The U.S. and Iran have drifted back into active combat and President Trump is on Truth Social promising again to rain destruction down on the country and now more explicitly promising the outcome which triggered this conflict in the first place: the idea that Trump would duplicate in Iran what he has, kind of amazingly, pulled off so far in Venezuela. It’s a good moment to remember what’s going on here — what we’re doing here, big picture.
This war has been going on for almost four months. But most of that time has been under one or another kind of ceasefire, albeit often honored in the breach. A friend recently compared it to the so-called “Phoney War”, the eight-month period in 1939 and 1940 when Germany, France and Britain were nominally at war, though full-scale combat didn’t begin until the invasion of France in May 1940.
But this is different. And the key reason isn’t so much the dynamics of the conflict itself as the personalist rule that now defines the U.S. government under Donald Trump’s second presidency. As I’ve argued previously, the core issue here is that Trump lost this conflict either in its first hours or days. The clerical government didn’t fall, which was always a long shot at best. Iran moved to menace and then close the Strait of Hormuz. Then Trump made it clear with his actions that he was more responsive to the pain of the conflict (primarily electoral for him) than Iran was. All of that became clear at the very beginning. To put it in simple terms, he lost. Governments sometimes fall in such moments. Under less personalist regimes there are apparatuses in governments which can move toward some conclusion. But here we are operating entirely within the grievances, fears, whims and general psychodrama of a single man.
When I think about this I think about someone who makes a really bad bet on a stock which drops to 20% of its value soon after you buy it. That guy won’t ever sell because as long as he doesn’t sell he can pretend it’s just a short-term reverse. He doesn’t have to lock in the reality of the defeat. Keeping the remaining capital parked in a moribund company is the rent he pays to avoiding facing reality.
Trump’s position is just the same. We’re in this unending groundhog day quasi-war, with weekly cycles of “just-about-done deal, really I promise!” followed by new threats because Trump can’t accept what happened. Presidents always call the shots on big questions of war and peace within the executive branch. But you don’t get the current situation in anything else but the personalist regime Trump has constructed around himself.
I’m seeing some commentary this morning that Trump’s new round of threats to “Venezuelanize” Iran is reacting to Fox News’ demands that he escalate the conflict, or “finish it,” as they put it. That may be the immediate trigger, the latest geriatric reaction to that Trumpworld mixture of soft criticism and goading encouragement. But the big picture remains the same. We’re stuck in this groundhog day tragicomedy because Trump acted on impulse in a vast act of executive self-soothing, and now he is unable to move forward because actually moving forward — as opposed to remaining in place, stuck like a couple in a broken marriage — because that requires facing the consequences of his own actions, which he is entirely unable to accept.