The joint U.S.-Israeli effort against Iran may only be
two months old, but that is already too long for many people, most of
whom never wanted armed conflict with Tehran in the first place. And
that is proving to be politically problematic for President Donald Trump
and the Republicans.
The Iran war is just one reason for the
polls predicting defeat for the GOP in the midterm elections in a year
when the incumbent party typically loses. There’s no question that the
rise in gas prices, combined with the general unpopularity of foreign
entanglements, is a drag on the chances of Trump’s party avoiding an
electoral disaster this fall.
While his opponents have accused the
president of having no strategy for victory and the president has been
characteristically inconsistent, as well as vague when discussing his
intentions, the path to success against Iran appears to require the sort
of patience that the electorate may not possess.
Iran isn’t winning
And that’s the conundrum at the heart of the current impasse between Washington and Tehran, and Trump and the voters.
Contrary
to his critics, Iran isn’t winning. The combined efforts of the United
States and Israel have done enormous damage to the Islamist terror
regime’s military assets, ballistic-missiles and what’s left of its
nuclear program. Even if the conflict were to end today, Iran’s
capability of inflicting harm on the West and American allies in the
region has been greatly diminished. But that isn’t enough—and Trump
knows it.
As he has repeatedly said, Iran must surrender its
enriched uranium that has been buried in the rubble of the nuclear
facilities that were bombed last June. It also needs to end its missile
program and stop spreading terror around the region via its
proxies—namely, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. Yet given the
fanatical nature of the regime, and its theocratic and terrorist leaders
from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), there’s little
reason to believe they will do any of that. What’s more, by obstructing
the passage of shipping through the Straits of Hormuz, Iran has been
able to exert some leverage due to the impact on the supply of oil to
Europe and the price of gas in America.
Considering that Trump’s critics in Europe and his Democratic political opponents at home are effectively cheering
for the Iranians to hold fast and prevent Trump from being able to
credibly claim victory in the conflict, Tehran has seemingly every
reason to persevere until the United States gives up. Its leaders have
played the waiting game before with Western nations and always got the
better of them.
That seems like a formula for a defeat for the
joint U.S.-Israel effort and, more importantly, as far as Trump’s
political foes are concerned, also one for the president. That’s why so
many in the American press and elsewhere have interpreted Trump’s
acceptance of a ceasefire, albeit while still enforcing a blockade of
Iranian ports, as a sign that the administration is weakening and will
eventually concede failure at some point before rising gas prices turn a
midterm setback into a rout.
Yet that assumption doesn’t take into account what Trump is obviously attempting to do.
