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IRAN FOUND TRUMP’S BONE SPUR

BY BRET STEPHENS
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Iran’s military leaders have greeted the cease-fire agreement with
President Trump as a triumph, crowing
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that “through the imposition of their divine and iron will” they
had “humiliated American and Zionist enemies.”

Mostly, they’re right.

Mostly, because it’s worth remembering that the current regime in
Iran is far less formidable than it was before the Hamas assault on
Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Back then, Iran had potent allies and proxies
in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and Yemen. Its nuclear program was intact and
steadily accumulating ever larger quantities of highly enriched
uranium. It had a powerful military-industrial base, a weak but
functional economy and a government that — for all its
repressiveness — was internationally recognized as legitimate.

Today, much of that is either gone or diminished. Iran is no longer
within sprinting distance
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of a bomb. Its ally in Syria was deposed. Hezbollah, Hamas and the
Houthis have lost much of their fighting strength. The Iranian rial is
the world’s most worthless currency. The leadership rules an unhappy
population that — outside of die-hard loyalists — would almost
certainly overthrow it if given the chance. Its latest ballistic
missile salvo against Israel failed to land a serious single blow. Its
blockade of the Strait of Hormuz strained, but did not strangle, the
world’s energy markets.

Those are real achievements against an evil, ambitious regime. Yet the
outcome of war rarely rests on a tally of relative strength. War is a
contest of wills. And in that contest, the hard men of Tehran appear
to have scored a decisive victory over the vain man of Washington.

I write this as someone who supported the war from the outset and
hoped to see Trump carry it through to a decisive result: if not
regime change, then at least a deal in which Iran would be forced to
relinquish all of its enrichment capabilities and access to the Strait
was unfettered. Those goals were well within the president’s reach,
particularly if he had continued to attack Iran’s
military-industrial infrastructure until it agreed to terms, rather
than conducting most of the negotiations after the fighting had mostly
stopped.

But Trump got spooked after the regime didn’t instantly crumble and
energy prices shot up. He then effectively abandoned the war he had
started after less than six weeks of sustained combat — combat in
which the United States lost fewer service members than in the 1983
invasion of Grenada
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He compounded the error with an almost comical succession of military
threats and last-minute climb-downs, each of them signaling indecision
and weakness to Iranian adversaries practiced in the study of
weakness.

Tehran took the measure of Trump’s courage. What it found was a bone
spur.

All this may seem odd for a president who once loudly complained that
the United States hadn’t “fought to win
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a war since 1945, who demanded “unconditional surrender” from
Tehran and who had repeatedly lambasted his predecessor for the
humiliating exit from Afghanistan. Then again, it’s not odd for a
president whose very essence is betrayal of everyone and everything,
his own words not least.

Though the details of the deal remain murky — a telling indicator of
its likely shoddiness, since the administration would surely trumpet
the terms of a strong agreement — it’s already clear that Trump
has betrayed his promise to the Iranian people, after they were
massacred in January to quell antigovernment protests, that “help is
on its way
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As in Venezuela, to say nothing of China and Russia, this
administration’s message to oppressed people everywhere is that
their rights come last.

Trump is also on his way to betraying Israel, our principal ally in
this fight, by pushing Jerusalem to stand down in its effort to stop
Hezbollah’s attacks on its north, in that way handing Tehran the
victory of creating a diplomatic linkage between Lebanon and Hormuz.
If Iran is now allowed to extract some kind of service fee
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for permitting ships to transit the Strait, Trump will have also
betrayed our allies in the Persian Gulf by giving Iran financial and
strategic leverage to which it has no right, and which it didn’t
previously have.

The worst betrayal, however, is of Americans who supported the war —
not only neocons like me
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also most of Trump’s MAGA base
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— because we believed that Iran, which has waged a 47-year war
against us, posed an increasingly intolerable threat to our security
and vital interests.

This cease-fire neither ends nor eases that threat; it hardens and
magnifies it. It removes the one point of U.S. leverage over Iran —
the naval blockade of its ports — before there’s any negotiation
over its nuclear program, which the Iranians will almost surely drag
out until Trump is out of office. It reminds the world of the adage
that while it can be dangerous to be America’s enemy, it is fatal to
be its friend. And it gives Iran’s leaders something even more
vital: The confidence that, whatever Trump may threaten, they can
withstand the most any American president or Israeli prime minister
can throw at them.

There’s a word for this: debacle. Not because the war, for all its
costs or errors of execution, was a mistake. It’s because this
pretense of a peace is an act of geopolitical self-harm that will
haunt our standing in the world for years to come.

 

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