Unconditional Surrender

The U.S. has joined in Israel's war aims because Trump felt like going to war. He's given up on exit ramps and talking about boots on the ground. Nothing but hard times ahead for the rest of us.

Trump post around the time the clocks changed on Sunday.

The War on Iran seems clearer now than it did when I wrote about it on Friday, and I’m planning to make this my last take on the subject for a while. There are other things to talk about, and the war is serving at least one purpose for Trump by making it hard to find space to talk about revelations in the Epstein files or the question of whether there are any limits to how AI may be used by the U.S. military or Trump’s security forces.

The basic story of the war is clear now, while the question of what will happen next is entirely uncertain. Maybe the war ends quickly and becomes just another episode in Trump’s savage presidency, like Venezuela or “Liberation Day,” but that seems less likely every day. Maybe it will bring global economic disaster and a new level of instability and regional conflict from the Kyber Pass to Gaza. Afghanistan and Pakistan are about to go to war, right on Iran’s border.

So far, the news out of Mar-a-Lago and Tel Aviv is that it will go on for a while, heightening the likelihood of disastrous outcomes. No one is talking about a limited strike anymore. That ship sailed a week ago.

What is clear is that the war-fighting strategy was defined by Israel as the senior partner with the deepest knowledge of the battlefield, and the purpose of that strategy aligns with Israel’s broader national security strategy under Netanyahu in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack. Israel is waging the same all-out war against Iran and its proxy, Hezbollah, that it did against Hamas in Gaza.

Humanitarian concerns are not part of the playbook, as Gaza’s devastation and the deaths of more than 70,000 Palestinians demonstrate. At present, Israel’s plan is to destroy as much as it can of the Iranian state, with its raids extending beyond military targets to include civilian buildings and infrastructure, including an airport in Tehran and the nation’s energy infrastructure, along with an intensive focus on internal security forces.

Israel appears committed to decapitate any leadership that emerges, having already eliminated most of the officials that strategists in the White House thought might be willing to cut a Delcy Rodriguez kind of deal. Whether one agrees with it or not, Israel’s purpose is clear: it wants to eliminate Iran’s ability to threaten it, which includes not simply destroying Iran’s current war-fighting capacity but also eliminating the nation’s ability to rebuild and re-arm.

Israel is not interested in a brokered peace, or in preserving any element of the current regime in Iran. It would prefer a broken or disordered state only capable of waging occasional terror attacks to any sort of stable regime in Iran.

Almost certainly this war has been a long-time goal of Netanyahu’s, one that couples an absolutist strategy for Israeli power in the region to his own political needs, including deferring any sort of reckoning for the colossal blunders that led to the October 7 attack, as well as his own criminal case for corruption.

The United States has joined entirely in Israel’s strategy and plan. Our purposes and rationale now echo Israel’s precisely. We may be funding the war and providing much of the destruction, but it’s Trump’s war, and he’s hitched himself to Netanyahu’s horse.

There’s no way Trump can declare victory, the way he did last June, and force Israel to a ceasefire it didn’t want at the time. Israel won’t let him negotiate a peace with any remnant of the current regime.

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War against Iran has never been part of U.S. national security strategy. Containing Iran’s nuclear ambitions has been our primary strategic interest when it comes to the theocracy, and working together with the Israelis we have been able to achieve that without going to war.

At the point the war began, Iran was apparently ready to make major concessions, beyond those contained in the 2015 Obama agreement that Trump abandoned out of spite in his first term. That may be one reason the Israelis hurried Trump to act when he did.

The United States has joined fully in Israel’s war, which would not be possible without our involvement. The Trump and his administration workshopped a wide variety of reasons and purposes for the war, some of them contradictory, before Trump finally joined entirely in Irael’s project: “unconditional surrender.”

As for rationale, we have settled on the one that Israel used from the start: to destroy Iran’s war-fighting capacity and eliminate its leadership. The idea of maybe providing a path for the opposition to emerge and take control is an afterthought in this plan—lip service, it seems, since to effect the latter appears entirely unplanned. We are waging this war on behalf of Israel’s national security interests, not our own.

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It’s useless to speculate about what Trump was thinking, when he decided to accept Netanyahu’s invitation and join in the killing spree. To assign rational motives—even the motives of burying the Epstein story and trying for a “rally around the flag” shift in Republican electoral prospects—is to sane wash a man whose reasoning is entirely subject to his Id.

Trump felt like going to war, so he did. That’s really all you can say. Anything else is a post-facto rationalization of an irrational act. Trump requires the constant exercise of power to maintain his sense of self, which doesn’t exist without external scaffolding. The heady victories of his initial blitzkrieg have given way to all manner of roadblocks and defeats over time, as his approval ratings have plummeted.

Now that tariffs have been taken from him, war is really the last domain in which Trump is still able to exercise unchecked power. He discovered he liked it with the pictures of the first bombing and the smash and grab of Maduro, and even mulled the hostile capture of Greenland, which he wants “for psychological reasons,” so when Netanyahu gave him the opportunity to join in the killing of Khamanei, he leapt at the chance.

One of the most interesting features of the war is how well-planned it was militarily and how completely absent of planning it was in any other way. That shows up most obviously in the administration’s complete indifference, even after the fact, to the plight of U.S. citizens in the region, who number somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million.

It shows up as well in the seeming indifference to the economic consequences of the war, which seemed to take Trump by surprise, and in the absence of any sense that the U.S. had any plan for an endgame. That all the people we thought we might be able to talk to were killed at the same time as Khamenei was may demonstrate how little interest the Israeli’s have in any outcome short of the regime’s utter destruction.

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So we went to war based on one man’s impulse, and now we’re joined to Israeli’s strategy for waging it. It appears that it was American bombs that slaughtered more than a hundred schoolgirls last week. On Saturday, Hegseth said “the only ones that need to be worried right now are Iranians that think they’re going to live.” This is the war that we all own now, as U.S. citizens.

There is no discernible off-ramp for the war right now, and over the week Trump has seemed to move from what might have been defined as a U.S. position on the war—the sort of thing that hopeful pundits have drafted about how things might work out OK—to an all-out embrace of Israel’s goals.

Two sidebars last week underscore the ineptness or stupidity of Trump and his servile courtiers. One was the report of an intelligence analysis that made clear that an air campaign alone was unlikely to achieve regime change, because of the entrenched nature of the existing power structure. The absence of a discernable pathway to regime change without boots on the ground was known before we went to war.

The second was the White House decision to prevent the release of an official joint FBI, DHS and National Terrorism Center bulletin to state and local police officials about Iran-linked threats to the U.S. homeland because of the war. At the same time, the National Terrorism Advisory System, that once maintained a color-coded system of threat levels, and now issues time-specific bulletins and alerts has gone dark, ostensibly because of a lack of funding.

The White House is concealing terror threat data for political reasons. Think about that for a moment.

Trump himself has been noticeably reticent to talk directly to the American people about why we are fighting this war with Israel and what he hopes to accomplish by it when the bombing ends. Instead, he has just offered hints of his thinking in individual interviews, responses to press corps questions, and the occasional Truth Social screed, while Hegseth himself has alternated between stupid belligerence and castigations of the press for reporting on the war dead.

It is almost as if the White House doesn’t want people to pay too much attention, now that the war is moving into a second stage and looks like it will last for a while. There’s no real sense that we’re winning, giving how stalwart Iranian intransigence has been, and the immediate economic consequences of the war—gas prices up, markets down—will only get worse the longer the war continues.

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Trump’s presidency has proceeded as a series of self-laid traps, with each fresh iteration partly erasing the one that came before, and the accumulated effect resulting in a presidency increasingly seen as failing in every significant domain.

He has already lost on most fronts: DOGE was a failure, tariffs backfired and failed, ICE destroyed his polling on immigration and was forced to retreat a bit, he lost on occupying cities with federalized troops, and the economy was already the source of widespread disapproval. The mid-terms presage a blue wave.

Now, he’s laid the biggest trap of all for himself—the same one George W. Bush did, and LBJ before him. There’s no path to victory in Iran—what would it even look like? But the war does have the potential to let Trump do something even Vietnam and Iraq did not do: conduct a pointless war without even trying to offer the American people a rationale. No president has ever started a war with so little popular support.

Trump is already talking about boots on the ground—not an invasion force, but maybe commando raids to capture enriched uranium or take out Kharg Island—and one expects that at some point the U.S. and Israel will run out of bombing targets, though that could take a long time in a nation of 90 million that stretches from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Turkey. We have told to expect casualties. As Trump said, “Sometimes in a war people die.”

Given that the U.S. has no war aims independent of Israel’s it seems likely that the war will keep going as long as Trump lets it. The Israelis have no intention of stopping.

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In the end, I’m not sure the posture of war-fighting president actually suits Trump. It’s a constraining role—he can’t just go to some town in Ohio and ramble on about the things he rambles on about, and he has to know that anything he says about the war will be a headline.

Keeping the story straight has never been a strength for Trump, and it’s hard to lie about the war the way he lies about immigrant crime and dystopian blue cities. Maybe he can work some applause lines with the MAGA crowd, but no one else is buying what he’s selling.

As vainglorious as he is, one might think Trump would take advantage of the war, maybe the way George W. did with his flak jacket on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln. But he must know it won’t work—that it’s hard to brag about bombing strikes when you can’t explain why they’re happening. Iran has been a real but distant enemy longer than many Americans have lived and we are inured to it. Invoking the U.S.S. Cole terror attack as part of the rationale won’t make much a meme.

The fact that we’re all in with Israel on this war presents a political challenge for both parties, with AIPAC money becoming toxic for Democrats, and MAGA with its antisemitic, “America First” intellectual and podcast faction accusing Trump of being duped by Netanyahu. But apart from the third of the country still devoted to Trump, no one else likes it. Republican officeholders are in a much worse bind than most Democrats.

The price of gas is already up 50 cents in a week, and according to prediction markets there’s a good chance it may spike to more than $5.00 by mid-spring. Unprecedented gas prices—and jet fuel, for that matter—may come just as the summer travel season starts in the U.S. There’s no good political news for Trump and the Republicans in that.

The only quick end to the war is to do what Trump has ruled out and accept some sort of negotiated surrender with whomever manages to still be alive and in power. Right now, it seems that even if Trump wanted to deal, the hardliners control the regime, and there’s no reason to trust the U.S. in negotiations in any case. Both sides are trapped, and the only winner is Israel.

Maybe I am wrong—maybe there’s some deus ex machina in this script that I can’t read—but it looks to me like we’re in for a long war with accompanying pressure on both inflation and employment, both at a time when warnings about the fragility of various components of the global financial system have grown louder. The stock market is due for a correction, and the uncertainty caused by a war with no defined purpose or endpoint won’t help.

It may turn out that the real question wasn’t whether American democracy could survive Trump, but instead how much of the nation’s wealth and standing in the world will be destroyed before Trump is done.