Unless he suddenly loses practically all of the instincts and tactical astuteness that got him where he is, President Trump will win the Iran war. It may be that it will have proved a mistake to go to negotiations, but as the president has made clear before and during the Iran negotiations in Islamabad, he expects to win either way.
This is as he possesses, with his Israeli allies, the ability to clear the Hormuz Strait to assure that Iran does not become a nuclear military power, and to strangle Iran so that it has no ability to underwrite international terrorism as it has for nearly half a century.
The United States and Israel will return to war and achieve these goals following Iran’s failure to concede them verifiably in the Pakistan negotiations. It may be that the president underestimated the disposition of Iran to claim victory even though it has been overwhelmingly defeated, and of the ambition of Mr. Trump’s detractors in the United States and elsewhere to amplify that claim. American opinion is as volatile and soft as it is on the issue of the Iran War because the president did not have the opportunity of selling the war to the public without giving a militarily undesirable level of warning to the Iranians. But this has assisted in luring the Democrats ever farther into the cul-de-sac of Trump-hate.
There is not the slightest pretense of bipartisan support for the war effort and as the Democrats demanded peace they went on record proclaiming that Iran was not a threat to America, that the United States is losing the war, and had been dragged into a quagmire.
When the negotiations came, they denounced them. The negotiations did not last long. Iran’s failure to concede the verifiable and permanent elimination of its nuclear military program and the abandonment of funding for international terrorism, particularly on the borders of Israel, and end all pretense of controlling the Strait of Hormuz, means the war will be resumed and those goals will swiftly be achieved by the Americans and the Israelis.
At that point all the scaremongering of the Democrats as the “progressives” devour and intimidate whatever is left of moderate Democrats, will be exposed as a fraud. Congressman Ro Khanna’s demand for Mr. Trump’s removal because of mental incompetence and the disintegration of Congressman Eric Swalwell’s gubernatorial campaign because of his aggressive womanizing have lowered the farce of the California Democrats to hitherto unexcavated levels.
There is little that the voters of America like better than victory in a “splendid little war” at a low cost (Theodore Roosevelt on the Spanish-American War). This was the story of Presidents Polk in Mexico, McKinley in Cuba and the Philippines, and even, for a time, the Bushes in Iraq. In the aftermath of Iran’s refusal to concede the nuclear and terrorism issues, the United States and its allies will seize Kharg Island, close Iran as tightly by sea as it is by air, strangle it of the ability to support terrorism, and impose a permanent aerial arms embargo on nuclear military development; all at minimal cost to the United States and Israel in the lives of their servicemen. One or the other of these conclusions will be determined and imposed within a couple of weeks. At that point every stance on every side of this issue that the Democrats have adopted will have been debunked. Israel is about to agree with the Lebanese government on a joint plan to finish off Hezbollah.
Once Iranian aid to Hamas has been terminated permanently, Israel’s ability to end the violence in Gaza and open the era of reconstruction will have arrived. While these postwar objectives are being pushed into place, a post-Iran War America will enjoy a sharp reduction in gasoline and fuel prices and a resumed boom in economic growth.
All of this will be evident well before the midterm elections and the Democrats will have completed their capitulation to the left which was only half committed in the 2020 election when they adopted the catastrophic Sanders-AOC socialist program but in order not to frighten the voters, nominated the irresolute figurehead, President Biden, to front the far-left takeover while the Democratic dirty tricks division in and around the Justice Department set out to destroy Mr. Trump. As everyone knows, all of this failed, and now more than ever the only card they have is Trump-hate. The ICE issue has already been turned around by the administration; the Epstein issue was never really an issue. The greatest military and diplomatic victories in the Middle East since the founding of the state of Israel 78 years ago and the Trump economic boom, will facilitate the first political gains in the sixth year of any administration since before the Civil War.
Yet the important fact is that Mr. Trump will defeat Iran, and even if the unprofessional biases of the majority of the national political media can deliver gains for the Democrats in the midterms, they will have no ability to overturn Mr. Trump’s veto, and enlist the adherence of Mr. Trump’s attorney general, or achieve any more than Congress’s hostility to the administration in its last two years.
Which, apart from FDR, has been all of them since Theodore Roosevelt, who left office in 1909. Presidents Wilson, Truman, Eisenhower, Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama all had hostile majorities in both houses in their last two years. Mr. Trump is still the master of this game; he is like the circus performer who always appears to be on the brink of disaster, and it is only clear how agile he has been when he leaves the arena.
Conrad Black is a contributing editor of the New York Sun.
