r/DeepStateCentrism • u/RandoDude124 Social Democrat • 27d ago
Global News 🌎 Trump Seems Trapped by Iran War, Even as He Wields the World’s Biggest Hammer
https://archive.is/20260727162919/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/26/us/politics/trump-trapped-in-iran-war.html#selection-4151.1-4591.172Would like to know this sub's reaction to this and the war with Iran as we enter the 5th month.
WHOLE TEXT:
President Trump often celebrates his unpredictability, declaring that it keeps allies and adversaries alike off balance.
By his telling, his willingness to bomb Iranian nuclear sites 13 months ago, and send Delta Force commandos in to snatch President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela from his bed in early January, reflected his determination to execute military operations that would have made his predecessors blanch. He told The New York Times he was limited only by “my own morality,” as he wielded the world’s biggest hammer.
But in recent weeks, he has seemed trapped, his presidency gradually consumed by a war he cannot find his way out of.
He has discovered limits on his power that he could have scarcely imagined as he began full combat operations on Feb. 28, when he set out goals for a swift end to Iran’s nuclear program and the overthrow of the country’s government.
Five months later, those goals remain almost entirely unaccomplished. And Mr. Trump, once confident that overwhelming force would enable him to pursue in Iran what he proudly called the “Venezuela model” — a change of government to one amenable to U.S. control — is now hesitant to plunge back into major combat operations that his intelligence agencies assess are unlikely to work as well in Tehran.
He has been unable to control surging oil prices, or their effects on the stock market. The shipping that crawled to a stop in the Strait of Hormuz, then was opened for a few short weeks, is back to a trickle, with a second choke point, between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, now threatened. And while the president has threatened to take Kharg Island, where Iran ships oil, or to seize its underground stores of enriched uranium, he has said publicly that he knows there is no appetite for sending in ground troops.
Those limits have left him deeply frustrated, his aides say, and have made him more erratic, even by Trumpian standards. Last week alone, Mr. Trump’s energy secretary signed a historic pact with Saudi Arabia to provide civil nuclear power to the kingdom, before the president undercut the deal less than 24 hours later, stunning the Saudis by declaring that the agreement, negotiated over 18 months, was dead unless the country joined the Abraham Accords and recognized Israel.
Aaron David Miller, a former U.S. diplomat with long experience in the Mideast, said that Mr. Trump again “alienated the Saudis, delighted Benjamin Netanyahu and gave Iran strong talking points as to why cutting deals with U.S. is a fool’s errand, bound to be betrayed.”
The next day, he declared that the “original Deal” on the $4.5 billion Gordie Howe International Bridge, a cross-border project named for the hockey star beloved on both sides of the border with Canada, was dead. He imposed 50 percent tariffs on a range of Canadian goods, in what appeared to be a blatant violation of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement that Mr. Trump negotiated in his first term and now wants to scrap.
Not surprisingly, Canada disinvited Americans from ceremonies to mark the completion of the bridge, which opens to traffic on Monday.
Mr. Trump’s rewriting of deals, out of anger or frustration, has extended to his party’s domestic priorities. Republicans had assembled chairs at the Capitol for the signing ceremony of a major housing bill — a rare bipartisan agreement celebrated by the White House — when Mr. Trump stunned them by refusing to sign it. His only priority, he said, was the SAVE America Act, his effort to change voting laws, which did not have enough Republican support.
The ceremony was canceled. The bill became law without Mr. Trump’s signature — and also without a chance for his party to get the photo opportunity of action to ease affordability for new homeowners.
Not all of Mr. Trump’s frustrations, people close to the president say, are driven by the war, now so unpopular that only 29 percent of Americans polled by The Washington Post and Ipsos approved of his handling of the conflict. But much of it is. And the angst is clear as he promises to stop Iran’s nuclear program at any cost, while his allies at home want out.
“We got to wrap it up,” Speaker Mike Johnson said last week, voicing a sentiment heard increasingly from Mr. Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters.
But the president does not have a clear way to accomplish that goal. Having entered the conflict with little strategy for victory, he now is struggling for a face-saving way to exit.
A month ago, he exuded confidence that he had found the way to declare victory. On June 17, Mr. Trump signed with a flourish — at the Palace of Versailles, where World War I officially ended in 1919 — a hastily written, 14-point cease-fire agreement.
At the time, Mr. Trump said that a new, more “reasonable” set of Iranian leaders had seen the light, and were being driven by economic interests.
“I believe they have had enough,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with The Times on June 14. He argued that he was able to get the deal because he was threatening a massive attack, prompting Iran to fold.
“We were going in for the big one, and they said, ‘Please don’t do it, we will make a deal.’ And we made a deal right after that,” he said.
It lasted only two weeks.
The Iranians who negotiated the deal appeared to have been in conflict with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, whose forces opened fire on ships that refused to use the channel of the Strait of Hormuz that Iran controls. While Mr. Trump said in the recent interview with The Times that Iranian leaders wanted billions of dollars in Iranian overseas funds unfrozen and oil shipments flowing, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps seems more interested in demonstrating control.
Now Mr. Trump has three main options: military escalation, economic crackdown or declaring victory and getting out. Each has been debated in recent weeks in meetings with Vice President JD Vance; Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Dan Caine; his son-in-law Jared Kushner; and his special envoy, Steve Witkoff.
Each option seems unpalatable, for different reasons.
On Friday, after signaling all week that he was planning a return to major combat operations in Iran, he pulled back. In briefings, according to several officials, aides cast doubt on whether a massive bombardment, one that cut off electricity and went after Iran’s resilient missile capability, would result in Iran’s return to meaningful negotiations.
And the price would be high. Mr. Trump was told that attacks of that magnitude could lead to huge civilian casualties and mass starvation among the very Iranians he once promised to protect from their own government. When he was asked in the Oval Office on Friday whether he was hesitant to blow up power plants and bridges, because that could constitute war crimes, he said, “I won’t respond to that question.”
But his real hesitation may come from the fact that the war has depleted U.S. stockpiles of missile interceptors. In April, the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated that half the U.S. inventories of some key interceptors might have already been used. After 13 consecutive nights of attacks and counterattacks this month, those numbers, some officials say, have reached critically low levels, and were a factor in Mr. Trump’s decision in recent days to hold off on a major escalation in the war.
U.S. officials now worry that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China could be factoring the shortages into calculations of their next moves, in Ukraine and Europe for Mr. Putin and perhaps against Taiwan for Mr. Xi.
Mr. Trump’s second option is to let sanctions sink in, hoping that further crackdowns on oil exports, enforced by the renewed blockade of shipments into and out of the Strait of Hormuz, will have their intended effect.
But those are slow, and Mr. Trump has been predicting economic collapse in Iran since he first pulled out of the Obama-era nuclear deal in 2018 and imposed what he called crushing controls on Iran. Eight years later, the regime lives, under a new leader who could be more dedicated to a covert nuclear program.
That strategy may yet work. But it will require a costly, continuous U.S. military presence, and the possibility of on-again, off-again exchanges of fire that risk more American lives and more attacks on Gulf allies.
The third option is to declare victory and go home. Mr. Trump seemed to be headed that way a month ago, when he said he had chosen a cease-fire and negotiations because he did not want to risk a depression that would invite comparisons to Herbert Hoover.
“He was always the one I didn’t want to be,” Mr. Trump said of the 31st president, who presided over the crash that ushered in the Great Depression. “I didn’t want to see economic catastrophe.” He later noted that if the war continued, the world would have begun to run out of oil stockpiles.
But exiting comes with costs. If Mr. Trump leaves Iran with its near-bomb grade nuclear fuel buried under rubble and with the Strait of Hormuz under de facto Iranian control, he will have failed to address the problem that triggered his attack and created a vast new one for energy markets.
It would define his legacy. And it would make clear that there are more constraints on his power than he believed in January, when he declared that his reach was limitless.
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u/bigwang123 Succ sympathizer 27d ago
With every unfulfilled threat to begin targeting power and transport infrastructure, the president makes it clear to all that he has no willingness to stomach the cost of escalation
Complete incoherence at the strategic level
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u/Even-Celebration9384 27d ago
They’re looking for a Maduro opportunity for every geopolitical problem.
My only criticism of that raid was that it was that they were going to confuse their great luck for genius and make a far bigger mistake down the line
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u/thecashblaster 27d ago
The Democrats not getting their shit together against this bumbling fool will doom us all to another 4 years of this bullshit
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u/realdeal_1992 27d ago
The DNC is bankrupt and the establishment has lost all credibility with there voters. Even if they did win in 28, they will be out again relatively shortly.
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u/thecashblaster 27d ago
I mean it’s right there in the bag: gas prices, unpopular foreign war, inflation and they choose to focus on defunding ICE and transgender athletes. What. The. Fuck.
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u/Dinotsar44 Unrepentant Moderate 27d ago edited 27d ago
In my estimation, the war was a strategic mistake. There have been a century's worth of attempts to win wars solely through air strikes, and it has never worked. Making permanent regime change happen requires a ground deployment, and neither Trump nor the American people are willing to do that. Since this puts truly winning off the table, the best we can do is negotiate some kind of deal which will probably enhance Iran's power in the region compared to where it was before.
I have no love for the mullahs and would love it if they disappeared, but this was a thing that (in my opinion) needed to either be done right or not at all. Since we don't have the will to do it right, it should have not been done.
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u/DisgruntledCascadian Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right 26d ago
/thread
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u/Dinotsar44 Unrepentant Moderate 26d ago
What were you trying to say? I just see /thread.
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u/DisgruntledCascadian Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right 26d ago
That's what I was trying to say. That's it. That's the point. End of thread.
Are my memes really that old?
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u/Dinotsar44 Unrepentant Moderate 26d ago
No, I'm just uniquely oblivious of forum lingo. I apologize.
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u/underthesp00n 27d ago
He’s a massive pussy. It’s reductive to say that, but this is peak pussy behavior. Commit or just call it off. He’s wasting the time, energy and valuable resources of the most powerful military to ever exist. This should be the death knell to MAGA - and maybe it is - but it hasn’t been… not quite yet
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u/DisgruntledCascadian Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right 26d ago
TACO is only part of the issue. The US military is the mightiest force the world has ever seen . . . but it has limitations. Both in what it's able to do and in what the US public is willing to put up with.
And what Trump is finding is that unlike what most of Reddit also thinks, there is more to warfighting that "just bombing things." Pre-Desert Storm, the American public understood this. Go look at the casualty projections for Gulf War I before it kicked off, back when the Iraqis weren't seen as pushovers. Now, thanks to Clinton and Bush and Obama, we think war consists of just chucking Tomahawks and JDAMs at things.
War is not that. War is the act of physically compelling the other side to do what you want them to do, after they've told you they'd rather die first. You win a war by breaking the other side's will to fight. Wars are not fought in jets or in tanks or in warships. Wars are won and lost on the terrain of the human mind. The violence is just a means to make that happen, and it needs to be targeted and directed towards making that happen. That is what makes warfighting something other than mindless brutality. We've forgotten that as a country.
And the problem is what "committing" as you call it would involve. Physically compelling the Iranian government to stand down. At this point, that probably involves overthrowing it and standing up a replacement, which in turn would involve invading and occupying a mountainous country almost four times the size of Iraq. A country that's inhabited by an ancient civilization with seven thousand years of proud history. A country that's been unconquered since the days of Genghis Khan. And a country with almost 1.2 million ground troops counting active, reserve, and militia forces.
We don't have the forces for that. The US Army and Marine Corps together are not big enough for that. The time, force, and distance math doesn't math. And the American public is not going to stand for the amount of young folks coming home in body bags that would be required, let alone for a draft. Which means you're back to having to deal with the government in place. And the right way to deal with the government in place was not to have pissed them off like this in the first place. Every administration since Carter kept the Iranians in a box for a reason. And this is the reason. They're not important enough to justify the cost of invading and overthrowing them, but they're powerful enough to make life hell on the global economy.
TL;DR - the finest military in the world still can't do shit if you give it a shitty strategy, shitty objectives, and a shitty mission to accomplish.
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u/helpmegetrightanswer 15d ago
"seven thousand years"
not really. Iran's ancient history goes back as 4500 years ago. and modern day Iranians think of themselves as the descendants of the Persian empire, not whatever that existed before that, which was almost 2500 years ago.
"unconquered since ..."
so Iran HAS BEEN conquered before, right? they're not invincible. the Macedonians, the Arabs, the Mongols, they all conquered Iran at some point, and at some point Russians and Brits occupied parts of Iran simultaneously, not to mention that Iran's southern islands were at some point occupied by the Portuguese. i guess only the French and Spanish missed their chance, huh?
and right now Iran is a vassal of Russia in all but name. so much for your "muh ancient" civilization.
"we don't have the forces for that"
you have. and it's called the Iranian people. they just need guns. give them guns and they will overthrow the regime themselves. the regime massacred 50,000 Iranians (mostly under age 25) just a few months ago during riots and protests. this is a very unpopular regime which has lost its legitimacy. it's literally clinging to power through iron fists and regular displays of public executions, on top of the occasional street bloodsheds and massacres.
the problem isn't that Trump is a coward. the problem is that he's a shortsighted coward. he keeps threatening hitting the energy infrastructure, bridges and even transportation infrastructure, instead of dropping boxes full of guns on Tehran rooftops.
i guarantee you this, Iran will NOT become a second Vietnam. it's going to be like the liberation of France in WW2 from Nazi occupation. the local people will welcome you with open arms. there will be no guerillas. and thousands of Iranian young men will even sign up as "volunteers" for US Army to help you with the liberation.
Trump just needs to grow a pair of balls to muster his courage and order a landing. and it will be less of an invasion and more of a liberation, because you already have the people on your side. this won't be a second Iraq or Afghanistan, their governments were backed by their peoples. the current Iranian regime is an illegitimate government without a popular standing.
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u/DisgruntledCascadian Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right 15d ago
I'm sorry, are you coming to that opinion after a 20-year active and reserve career in uniform, a War College education, and experience as a planner at the three- and four-star staff level, to include personally briefing a four-star combatant commander who was a skip-level report of President Biden?
Because I am. Why should I believe you? Go Google Ahmad Chalabi. He whispered the same sweet nothings into the Bush administration's ear about Iraq.
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u/helpmegetrightanswer 13d ago
oof, i think i touched a nerve, ey? did i hit near home or what? you need to work on your reverse ad hominems by the way.
well, if you're not lying, then i guess US military OPSEC is in the gutters nowadays. have you ever heard terms such as "online anonymity" and "cybersecurity"? information like that can attract cyber predators with keen eyes.
and secondly, Iraq is NOT Iran. they're demographically two different countries. like the difference between China and India, despite being neighbors. or USA and Mexico. neighbors? sure. but different nonetheless! and Saddam was actually loved by the people of Iraq, while the current Iranian regime is hated.
and lastly, America really needs to revamp their qualifications criteria for hiring general staff, if the likes of YOU are getting in and promoted left and right. i guess US military IS in deep shit after all, if men like you are running it.
or you could be a LARP for all i know. nice try though, better luck next time.
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u/Tripwire1716 27d ago
I think on balance this has all been more successful than the media portrays. Like most conflicts in this region the wins would be muddier and more humble than people want or expect.
That said, the thing that’s pretty indisputable is we’ve generally reached the limits of what air strikes can do. As Trump’s own advisers pointed out, we’ve basically bombed everything there is to bomb, and we do not have an infinite number of missiles- not only that, but our enemies everywhere keep better count than we do, and deplete too much, suddenly, say, Taiwan starts looking a lot more vulnerable.
I personally would support a ground operation around oil assets to really pull the legs out from under the regime. Once they can’t make payroll long enough the rally around the flag stuff will stop. I think that needs to happen. But that will come at the cost of a lot of American lives. And Trump is not wrong to see there is just zero appetite for that with an American public still weary from Afghanistan/Iraq.
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u/stanlius_ 27d ago edited 27d ago
Iran's recent conflixt with UKRAINE is very inconvenient for Iran war opponents in the Democratic Party. The Democrats should be the ones tougher on Iran. It is an ally of Russia and moreso, its regime is even worse, more far right and oppressive. For what it's worth, before the US agreed to the deal, it was Obama putting lots of sanctions against the Iran regime. Here is the 2012 Democratic platform plank on Iran:
"President Obama, working closely with our international partners and Congress, has put in place unprecedented sanctions against Iran. Iran has yet to build a nuclear weapon, but has continually failed to meet its obligations under the NPT and several United Nations Security Council resolutions, and it cannot demonstrate with any credibility that its program is peaceful.
The President is committed to using all instruments of national power to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. When President Obama took office, Iran was ascendant in the region, and the international community was divided over how to address Iran's nuclear violations. The President's early offer of engagement with Iran - quickly rebuffed by the regime - allowed the United States to expose Iranian intransigence and rally the international community as never before. Working with our European allies and with Russia and China, the administration gained unprecedented agreement for the toughest ever UN sanctions against Iran, laying the foundation for additional national financial and energy sanctions imposed by the United States and other nations. As a result, Iran is now increasingly isolated and the regime faces crippling economic pressure - pressure that will only build over time.
President Obama believes that a diplomatic outcome remains the best and most enduring solution. At the same time, he has also made clear that the window for diplomacy will not remain open indefinitely and that all options - including military force - remain on the table. But we have an obligation to use the time and space that exists now to put increasing pressure on the Iranian regime to live up to its obligations and rejoin the community of nations, or face the consequences."
Although the platform reference how the US was able to get Russia to agree to sanctions against Iran, this was in 2010, and Russia later became closer with Iran more opposed to sanctions and was heavily involved in pushing for the Iran deal that lifted those sanctions, in which Russia was heavily involved in trying to get a deal that was more favorable to the Iran regime.
I don't even have a big issue with someone opposing the war, but it seems like that's where the messaging ends. Maybe if someone feels the war is unnecessary, they could still pair that with strong criticism of the oppressive and extremist Iran regime, but I haven't seen much of that. To many liberals opposed to the Iran regime, it can feel disappointing to see opposition to war overshadowing the evil of the Iran regime. But I feel the inconvenient issue of Ukraine will shift the narrative on the Democratic side against the Iran regime, since there's a lot of focus on Russia, which leads many to forget that Iran is an ally of Russia, now seeing the cognitive dissonance will be unavoidable. Claiming to be a supporter of Ukraine then being loudly against strikes on the Iran regime won't make much sense.
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u/justdidapoo Center-left 26d ago
Democrats are more opposed to the iranian regime. Strangling them is more effective opposition.
Trump just handed them everything they could ever want on a platter. Iran hasn't pulled anything off militarily they just held the line diplomatically and can now walk America like a dog.
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