The war in Iran, President Donald Trump claims, will be over soon. Despite a recent flare-up in the Strait of Hormuz that Trump called a “love tap,” both the U.S. and Iran say that a ceasefire is still in place, though negotiations appear to be on thin ice. The war, which has dragged on for well over two months, may end with Iran’s regime still in tact and still in a dominant position in the Strait of Hormuz, which according to the administration is a win.
“I think we won,” the president said on Wednesday. “Now we have to get what we have to get.”
But what the U.S. wants to get may be impossible — and that means this whole conflict will end with something less than a win.
The material realities of the past two months of war tell a story that differs wildly from the narrative the president and his administration pushing. On Thursday, The Washington Post reported that internal CIA estimates showed that Iran’s military capabilities had weathered weeks of American bombing relatively unscathed, retaining 75 percent of their mobile missile launchers and roughly 70 percent of their ballistic missile stockpiles. That’s a direct contradiction to Trump’s last statement on Wednesday, when he said that Iranian stockpiles were “mostly decimated” and that “they have probably 18, 19 percent, but not a lot by comparison to what they had.”
Trump’s main leverage over Iran — aside from bombastic claims to bomb them into a different era — has been the damage he says he has and will do to the country’s economy. But the new CIA report throws water on that, as well, noting that Iran’s economy is robust enough to withstand the U.S.’s blockade for as long as four more months. And even the holy grail of Iranian military targets — its nuclear program — seems to be relatively intact, as recent reports indicate that the latest campaign has done little new damage.
Judging the United States’ actual performance in the war isn’t quite as simple as calling balls and strikes, though. Robert Farley, a senior lecturer at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at University of Kentucky, tells Rolling Stone that U.S. servicemembers who actually fought the war are probably pleased with what they accomplished on a small-scale tactical level. “There’s a lot of operational and tactical pride in the U.S. military,” Farley says, noting that soldiers will say “this is what we did, we did it with very few casualties, and we did a lot of damage.”
But that doesn’t mean that the military is blind to the wider story of the war.
“People in the navy and the army are asking lots of questions: ‘Why did we do this? What did we accomplish? And what did we change that does not make the Middle East just as dangerous in six months?’” Farley says. “I don’t think there’s a really good answer to it. However excellent we were, we didn’t solve any problems.”
“I don’t know if I’d say we lost,” Farley adds, “But we certainly didn’t win.”
The best case scenario at this point may be that relationships along the Strait of Hormuz go back to essentially what they were before the U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran. The current round of negotiations appear to hinge on an agreement that would see Iran reopen the Strait of Hormuz and kick the can down the road on future negotiations around its nuclear program. On Tuesday, Marco Rubio said that Operation Epic Fury is “over” and that the U.S. wants the strait to reopen so that the world could “get back to normal.”
There are two glaring issues with this future, though. One is that the Trump administration will never, under any circumstances, admit that it was beaten. But the other is even more dangerous: The third party in the war, Farley says, has different objectives than the U.S. While Trump’s goals for the war have always been nebulous, the Israelis have been far more aggressive. They don’t just want the strait re-opened — they want the things Trump hasn’t been able to deliver: a true decimation of Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities, an end to Iranian support for militia groups around the world, and even total regime change. “I wouldn’t be surprised to see them play some kind of spoiler role,” in future negotiations, Farley says.
And that’s something we’ve seen before. For years, in fact, Israel has been targeting not just top Iranian officials but specifically those in charge of negotiating with the United States and other countries, overtly sabotaging efforts to reach diplomatic settlements. And even if the Trump administration does manage to strike a deal with the Iranians, it doesn’t guarantee that Israeli forces will abide by it for long – the initial ceasefire in April didn’t stop Israel from launching a devastating wave of attacks on Lebanon.
None of this, of course, is information that the Trump administration will admit. When, and if, we do get some kind of stronger, more formalized ceasefire, Trump will declare total victory. But a lasting peace could be hard to find. “War is supposed to be about reaching a better peace,” Farley said, quoting the military theorist B.H. Liddell Hart. “But I don’t know if we have a better peace for anyone who is involved.”
The future then, only looks like more war.
