No president really wants to be compared to Jimmy Carter (rest his soul), but in Donald Trump’s case, the parallels now are hard to ignore. Carter’s presidency was overtaken by a hostage crisis in Iran, where in 1979 followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini seized 66 Americans and held them (or most of them, anyway) for more than a year. The impasse played out as a televised drama — it gave rise to Ted Koppel’s Nightline — and became entwined in the public mind with uncontrolled inflation, interest rates, and gas prices, while Carter pleaded with Americans to turn down their thermostats and put on sweaters instead. All of it signalled that the country was spiralling and the president overmatched.
Almost a half-century later, Trump stumbled into his own implacable hostage crisis in Iran, this one entirely of his own making. For several weeks, Iran has held the Straight or Hormuz — and, by extension, the global economy — at gunpoint. Chances for permanently ending the standoff seem to fluctuate by the day, as Trump desperately seeks a way out of the conundrum. As I write this, the most likely outcome seems to be a humiliating capitulation on Trump’s part, in which Iran will loosen its grip on the oil in exchange for a bunch of vague talking points about future accomplishments.
Here again, Americans have come to conflate the standoff with rising costs and economic instability, both of which are certain to last well after the military crisis has passed. In May, Trump’s approval ratings plunged into the 35 percent range — not quite as low as Carter’s low point, but nowhere near as high as Carter’s ratings were in the first months after the hostages were taken.
In recent weeks, the argument about strategy in Iran has given way to a debate over whether the whole undertaking was worth the economic costs. After years of struggling with post-pandemic inflation, Americans are seeing another surge in the price of gas and groceries, while hopes for the lower interest rates Trump keeps promising have dimmed. The Pentagon has spent, conservatively speaking, upward of $30 billion on the war and has asked Congress for $1.5 trillion in the next budget — roughly a 50-percent increase over the prior year.
Trump, meanwhile, has dismissed the spike in gas prices as “peanuts.” Asked recently whether he considered the costs to American consumers when trying to reach a deal with Iran, he gave what was — even for him — a breathtaking answer. “Not even a little bit,” Trump said. “The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran is that they can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation.” If AI server farms don’t overwhelm the nation’s electric grid, the number of Democratic ad-makers downloading that clip just might.
It’s not usually my thing to defend Trump, but before we caricature him as a hopelessly out-of-touch billionaire warmonger, we should consider the possibility that he was right. If you’re pressed into war, and if the fate of innocent Americans and foreign allies depends on the outcome, then it’s myopic to fixate on what it’s going to cost the taxpayers in the short run. It might also be economically foolish, since an Iranian nuclear strike on Israel or America would almost certainly lead to worse economic consequences for everyone. Nothing about Trump’s statement is so out of alignment with how previous wartime presidents looked at imminent threats — except perhaps for the moxie to say it out loud.
In the last century, America fought the Second World War, followed by long engagements in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq — and that doesn’t even factor in the covert conflicts undertaken all over the globe in the name of defeating communism, or the trillions of dollars spent on the arms race. And yet, despite all that, rarely did we talk about war as a spreadsheet analysis.
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We argued, almost to the breaking point, about the loss American lives, particularly in Vietnam, and a few people put bumper stickers on their cars that said things like: “It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.” But, by and large, the monetary costs of war were a footnote to the debate over policy. This was partly because the country remained, even past the peak of the industrial age, prosperous enough to look the other way, but it was also because we took for granted the economic burden of being a superpower. If the war had to be fought, who else was going to fight it?
So there’s a world in which I’d agree with Trump’s answer and might even find it admirable. Except we don’t live in that world — we live in the real one. And in this world, there’s so much wrong with Trump’s theory of the case that it’s hard to know where to start.
FOR ONE THING, Iran didn’t actually have a nuclear weapon and wasn’t on the brink of having one, either. That’s not me playing nuke detective; that’s Trump’s own Defence Department, which estimated last year that it would be roughly nine years before Iran could test a weapon — a timeline that could have been pushed back further with some kind of deal involving a monitoring regime, if anyone had thought of that. Oh wait, someone did! But Trump tore that agreement up the minute he got to the White House, because it had Barack Obama’s signature on it.
True, Iran was much closer than that to having the enriched uranium necessary to engineer a bomb. But even now, Trump and his defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, have no apparent plan to retrieve that uranium, unless it involves sending in Jack Ryan (whom Hegseth may well think is real). Instead, as I write, Trump is negotiating a settlement that will look a lot like the Obama deal in how it disposes of what Trump calls the “nuclear dust,” except it will also release a lot more cash back to the Iranian regime than Obama ever did. And if anything, this regime will ultimately be more determined to get a bomb, since without it Iran will have very little leverage to avoid another attack.
Also, if Trump’s war was one of necessity, rather than choice, then why didn’t he bother making that case beforehand? In the brief run-up to the war (a blink of the eye compared to the time George W. Bush spent selling his invasion of Iraq), Trump talked more about Iranian protesters and regime change than he did about some urgent nuclear threat. And that was before his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, revealed the most plausible reason for the attack: Israel was going to do it anyway, so, you know, why not? The truth is that Trump, who consistently campaigned against foreign wars, somehow didn’t think he needed a clear rationale to start one, so it’s not really shocking that two-thirds of the public disapproves of the whole adventure.
And this idea that American families should sacrifice for the cause would seem a lot less galling if the president weren’t so busy spending public money on every ridiculous, Nero-like whim that crosses his mind. We’re all supposed to tighten our belts and carpool more while Trump spends hundreds of billions of our dollars on a ballroom and a statue garden and a giant Napoleonic arch, not to mention cutting a deal with his own administration that will basically protect him and his sons from ever having to pay taxes again, along with possibly doling out cash — again, your cash — to supporters who were unfairly persecuted for the patriotic act of breaking into the Capitol and trying to kill their representatives. It all makes the “I just can’t worry about your household finances” stance ring a bit hollow.
The bottom line is this: Trump is absolutely right that the economic cost of the war wasn’t the real problem here. It’s the war itself, and the way he got us into it, that’s now crippling his presidency. I’m not big on formulating pithy, blanket rules for what are often complicated situations in life, but if I had one for a president, it would be this: if the argument about a war centres on the economic costs, then you probably shouldn’t be fighting it to begin with. Because when Americans clearly see the necessity of a military intervention, they don’t care what it costs. And if you can’t make them see the rationale, then you have no business asking them to sacrifice.
That’s the essence of leadership, after all — to persuade people to put the national interest above their own. Carter was a thoroughly decent man who failed that test. Trump checks only one of those boxes.
From Rolling Stone US
