How Trump’s war goals are shifting - with no clear endgame in sight
Donald Trump’s address on the war in Iran was meant to explain his clear exit strategy from the conflict, but it offered few answers, writes Kiran Moodley.
White House addresses are usually on vital subjects of national interest and security.
They can define a president’s time in office: John F. Kennedy addressing the Cuban Missile Crisis; Richard Nixon resigning and both Lyndon B. Johnson and Joe Biden telling Americans they would not be running for reelection.
So what about Donald Trump’s address on 1 April? It could have been an April Fool given it was light on anything new. Perhaps that was to be expected, when Trump has called nearly every American journalist in recent weeks to inform them of his thoughts on the conflict with Iran.
But the White House address was a chance for him to offer clear reasoning for going to war, along with a clear exit strategy. Neither materialised.
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“Trump’s speech was essentially vamping - repeating the same background music to stall for time with financial markets while he continues prosecuting a failed war,” Rosemary Kelanic, director of the Middle East Program at Defense Priorities, told me.
“Unfortunately, Trump’s theory of victory over Iran did not pan out - decapitating the leadership failed to induce quick surrender - and there is no realistic way to achieve murky and shifting US strategic objectives at acceptable cost.”
Trump has gone back and forth over regime change, and with the administration beginning to attack major civilian infrastructure in Iran for the first time, is the White House trying to push further destabilisation?
“We started this war with the goal of regime change,” said Holly Dagres of the Washington Institute. “Instead, what the United States and Israel created with this war is they’ve created a rump regime that’s more hardline, more repressive.”
Foreign policy at the whim of one man
With frequent muddled reasoning given to us by a range of officials, it has sometimes been confusing to know who to believe.
President Trump said talks were going well this week, but Secretary of State Marco Rubio told ABC News that they were “dealing with a 47-year-old regime that still has a lot of people involved in it who aren’t necessarily big fans of diplomacy or peace.”
“I think this war is at the whim of an individual, or individuals in the White House, which is why Congress needs to get involved,” said Chris Purdy, a veteran of the Iraq War and CEO of The Chamberlain Network.
Ever since Trump came back into office, he has bypassed Congress entirely and ruled via executive order. No longer surrounded by foreign policy wonks like Jim Mattis or John Kelly from his first term, Trump feels unrestrained now.
“This is no way to govern a republic,” Purdy said. “We have three branches of government. It seems, according to this president, we only have one.”
Dagres noted a lack of expertise. “It’s really frustrating me, as an Iran analyst here in Washington, I’ve seen so many smart people be fired from their job in the State Department and other US agencies. The president is going off his own ideas on how the world works and he seems to think that one size fits all. Something that happens in Venezuela can happen in Iran.”
Trump’s new narrative
No wonder then that Time reported that White House Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, pictured below, was concerned aides were only giving Trump “a rose-coloured view of how the war was being perceived domestically, telling Trump what he wanted to hear instead of what he needed to hear.”
With Trump now worried about gas prices rising in America, his approvals on the economy dropping and with an eye on the midterms, he wants out. And we know what the final argument will be from the White House: Trump dealt with an issue every other president was afraid to touch and he resisted a forever war in the process.
“It’s very important that we keep this conflict in perspective,” Trump said in his speech.
“The Vietnam War lasted for 19 years, five months, and 29 days. Iraq went on for eight years, eight months, and 28 days. We are in this military operation so powerful, so brilliant against one of the most powerful countries for 32 days. And the country has been eviscerated and essentially is really no longer a threat.”
Strait to the problem
That argument of course ignores the problem of the Strait of Hormuz and the flow of oil that is causing concerns for so many countries around the world, including America’s allies. Trump has essentially told everyone to just deal with it themselves.
But that argument portrays America as weak; a superpower that started a war it hasn’t definitively won and with a major problem in the region it is failing to sort out.
Purdy said: “America over the past 80 years has built a better world, a more free world, more prosperous world through allies in Europe, in South America, in Africa, all across the world. And over the past year, we’ve made our allies our enemies.”
Dagres told me: “If the US decides to pull out of this war, the Iranians are going to feel even more in a position of power and say, look, we’ve managed to push away the world’s largest superpower. What does that mean for Iran? It means they’re going to act more with intensity than they have before, because now they’re going to be able to shut down the Strait of Hormuz whenever they want.”
Next steps
For now, we still wait to see what the next few weeks bring ahead of a possible declaration of mission accomplished, or rather, mission over from the president.
“We are on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly, very shortly,” Trump said. “We are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We are going to bring them back to the Stone Ages where they belong. In the meantime, discussions are ongoing.”
What does “bring them back to the Stone Ages” mean? What does hitting them “extremely hard” mean? And what are the ongoing discussions?
With news of the downing of a US jet in Iran, Kelanic said that this “strongly suggests that crucial Iranian military capabilities remain intact and functioning, despite President Trump’s assertions that Iran has been decimated. This is yet another disturbing sign that Trump’s war is going far worse than the White House has publicly acknowledged.”
“Simply put, Trump’s war is like when Wile E. Coyote has run off a cliff but hasn’t looked down yet. But a fall is inevitable - and the sooner Trump accepts reality and disengages from a losing war, the less it will hurt.”
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How could such a superpower such as the USA walk into such a military disaster? Answer: Trump.
Great read but no mention of Israel 🤷🏼♀️