With the War in Iran, Trump Has Launched His Own Brand of Forever War

As the Iran war drags on and the death and devastation grow, I keep returning to a three-minute clip from a Republican presidential debate in February 2016.

That debate took place a few days before Jeb Bush was set to hit the campaign trail for the first time with his elder brother, former President George W. Bush. Citing that scheduled appearance, moderator John Dickerson asked Trump about a 2008 interview, in which he expressed surprise that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hadn’t impeached Bush for his handling of the Iraq War. That, Trump said at the time, would have been a “wonderful thing.” Dickerson asked Trump if, eight years later, he still felt the same way. 

“Obviously, the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake. All right?” said Trump. “We spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives, we don’t even have it. Iran is taking over Iraq, with the second-largest oil reserves in the world. Obviously it was a mistake. George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes. But that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East.” 

But the quotes don’t do the clip justice; you really have to watch it. Trump is not just animated but visibly, righteously angry. He’s pissed off about the Iraq War, and the fact that he’s standing on the debate stage with the brother of its principal architect disgusts him. It is a perfect encapsulation of a key aspect of his initial appeal: Trump loathed the American political establishment in precisely the same way many voters did (and still do): These people make stupid, costly, destructive decisions, and they’re never held accountable for them. 

A decade later, Trump is the one making stupid, costly, destructive decisions. The war on Iran is probably the worst American foreign policy move since Iraq, and that’s only one of several ill-conceived imperialistic adventures abroad during his second term. He is leading the United States into a new kind of forever war that may well continue even if the one in Iran winds down. 

Did Trump really believe any of what he said on the debate stage in 2016? He certainly understood something back then: that he was really running against the political establishment writ large, that Jeb Bush was the perfect stand-in for that establishment, that few recent events encapsulated its failures like the Iraq War, and that millions of people viewed that war as a costly disaster and a waste of resources. Trump was running on refocusing those resources on the issues he said actually mattered: a supposed epidemic of violence and drug abuse caused by a flood of undocumented immigrants. 

At the same time, Trump had more strategic criticisms of the war. Again and again, he railed against Bush—and President Obama, to a lesser extent—for failing to seize Iraqi oil during the war. But he also clearly viewed the war as a cautionary tale. Once you deploy tens of thousands of ground troops, as Bush did, it’s very hard to pull them out. And if you can’t pull them out, you can’t declare victory.  

A great deal of Trump’s foreign policy can be explained via those conclusions. Trump believes American power should be used in a coercive, extortionary, and often outright imperialistic manner. He shuns the abstractions of “soft power” and thinks the NATO alliance is a con job because weaker nations don’t pay up for the protection the U.S. provides. He also believes that military intervention and regime change should always prioritize new revenue streams: When the U.S. kidnapped Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in January, Trump didn’t pay lip service to democracy or freedom—he went on TV and said he took Maduro in large part so he could seize Venezuela’s considerable oil reserves. 

Trump’s pointed criticism of the Iraq War in 2016 led many to conclude that he was an isolationist. Nothing could be further from the truth. Trump loves using American military power, and he has few compunctions about using it. In his six years in power, he has bombed over a dozen nations, assassinated and kidnapped foreign military and political leaders, and risked war via bombastic and reckless actions on a number of occasions. He has embraced missile and drone strikes, in particular, but on occasion has used stealth bombers (as he did against an alleged Iranian nuclear site last June) and U.S. special forces (as he did to kidnap Maduro). He has, it seems, just one red line: He is extremely reluctant to deploy thousands of American troops overseas. 

The lack of a mass deployment is misleading in two ways, however. For one, Trump is waging his own kind of forever war. The U.S. military, under his command, has been constantly active all over the world during his second term: Air strikes in Yemen last year were followed by ones in Somalia and then Syria; the raid in Caracas was followed less than two months later by the bombing of Iran. While the war on terror under Bush and, to a lesser extent, Obama was motivated by an unattainable end goal (to rid the world of “terror”), Trump’s forever war is even less well defined: There is no stated or apparent policy uniting these military operations. 

The second way stems from the first. Recent reports suggest that Trump expects the war in Iran to continue for another month, but his public statements have suggested it could either end imminently (he said earlier this week that it was “very complete, pretty much”) or never (he has warned the Iranian regime that he is prepared for it to go on “forever”). His one stated criterion for the war’s conclusion is something that seems highly unlikely to happen anytime soon: The Iranian regime must “unconditionally surrender.” Trump has expressed his displeasure with the nation’s new leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, without providing any indication of what a more acceptable alternative would look like. It’s not clear what Trump wants from this war, in other words, which means it’s not clear how it will actually end. 

What is clear is that this is already the exact type of overseas conflict that Trump was railing about a decade ago. The U.S. is relying on faulty on-the-ground intelligence—over 100 Iranian schoolchildren are dead because of it—to wage a war that has no clear purpose. The war has already enveloped the entire Middle East, as Iran lashes out at its neighbors and Israel takes advantage of the moment to wage a destructive ground campaign in Lebanon. The widening conflict is taking on a momentum of its own, which the U.S. may be powerless to stop even if Trump decides to end U.S. involvement.

All of this was predictable when U.S. airstrikes began 14 days ago. But Trump blithely rushed ahead, falsely believing the Iran regime would crumble quickly and that there would be little to no disruption in the markets. Dissenting voices were shut out in the rush to war. They are still largely silent. “Inside the administration, some officials are growing pessimistic about the lack of a clear strategy to finish the war,” reported The New York Times earlier this week. “But they have been careful not to express that directly to the president, who has repeatedly declared that the military operation is a complete success.” 

The Iran regime is being mercilessly bombed but has choked the global oil supply. By closing the Strait of Hormuz, it arguably seized control of the narrative of the war itself. What started as a test of bombing capability—the U.S. concentrated its massive, technologically advanced arsenal against Iran, which has fought back by lobbing missiles and deploying drones at its Gulf neighbors—is now a battle over who can absorb more pain. Iran’s pain is obviously greater and more visceral, but it may have an edge in that fight, especially as gas prices tick up. 

The war is not a “complete success,” in other words. It’s a “beauty” of a mistake, costing more than a billion dollars a day. As it drags on, the likelihood of troops being deployed grows. It is likely such forces would be small, elite, tactical units, but it’s not hard to envision a situation—think Black Hawk Down or the botched attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran in 1980—that quickly spirals into something larger. It is, as Trump said about Iraq in 2016, a big fat mistake. 

Watch that clip again. What stands out now is Trump’s hubris. He wasn’t wrong about the Iraq War. But his real point was that George W. Bush was stupid, while he was smart—smart enough to avoid a boondoggle like Iraq. In office, Trump’s foreign policy has increasingly been guided by a belief that, for that reason, he can have his cake and eat it too: He can bomb and pillage wherever he wants and skate away before things turn really sour. He wouldn’t launch a forever war. He wouldn’t destabilize the Middle East. He was different.