We are now six days into Trump’s war on Iran, and his team is still trying to figure out the reason. We started with regime change, but Trump quickly decided that he might be okay with leaving someone from the current government in charge.
Then he went with the need to keep Iran from having nuclear weapons. That one didn’t work very well either since he was still boasting about having obliterated Iran’s nuclear weapons program in his attacks last summer.
Team Trump then shifted to the need to strike preemptively. This story went that Israel was about to attack, and we knew that if Israel attacked Iran would retaliate against U.S. forces in the region. Therefore, we had to attack first, along with Israel.
That one may be closest to reality, but it does put Trump in the embarrassing position of admitting that he allowed Netanyahu to drag the United States into a war that doesn’t make much sense from the standpoint of the United States. As Marjorie Taylor Greene and other MAGA stalwarts are pointing out, this is not very America First!
War Without Warning or Planning
Trump not only lacked a reason to go to war; it seems his team didn’t bother to do any planning. Three days after the war began and Iran started sending drones and missiles around the Middle East, it suddenly occurred to Team Trump that they should try to evacuate U.S. citizens from the region.
That is likely a good idea, but the sort of thing competent governments plan before they go to war. It is truly amazing that Trump apparently was completely unprepared for what was almost a certain outcome of his war.
It is worth comparing this failure to the problems associated with Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. Biden managed to get almost 130,000 people out of Afghanistan as the regime we had supported there was collapsing. This was a very impressive accomplishment. These were people who had worked with the U.S. military. Their lives and the lives of their family members would be endangered if they were not able to get out of the country. There were 13 U.S. soldiers who will killed in a terrorist incident near the airport from which most people were being evacuated.
That was a tragic event, but in the larger context, the withdrawal went remarkably smoothly given the extraordinary circumstances. And just to be clear, it was Trump who put Biden in this situation, having already negotiated a withdrawal with the Taliban before Biden came into office. Nonetheless, news outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, and National Public Radio felt obligated to refer to the withdrawal as “disastrous” when referring to it in their news stories for the rest of his presidency.
It will be interesting to see how they refer to this incredible mess-up by the Trump administration. Presumably Trump knew in advance that war was likely. The State Department could have issued warnings to U.S. citizens in the region. They also should have developed contingency plans to withdraw people once the war started, recognizing that it was likely airports in the region would be closed.
None of this happened. Now they are in the situation of telling hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens you’re on your own in trying to make travel arrangements to get to safety in the middle of a war zone. The level of incompetence is orders of magnitude greater than any failures by the Biden administration in the Afghanistan withdrawal.
The United States Screws Its Former Allies
When George W. Bush attacked Iraq in 2003, he made his plans very clear to U.S. allies, and in fact to the whole world. The attack may have been unjustified, but it was not a secret to anyone. The same was true of his father’s attack on Iraq in the first Gulf War. In both cases U.S. allies knew what to expect well in advance and could plan accordingly.
That is not the case with Trump’s war on Iran. The U.S. was apparently unprepared for Iran’s military response and so are U.S. allies. This is a huge deal for East Asian countries that are heavily dependent on oil from the region and European countries that badly need liquid natural gas from the Persian Gulf countries, especially as they have mostly cut imports from Russia. The jump in the price of oil and natural gas is yet another shock to these countries’ economies, after the earlier shock from the Trump tariffs.
If it wasn’t already completely clear, with the exception of Israel, none of the United States’ traditional allies can count on the United States support, either militarily or economically. The Trump administration is at best indifferent, if not outright hostile, to countries that are committed to democracy and the rule of law.
The fact that a blockage of the Straits of Hormuz might be a serious economic hit to much of the world seems to have not weighed into Trump’s decision to go to war at all. If the blockage is only for a few days, the impact will end up being limited, but if it lasts for months, the hit will be comparable or even larger than the impact of the sanctions most rich countries imposed on Russian oil and gas after the invasion of Ukraine.
As far as whether the blockage of the Straits is likely to continue for long, part will depend on Iran’s ability to fire missiles and drones, but part will depend on Trump’s decision as to whether to continue the war or seek a negotiated settlement. On that point, he is again playing reality TV show host, telling the world to stay tuned and we’ll see what he feels like.
One positive outcome from this war is that it should further accelerate the shift to clean energy. Now that the world recognizes how fragile its access to traditional fossil fuels is, it has become a huge natural security matter for them to quickly shift to sources of energy that can’t be turned off. It was already the case that renewable energy accounted for the vast majority of new energy being added in most countries, even the United States. But the war should prompt countries to accelerate the pace at which they add wind and solar, allowing them to retire facilities relying on fossil fuels.
The same story applies with electric vehicles. They already account for the bulk of vehicle sales in China and some other markets. This is in large part because they are as cheap as gas-powered vehicles to buy, and much cheaper to operate. Countries are likely now to push quickly to get towards 100% electric vehicles among new sales and replacing many of the older gas-fueled cars still on the road.
Those of us in the United States who lived through Donald Trump’s first presidency know that he is not a person who thinks carefully about his actions and their long-term consequences. Trump began to demonstrate this point to the world clearly with his hare-brained tariff scheme where he sought to punish countries for trading with us. This war without reason removes any doubt that Trump is a threat to world peace and economic stability. The world needs to move away from any dependence on the United States as quickly as possible and now they all know this.
Dean Baker is a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the author of the 2016 book Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.
Reprinted with permission from Dean Baker.
