Donald Trump’s Case for War Fails to Mention How to Win It

Over the past month, Trump has repeatedly asserted that the war was about regime change, that it was about destroying the nuclear program he said he had already destroyed, and that it was about ending the threat of Iranian ballistic missiles against the US homeland, even though, according to the US Defense Intelligence Agency, Iran does not have the capacity, and will not soon do so, to threaten the US homeland with ballistic missiles. In his speech on Wednesday evening, he repeated much of this, except that he denied that regime change was ever the goal of the operation, while asserting, as in his morning social media post that same day, that regime change had in fact already occurred.

At times, Trump’s many false statements raise almost existential questions: If, as he said a few weeks ago, the Iranian military has been one hundred percent destroyed, then how can it still fire missiles, like the barrage launched at Israel on Wednesday, sending millions into bomb shelters and safe havens across the country as they prepare to begin their Passover Seders? More broadly, can everything go as planned if there is no real plan? Is a president required to articulate a clear strategy only to claim he executed it brilliantly?

You won’t be surprised to learn that Trump didn’t mention these complicated issues in his speech. However, he announced that America, in this war as in so many other things, was “winning more than ever.”

There is no doubt that Trump’s political advisers had genuinely pressing reasons for wanting him to make the points to the American people that he should have been making from the outset of the war. The latest CNN poll, released hours earlier, found that only 31 percent of Americans currently approve of his handling of the economy; his overall disapproval rating rose to sixty-four percent, which is about as bad as before. Never obtained for a president, at least since the beginning of modern polls. Before the speech, one of those “anonymous people familiar” with Trump’s White House plans and still quoted said Policy that, although it would be a difficult mission, Trump would hopefully manage to be both non-confrontational and “reassuring” in his speech.

Well, it’s hard to imagine how non-confrontational the threat to destroy every one of Iran’s power plants was. (To be clear, bombing a nation of ninety-three million people into the Stone Age would also be an international war crime, given the effect it would have on the civilian population.) As for reassurance, it took Trump eleven minutes to mention the economic disruption generated by the war. His main argument to Americans regarding skyrocketing gas prices was not to worry about them because, once hostilities ended, they would “naturally” fall at any time. I can’t be the only person who thought this sounded a lot like Trump circa 2020, when he told us the coronavirus would magically disappear.

Hours before his address to the nation, Trump outlined his plans: “Tonight I’m going to give a little speech at nine and basically I’m going to tell everyone how great I am.” For once, he wasn’t lying. When he got to the point where he congratulated himself for doing “what no other president was willing to do” by attacking Iran’s nuclear program, Trump did indeed look like a happy warrior. “They made mistakes and I’m correcting them,” he said of his predecessors in the White House. This was his main point: not how he planned to succeed in the war, but why all those who came before him failed.

The political impetus of this speech may well be as non-existent as the clarity it failed to provide on the objectives of a conflict whose stakes could not be higher. But the ego boost for a man who plans to place a giant golden statue of himself in the amphitheater of his presidential library, it was priceless. ♦