the war and absorbing even more punishment. The unknown? What will its terms for a deal be, and can Trump agree to them without looking like he was forced to end the war and make concessions to Iran that he had ruled out?
Netanyahu May Have the Most to Lose: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may come out of this looking worse than Trump. Netanyahu has dreamed for years about toppling the Islamic Republic. He may have played a role in convincing Trump that the Islamic Republic could be brought down and that he, Trump, was the only American president with the guts to do it. Trump excels at the strongman act, but he is vain and can easily be flattered. Once he was persuaded to go to war, no member of Trump 2.0 (unlike 1.0, filled with toadies and flatterers) could dare say, “Mr. President, don’t do this.” So it won’t be just Witkoff, Rubio, and Kushner whom Trump tosses under the bus; Netanyahu, too, might suffer that fate—if not in public, then in private. Trump neither forgets nor forgives.