President Trump the other day posted a heroic image of himself backed by an aircraft carrier, warplanes and American flags. In the lower left corner was former President George W. Bush and a sign, “Mission Not Accomplished 2001-2021.” In the other corner was a sign referencing himself saying “Mission Accomplished 2026.”
Except that it is not. Mr. Trump’s war in Iran, which hit the six-month mark on Friday, is anything but accomplished. Half a year in, the conflict has deteriorated into a quagmire of the president’s own making with no clear goals, no obvious strategy and no end in sight. Mr. Trump, who came to power running against Mr. Bush’s “forever wars,” has staked his presidency on his own version.
For Mr. Trump, it may be the worst of both worlds. He finds himself stuck in a maddening purgatory between full-fledged combat and genuine peace. He is reluctant to resume an all-out bombardment despite his thunderous threats, yet has been unable so far to broker an agreement to end the war on satisfactory terms. He has no victory to take credit for, yet is paying the political price in terms of the toll on the American economy and his party’s chances in the fall elections.
This sort of in-between stasis could in theory extend for a long time, a far cry from the four-to-six-week lightning strike that Mr. Trump predicted when he ordered Operation Epic Fury at the end of February. With no breakthrough in sight, both sides are testing the other’s staying power and Mr. Trump, despite a history of impatience, has made clear that he is “not in a hurry,” as he put it earlier this week.
“There’s not a lot to speak to,” he told reporters on Thursday, disavowing interest in negotiating with Iran at this point. “We don’t want to speak to them; we’re not looking to meet or anything. The strait is open; we’re taking a lot of boats — millions and millions of barrels of oil are coming out of the strait every day.”
In fact, the Strait of Hormuz remains a volatile passage with only a fraction of its prewar shipping traffic, leaving oil markets in flux. While the war killed Iran’s supreme leader, he was replaced by his son and the brutal regime in charge six months ago remains in charge today. Iran’s nuclear program has been damaged but Tehran still refuses to give it up.
“This has been a fiasco,” said Richard N. Haass, who was director of policy planning at the State Department when Mr. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003. “That’s the harsh reality. He can declare ‘mission accomplished.’ He can try to sell the argument as he often tries to, almost to create reality. But it’s going to be a hard, hard sell. There’s nothing to point to that will suggest either that we are better off or that the war was worth it.”
Supporters of the war have counseled forbearance, arguing that Mr. Trump has succeeded in substantially weakening a radical and dangerous Iran with far fewer American casualties than during Mr. Bush’s ground wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. If Mr. Trump sticks with it, they said, he may yet force Iran to back down through military force or economic pressure, making America safer in the long run.
“I know this cuts against the conventional wisdom, but I believe President Trump is winning the confrontation with the regime in Iran,” said Mark Dubowitz, chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “The Islamic Republic has never been weaker in its 47-year history. And it was forced to play its most important card — the Strait of Hormuz — from a position of extraordinary weakness.”
Mr. Dubowitz said that Iran now is left deciding whether to negotiate seriously or spend the next two years under relentless pressure. “We are not at peace, and we aren’t in major combat operations,” he said. “President Trump may instead have found the strategic sweet spot between the two: sustained coercive pressure without either a major war or an unacceptable agreement.”
However it turns out, the war in Iran has become arguably the biggest gamble of Mr. Trump’s presidency, at least in foreign policy, and a case study in how he has approached his second term differently than his first.
While his original four years in power were defined by a more inward-looking America First policy in reaction to Bush interventionism, Mr. Trump returned to the White House last year more willing to wield power overseas and seemingly more intent on reshaping the world to his liking.
His decapitation of Venezuela’s leadership, his threats to take over Greenland, the Panama Canal and Cuba, even his renaming of Lake Ontario as Lake America this week all speak to a legacy-minded president looking to leave his mark beyond U.S. borders. Any hopes that Iran would be a quick and decisive success, however, have long since been dispelled and now the main aim is how to find a way out that can be framed as a victory of some sort.
“It strikes me that Operation Epic Fury is quintessentially Trump,” said Steven A. Cook, a longtime Middle East scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It is no doubt bold, but its orchestrator is mostly careless and unprepared, prosecuting a conflict on the seat of his pants and a lot of bluster.”
Mr. Cook added: “The U.S. could win in the end, but it would only be because it is powerful despite Trump’s mistakes and the Iranians are relatively weak, not because the president pursued an effective strategy.”
Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, disagreed, saying that Mr. Trump is pursuing what he called “an anaconda Civil War strategy” that will eventually pay off.
“He’s going to squeeze them as much as he can, and as they start to pop, they will send off missiles or drones from their vestigial fleet, and he’ll hit them hard,” he said in a Daily Signal podcast this week. “And he hopes that will continue, that containment will continue to the midterms.”
Mr. Hanson added that the economic pressure on Iran could ultimately generate popular uprisings or further depress the country’s capacity. “Is that victory? I don’t know,” he said. But he added that it could stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon at a cost in lives and treasure far below Mr. Bush’s wars. “Take that versus a trillion dollars in Iraq and probably $2 trillion in Afghanistan over 20 years,” he said.
Putting aside dollars and cents, the story of Mr. Trump’s war in its first six months can be told in five numbers: Sixty-three, 12, 1.10, 18 and 759. The first measures public opposition to the war. Just 31 percent support it, while 63 percent are against it, according to the latest Ipsos survey, the kind of figures reminiscent of the darkest days of the Vietnam War.
The second reflects the number of ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz each day, averaging about 12, compared with 130 before the war. The third reflects the average price of gas in the United States, which is about $4.09 a gallon, or $1.10 higher than it was at the start of fighting.
The fourth reflects the 18 American military personnel killed so far in the war. And the fifth is the estimated number of Patriot interceptors left in U.S. arsenal, down from 2,330 to as low as 759 a month ago, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonpartisan think tank.
As for the goals that Mr. Trump outlined at the start, most remain unmet. He likes to boast that he has destroyed Iran’s air force and navy, but Tehran remains capable of firing at U.S. bases and allies in the region. The day of liberation he forecast for the Iranian people throwing off their oppressors never arrived. Iran’s ability to support proxy terrorist groups in the region has been diminished but not eliminated. And its nuclear program has been seriously damaged but the regime refuses to abandon it and could reconstitute it, according to analysts.
“President Trump has entangled the United States in a foreign policy failure of historic consequence,” Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement on Friday. “Six months later, not a single objective has been achieved. Indeed, he has weakened our position in the Middle East and the world significantly.”
Mr. Haass, who was skeptical of Mr. Bush’s plan to invade Iraq while working in his administration and later wrote a book about its failure called “War of Necessity, War of Choice,” said that paradoxically both that conflict and Mr. Trump’s have left Iran stronger.
In the case of Iraq, Iran became a dominant force inside its next-door enemy after Saddam Hussein was toppled, Mr. Haass noted, and now Iran has demonstrated its ability to roil world energy markets by choking off shipping through the strait. “Iran is the strategic beneficiary of both wars,” he said.
Mr. Trump, of course, would dispute that. In fact, he has argued time and again that he has already prevailed against Iran. “We’ve already won,” he declared on March 7, barely a week into the war. “We won everything; we have all the cards,” he said on April 25. “We’ve already won that,” he said on May 4. “I don’t know if you heard, but we ended the war with Iran today,” he said on June 11, celebrating a cease-fire that did not last.
His “Mission Accomplished” social media post this week was a play off Mr. Bush’s own ill-fated speech in front of a banner with those words aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier just weeks after the original Iraq invasion in 2003, a pronouncement that later was taken as a metaphor for premature declaration of victory. If Mr. Trump saw the irony in invoking it himself, he did not indicate it, but many others did.
“Trump is clearly wrong to say the U.S. has won,” said Brett H. McGurk, a longtime Middle East adviser for presidents of both parties, including Mr. Bush, Barack Obama, Mr. Trump in his first term and finally Joseph R. Biden Jr. “Few of its stated aims have been met. But Iran has not won either.”
Mr. McGurk, who was a key architect of Mr. Bush’s second-term military surge and strategy shift in Iraq that helped turn the war around, said that experience showed that even a president in his final two years in office can have an impact. And he noted that Mr. Trump seems more committed to seeing the Iran war through than many had presumed.
“Six months is a blip in the Middle East,” Mr. McGurk said. “This war, like many, will not have a clean endpoint. It will merely shift advantage in an ongoing contest. And it’s too early to call where average ultimately settles.”
