He Warned It Would Show Weakness
Now Trump says his war with Iran is a success.
“Our president will start a war with Iran because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate. He’s weak and he’s ineffective.”
—Donald Trump, in a video post, Nov. 16, 2011
Consistency has never been Donald Trump’s strong suit, but this artifact from 2011 — dug up through Sourcebase.ai, a company I am affiliated with — exemplifies how Trump has no self-awareness.
This is the pattern: Trump warned years ago that starting a war with Iran would signal weakness. He did it anyway. And now he’s trying to redefine the outcome as success.
With the Iranian regime degraded but still surviving, Trump claims he’s negotiating an end to the war — recasting the outcome even as few of his stated war aims have been achieved. Wall Street seems to believe any scrap of positive news, but I doubt this negotiation will end much better than the talks before the war. Even an immediate end to the fighting will not mitigate the long-term damage to the world economy.
One month into the war with Iran, it’s clear how poorly the Trump team handled the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
That failure wasn’t inevitable. It was built into how Trump approached the talks.
Shortly after Trump launched the war, I wrote that “Trump pretended that he was engaged in negotiations with Iran. But that was just Kabuki theater. Trump was never serious about talks with Iran.”
As part of my evidence, I pointed to his negotiators — Steve Witkoff, a real estate developer, and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law. Neither were professional diplomats, and they had little expertise in Iran or nuclear issues. If you wanted to prevent a war, you’d send the A-team.
Since then we’ve learned how badly they bungled the job. Reporters such as Patrick Wintour of The Guardian have revealed that Iran made a substantive offer — but Trump’s negotiators were so clueless they didn’t understand the importance of the concessions.
Badr Albusaidi, Oman’s foreign minister and the intermediary between Iran and the United States, flew to Washington in a last-ditch effort to stop the war. Oman was convinced “that Witkoff and Kushner, either knowingly or through ignorance, were not feeding Trump the truth about the progress in the talks,” Wintour wrote.
Albusaidi suggested the Trump administration was pushed into the war by Israel. “It was a shock but not a surprise when on February 28 — just a few hours after the latest and most substantive talks—Israel and America again launched an unlawful military strike against the peace that had briefly appeared really possible,” he wrote in The Economist. He added that “the American administration’s greatest miscalculation, of course, was allowing itself to be drawn into this war in the first place.”
Trump started the war without enlisting allies, part of the basic prep work before any military engagement. Now he’s surprised — even enraged — that European nations appear unwilling to help him emerge from the morass. Energy prices have soared as the Iran has limited tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and attacked the infrastructure of its neighbors. That isolation is now part of the cost — and another constraint on how he can claim success.
While the new talks supposedly to end the war are opaque — and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi on Tuesday suggested there is not much to them — Trump has already declared that he’s achieved key goals, such preventing Iran from having a nuclear weapon: “They will have no nuclear weapons and that goal has been attained,” he said Tuesday.
This is, of course, ridiculous. Iran still has almost 1,000 pounds of highly enriched nuclear weapons, enough for at least ten bombs. If Witkoff and Kushner hadn’t dropped the ball, Iran in February appeared prepared to give that stash up. Many analysts believe that the war will only convince the hardliners to double down on a nuclear breakout.
Trump also asserted that another important goal was achieved: regime change.
“We’ve had regime change… because… the one regime was decimated, destroyed… [and]… we’re dealing with different people,” Trump told reporters on March 29. “It’s a whole different group of people. So I would consider that regime change.”
It’s a striking claim — and a telling one. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in the opening hours of the attack, and he’s been replaced by his son, who lost his family and said to be more hard line. Unable to point to a clear strategic outcome, Trump is redefining the objective after the fact.
Indeed, Secretary of State Marco Rubio took a different view the next day, telling ABC: “The people who lead them, this clerical regime, that is the problem. And if there are new people now in charge who have a more reasonable vision of the future, that would be good news for us, for them, for the entire world. But we also have to be prepared for the possibility, maybe even the probability, that that is not the case.”
Of course, it was only last June when Trump said he didn’t want regime change in Iran. “Regime change takes chaos and, ideally, we don’t want to see so much chaos,” he said. And ten years ago, in 2016, he declared at a campaign rally: “We’re going to stop the reckless and costly policy of regime change overseas.”
There’s that pattern again. The war Trump once called a sign of weakness will now, in his telling, be a victory. When he addresses the nation tonight, caveat emptor.
Witkoff is a known incompetent. He was also negotiating with Russia about Ukraine (who was not invited). He returned with a list of points that appeared to have by the Russians (and gave them what they wanted).
I appreciate that you included the statement from the Omani foreign minister, because as one of the men “in the room where it happened” he was able to tell the world that Iran was negotiating in good faith, and it was the ignorance and hubris of Witkoff , Kushner, and Trump that landed us in this war. Seems to me that it was the ignorance and hubris of Trump that tore up the JCPOA that had been negotiated in 2015. It is obvious now that ignorance and hubris don’t do much for the United States of America or the world.