Out Of Options

Trump’s Iran humiliation is complete

The world waited anxiously — once again — for a reckless move by Trump: an overwhelming strike on Iran, possibly involving ground troops, that would upend the Middle East. The signals were there, the plane movements, embassies evacuated, Iran’s own intelligence that it was going to happen.

Then nothing.

At the eleventh hour Trump was dragged back from the brink by his own military. In a series of background briefings, the scale of the unfolding disaster was revealed. In a matter of weeks, Trump and his War/Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have burned through an entire third of US stockpiles of key munitions.

The situation is so bad that US airbases in the region have stopped intercepting all Iranian attacks. To preserve munitions, only strikes targeted at US service personnel will be blocked. Missiles and drones directed at radar, runways and other facilities would be allowed through.

The humiliation. The US can no longer defend its resources. All because Trump and Hegseth blazed through hugely expensive missiles as if they were jellybeans in a jar, without any thought of strategic results.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine warned that while a major attack was “doable” it would leave US reserves dangerously depleted, essentially saying publicly that it was up to Trump if he wanted to continue. Nothing to do with him.

At the same time the Pentagon revealed it was pausing the bombing of Iran’s military facilities which have been taking place nightly over the last two weeks. The official line was that it would leave space for negotiations to take place.

The truth was buried in the statement. The Pentagon said that they had “reached the limit of what could be achieved” by those bombing runs.

A final recognition of reality about a tactic that had failed to bring Iran to the negotiating table since the start of the war.

This has been the modus operandi of Trump’s entire campaign: after the inability to gain results from the first three days of intensive bombing, he opted to do something, anything to pretend he hadn’t been defeated, even if it didn’t work.

And now someone has taken the dice away from him when he was about to make his final roll.

He’s got nothing left. The would-be strongman has been left looking weak on the world stage.

The extent of his incompetence needs to be put into context. It’s taken years to build up the US munitions stockpiles to prepare for major unforeseen events. A war with China, say. But the supply lines for these expensive missiles are extremely constrained. It will take months running into years to build the levels back up to what existed before his Iran War fiasco.

The Trump administration typically and ludicrously tried to blame the depletion of the stockpiles on Biden for “giving missiles to Ukraine”. The truth: even before Iran, Trump and Hegseth were wasting cruise missiles firing at Islamist positions in Nigeria, to little effect, and illegally blowing up small boats off Central and South America.

The beneficiaries of Trump’s failings are China and Russia. President Xi will have been watching closely at how terribly the US has conducted the war in Iran: strategically bereft, archaic — wasting multi-million dollar missiles to take out inexpensive drones — and revealing the limits of what the US is prepared to do to win.

Trump’s incompetence has made a Chinese invasion of Taiwan more likely. The US is in no position to fight an extended war with China and if it did, as things stand it would likely lose. Xi knows that. The Pentagon knows that. And Xi knows that too. All the calculations have changed.

The only thing that might restrain China is that Trump has so thoroughly degraded America’s standing across the world, it’s allowed China to move in to unexpected areas. In Africa, the Middle East and Europe, China is seen as a more reliable partner than the US. Xi may choose not to throw away those potentially long-term advantages with an attack on Taiwan, at least for now.

Putin too will be pleased that his puppet in the White House has so weakened the US. A weak America means a weaker NATO and Putin may calculate there will be no full Article 5 response to any attack on a NATO member. If NATO doesn’t respond, the entire alliance is pointless and loses its deterrent quality.

Trump has made America significantly weaker and the world a more dangerous place.

There are repercussions on the home front too. The failed war is driving down Trump’s polling and by association that of Republicans in advance of critical Midterm elections. A new poll for CBS revealed most Americans now expect the Iran War to continue for months if not years, with the accompanying drain on resources and blow to the economy. Only 19% are optimistic about the way the war is being fought.

The global economy continues to take a hit through inflated oil prices and the rising cost of essentials. Iran’s allies, Yemen’s Houthis, have attacked Saudi ships and show they can easily control the critical Bab al-Mandab Strait into the Red Sea. A Saudi ship also hit a mine when it deviated from the specified channel in the Strait of Hormuz on Sunday July 26.

Yet tellingly oil prices have fallen since Trump’s big attack was scuppered. The markets feel that what Trump was planning was likely to be even more of a disaster than the terrible situation that now exists.

Psychologically Trump is not in a good place. When his plans were overturned, he spent several hours posting a constant stream of AI slop on Truth Social, sometimes twice a minute, a Tell that he’s exhibited before when he feels fragile.

Things have never been worse for him since he was elected. His psyche would fall apart if he had to admit defeat and retreat. He can’t be the strongman of his dreams in that situation. But there’s nothing else he can do to bring about a positive resolution.

Some have suggested he might use a tactical nuke to cow Iran. Setting aside that even that wouldn’t course-correct the religious fanatics of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, it would turn the US into a rogue state with profound economic implications for the future.

Any attack by Trump would no doubt target Qom, the Iranian religious centre, rather than economically viable Tehran which he’d see as necessary for war-profiteering. But the wind could carry radioactive fallout to allies in the region. The ecological disaster caused by the conflagration would affect the entirety of Iran, hitting oil production and setting off a devastating economic spiral.

It’s hard to see those around Trump allowing him to follow such a course, Hegseth notwithstanding.

That leaves him with nothing. He could, of course, ignore the military’s advice and go ahead with a major attack, empty the stockpiles completely, risk US lives in a ground invasion of nuclear sites. The price would be huge for little reward.

Ironically, Trump’s best hope is a massive Democratic win in the Midterms. If they seize the House and the Senate, they could force Trump to end his illegal war. And that would allow him to claim that he would have won if only for those pesky Dumocrats.

A Democratic victory may remain the world’s best hope.

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