Trump’s War Empowers Extremists in Iran
New York Times · LC · trust 57/100
Credit... Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times Listen · 6:45 min Share full article 598 By Nicholas Kristof
“We’re winning very decisively,” he claimed, and “the result will be lower oil prices.”
Peter Navarro, a White House senior counselor, wrote an essay in March explaining why: “Iran War Will Lower Energy Prices.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in April announced “a historic and overwhelming victory” that had rendered Iran “combat-ineffective for years to come.”
Instead, Trump’s Iran war should be taught for decades as a model of how not to conduct either war or foreign policy. It’s an example of how hubris can swamp a presidency and lead it to military solutions for difficult global problems — and, in the process, make everything worse.
Now Trump finds himself stuck in the Sartre play “No Exit.”
“The unsettling reality is that the conflict is nowhere near over,” Ali Vaez of the International Crisis Group writes in a Foreign Affairs essay titled “The New Forever War.”
Still, the Trumpian myopia persists, with the administration continuing to claim that its pressure on Iran is a smashing success. “The blockade is working; it’s working like nothing we’ve ever seen,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox News in September.
Hmm. Diesel prices at a few places in California have hit $9.99 a gallon, the maximum price those pumps can display. The United States has already spent more than $43 billion on the war, by a lowball Pentagon estimate — more than enough to provide free college education for a year to every American family earning less than $125,000 annually. Higher prices caused by the war have cost the typical American family about $1,000 , according to the economist Mark Zandi. More broadly, we’ve depleted our arsenal, cost American and Iranian lives, possibly committed war crimes , exposed American vulnerabilities, effectively lost access to some bases and weakened American military credibility as far away as East Asia.
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