With talks between the Trump regime and Iran stalled and negotiators unable to reach a peace agreement, the U.S. military announced on May 25 that it had launched airstrikes targeting Iranian missile sites and boats attempting to deploy mines. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps promised a “decisive reciprocal response” to any cease-fire violations.
Just the day before, President Trump had sent conflicting messages about whether any progress had been made on a deal to end the war. Unresolved key issues include the future status of Iran’s nuclear program, their missile stockpile, control over the Strait of Hormuz, and whether or not an agreement would end Israel’s attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon. Adding to the confusion, Trump called on Gulf monarchies to sign on to the Abraham Accords to normalize relations with Israel, a demand that most observers dismissed as unlikely.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with David Faris, professor of political science at Roosevelt University, whose recent Nation magazine commentary is titled, “Why Ending the Iran War May Be a Never-Ending Story.” Here he talks about Trump’s apparent inability to end his own Iran War quagmire and the long-term damage to the United States’ standing in the international community.
DAVID FARIS: The president took the United States into a war with deeply delusional objectives, discovered pretty quickly that they were not going to achieve those objectives, at least not the way that they thought they were, and discovered to their horror that Iran has a source of leverage over not just us, but the entire global economy that no one in Washington seemed to have thought through very well, even though it’d been war games within the Pentagon for decades. And yet, they all seemed really taken aback that the Strait of Hormuz has been closed this whole time (chuckles). And so, Trump kind of went guns blazing into this war, thought it was going to be this kind of Venezuela scenario where they deposed the top of the regime and replace it with somebody more compliant, only to find that they have inadvertently put people who are even more hard line into power in Tehran who are, I think, pretty justifiably in no mood to compromise right now. Right?
I think from Iran’s perspective here, the United States has clearly bitten off more than it can chew. The president is embarrassing himself on a daily basis, seems to have no idea how to get himself out of this situation without making concessions that he himself has spent the better part of a decade making fun of in terms of the kinds of concessions that were made to Iran and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that was negotiated by President Obama. So we’re in the muck and mire here, right? And what’s happening this weekend does seem to be moving a little bit faster than things had been before, although the New York Times is reporting airstrikes on Iranian missile launch sites and the Persian Gulf. I think that the basic problem here is that President Trump and his team have no serious expertise on board at all about Iran.
They decimated the State Department. There are no seasoned negotiators taking part in these talks and that what they want cannot really be delivered. And it can’t be delivered without a really dramatic escalation of American military action that Iran knows that Trump won’t do. And so they’re in this place where they know that they need to make certain concessions to Iran. Is that tolls on the Strait of Hormuz? Is that a shorter timeline of suspension of enrichment activity is like, who knows, right? Because we’re not in the room here and neither you nor me nor anybody else listening to this program, I think believes the word the president has anyway, also for all sorts of good reason. And so we’re just full of uncertainty. And there’s this consistent pattern where the president claims that we’re about to wrap things up, the strait will open, we’re getting everything we want. The Iranians have agreed to all this stuff and then the markets move and the stock market jumps and oil prices fall and then it turns out to not be true at all.
And we seem to be in that part of the cycle where Trump’s claims are colliding with the reality on the ground. And the reality on the ground is that the Iranian regime is emboldened and is not going to fold their hand here without getting pretty significant concessions out of us. I just don’t see how he’s going to sign off on that without looking completely ridiculous. And so that’s kind of the pickle that we’re in right now. And I don’t really see much having shifted in the last week or so that would change that basic dynamic.
SCOTT HARRIS: Professor Faris, you wrote in your recent nation commentary about the possibility that Trump may try to just walk away from this conflict if he’s unable to negotiate a peace deal and declare a victory of some kind and attempt to save face with a propaganda campaign to boost his poll numbers, whether or not that could be successful. It’s another question, but what are the consequences for the United States and its standing in the world?
DAVID FARIS: It’s catastrophic. In terms of like the United States and its foreign policy as we have understood it for the past 75 or 80 years for all of its flaws and warts and inconsistencies and hypocrisies—that foreign policy as we know it is over. I mean, we have so comprehensively alienated our allies in Europe. I mean, NATO is a thing that exists on paper at this point. I don’t think anybody in NATO believes that the United States would come to anyone’s aid in the event of a real conflict. It’s not clear that they would come to our aid. We’ve destroyed one of the greatest alliances in history and we’ve also destroyed the equilibrium in the Persian Gulf. We had all of these sort of like supplicant monarchs eating out of our hands believing that we were the key to their security only to discover that not only would we take actions that would directly undermine their security, but that we were actually incapable of undoing the damage that we had done.
I think that’s probably the most shocking thing to many of our allies. Now, I’m not a fan of a lot of these countries, okay? These are horrific autocracies that have very terrible internal practices. I don’t really see much of a moral difference between them and the government in Iran anyway. But in terms of the foreign policy that we had 15 weeks ago, I don’t see how any of that comes back.
If you’re the United Arab Emirates, if you’re Qatar, if you’re Oman and you see the greatest military behemoth in human history incapable of using the most expensive Navy in the world to clear a single shipping channel that you yourself are responsible for screwing up in the first place—it’s like you can’t unsee some of this stuff, right? It’s not just that we’re untrustworthy, that we can’t be trusted to stick by an agreement, that we can’t be trusted not to attack people while we’re negotiating with them.
It is actually the revelation of pretty stark American military vulnerabilities and weaknesses that I think a lot of adversaries are taking note of. So there’s all sorts of really, I think, pretty significant implications for American power. Now, do I think it would be all bad for the United States to have a little bit less freedom of maneuver to do whatever we want to anyone in the whole world? Not necessarily, no. I think that you could see some changes to American policy and American attitudes in the world and the kinds of things that we’re willing or able to do to people. I don’t think it’s the worst thing in the world that we don’t get to do those things anymore.
But it’s a massive humiliation for Trump and it’s going to be whoever takes over in Washington next is going to be looking at a very, very different landscape and it’s a landscape in which all of our adversaries look at us and think, “We didn’t think we’d be able to get away with this thing, but now maybe we could. If the Iranians can take on the United States, fight them to a draw and extract concessions from them, what can we get away with?”
I mean, that’s what’s going to be going through the minds of a lot of world leaders in the next 10 years or so.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with David Faris (28:10) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the related links section of this page. To subscribe to our podcasts, email newsletters, our Trump authoritarian playbook Substack or social media, subscribe here.
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