An American surrender

Trump's climbdown points to a changing world

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A few weeks ago, Donald Trump was calling for the “complete and unconditional surrender” of Iran. Last night, he touted as a “workable basis on which to negotiate” an Iranian proposal that would instead amount to an American surrender. In the meantime, he has accepted Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz, and allowed Tehran to set the terms of passage for ships through one of the world’s key economic arteries. He now must negotiate, from a position of obvious weakness, to reopen the strait - and that’s before we even get to the issues on which this war was originally based.

The significance of this moment cannot be overstated.

For many weeks, the U.S. and Israel have pounded Iran and threatened it with worse. Iran’s military has been damaged, but in the process its national power and influence have grown. It has demonstrated that it holds the economic equivalent of a nuclear bomb, in fact something even more potent - the ability to unilaterally plunge the world into economic chaos and probable depression. The United States and Israel lack the ability to counter this control militarily at what they consider an acceptable cost. We knew that already, and Trump showed it again last night.

At the same time, American power and influence have been shrinking before our eyes. The country that too often thinks that bombing can solve problems, and that planning is for wimps, has bombed its way into a problem that it did not plan for and now can not solve. Trump has agreed to negotiate over something previously unthinkable - that the “Iranian terror regime” will maintain its vice-like grip on the world economy. He blinked, and in doing so he showed the limits of American power. The war, if it ends on anything like the terms now under discussion, is a Vietnam-level catastrophe.

Could it end like this? It might. Trump has made it clear that he thinks the Strait of Hormuz is somebody else’s problem, and he presumably is going to be less susceptible to being manipulated by Benjamin Netanyahu after the sobering experience of the last month. Trump could say he doesn’t care if Europeans and Asians end up with more expensive oil because they have to pay Iranian transit fees through the strait. He could just wave his wand at the MAGA base and claim that the nuclear issue, the proxy issue, and all these other things have really been solved, regardless of what they see on the news. What are they going to do, say “please sir, go back and finish the job, we want another Middle Eastern war?”

That’s one possibility. Another is that this ends up just being a brief pause. The Iranian and American positions are so far apart that it seems impossible to bridge them. The narrative that Trump lost and that he is a loser is going to set in and irk him. Even Barack Obama and his hated “Iran deal” managed to get Tehran to hand over its enriched uranium. Maybe, at the end of the day, what we’re witnessing now is just all theatrics designed to buy time for more Marines to arrive in the region. Maybe Israel won’t stop attacking Hezbollah, and Iran won’t stop bombing the Gulf, and the whole thing will collapse tomorrow.

But even if this is just a way-station on the way to something else, it’s still one that gives us a panoramic view - a view of a declining America, facing limits to what its power can accomplish abroad and a broken political system which allows this insanity to continue; of a new order in the Middle East, one in which Iran is even more powerful than before, and in more ways that matter to the rest of us; and of a shocked world, agog at the whole spectacle and convinced that the old order is dying and a new, more frightening one is being born.

What comes next? Onwards and upwards.