What will shape President Donald Trump’s meetings with Chinese leader Xi Jinping Thursday isn’t trade, tariffs, or Taiwan, but the war in Iran. According to Trump critics, as well as Iranian and Chinese propagandists, Xi has all the leverage because Trump has already lost—in fact, say some, his gamble has already lost America its empire. But Trump doesn’t seem worried. In spite of what it’s costing the U.S. electorate and his presidency, he says all that matters is preventing China’s Persian Gulf ally from getting the bomb.
The U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has pushed gas to over $4 a gallon and raised food prices, but Trump says the financial concerns of Americans don’t bother him. It sounds callous and cruel, but with midterms less than six months away, Trump has even more at stake: If Democrats take the House, they’re sure to hobble the president’s last two years with nonstop investigations, impeachment proceedings, and criminal charges against him and his family that will lead to cases brought by state and local jurisdictions and, should a Democrat win the White House in 2028, the Justice Department. But Trump says all that matters is stopping Iran from getting the bomb.
And yet, according to anti-Trump media, Trump has already lost the Iran war. It’s “a total defeat,” think tank scholar Robert Kagan wrote in The Atlantic, “a setback so decisive that the strategic loss could be neither repaired nor ignored.” It’s a surprise to many to see Kagan join the Iran echo chamber, but Tehran welcomes his exertions. “A vocal advocate of the war against Iraq and a lifelong champion of American military interventions in West Asia,” according to Iranian state media outlet Press TV, “he offered a grim verdict on the current war of aggression against the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
Compared to Trump’s Iran campaign, America’s humiliating losses in Afghanistan and Iraq weren’t so bad, according to Kagan, the foreign-policy mandarin who enthusiastically advocated that the United States squander its prestige and spend American blood in both hellholes by promoting democracy for primitive tribesmen who rape children. The real historical analogy to the Iran war, according to historian Niall Ferguson, is the disastrous military action that cost Great Britain its empire, the 1956 invasion of the Suez Canal.
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