It Ends With Us

Like all parents, I still hope to leave my son a better world than the one I grew up in. But at this point I’d settle for his being able to read the newspaper without the record for the dumbest thing he’s seen in his lifetime getting reset every week. This time it’s Iran, which has baffled our leadership by fighting back. Until our leadership can think of an actionable purpose for war, they can’t think of an end to it. 

Every woke professor in the world working 24/7 for 365 couldn’t roll back even a shred of the American empire that the Trump administration incinerates every day. Future historians working with corrupted data may be forgiven for mistaking this administration’s swarming attack on American prestige and power as something intentional. They spent the last year failing to harden regional defenses and capriciously flinging key munitions everywhere, depleting stockpiles while making insufficient arrangements to replace them. They alienated our allies by threatening to annex Canada and Greenland and playing extortionate games with tariffs. These last sent prices rising before the intervention of what might end up being the greatest hike in oil prices in history. The government that will respond to the onrushing crisis has been harrowed and crippled by tech-dweeb underlings named Big Balls, chosen by the father of Mecha-Hitler, which was itself another dumbest day in someone’s lifetime.

Iran and the United States’ responses scan like the actions of someone who read their Clausewitz, and someone who didn’t even read the children’s illustrated Clausewitz and bluffed the book report but are pretty sure they got away with it. Iran invested in asymmetry within their budget and have countless drones to overwhelm limited and costlier defenses. They are demonstrating that the U.S. cannot defend its allies’ or its own regional interests, letting their own petrol traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, strangling all else, and waiting to alienate America politically while breaking it economically. It’s such a rational response and such a natural antipode to their enemy’s constant offense to common sense that it not only should work, it ought to.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has engaged its own chosen war like the old “Far Side” comic about a pair of 1800s cowboys taking fire behind the circled wagons and saying, “They’re lighting their arrows! Can they do that?” Having no plans for maintaining traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is like starting a war with preflight Great Britain and being taken by surprise by the naval blockade that gets slapped on you afterward. Speaking of which, the Trump team had to call Lloyd’s of London to figure out how insuring petro tankers works, then were stymied by the fact that “don’t worry, the boat has insurance” is not motivation enough for the people who pilot the boats to burn to death on them. Trump’s taken to calling access journalist dopes who tweet what you tell ’em, promising that he and Dr. Kissinger have a secret plan to end the war — which they’ll win from 10,000 feet anyway thanks to the new Norden bombsight — whatever juices the markets before closing.

Certainly, some factors led us here, beyond the control of Trump’s sundowning feints at omnipotence. America’s defensive incapacity, for one, owes something to the “Fire and forget, baby!” ripshit mentality of the president and DUI hire Pete Hegseth, but it owes a lot more to a production chain outsourced to an ever smaller and more incestuous oligopoly, as well as a perennial source of magical thinking for leaders everywhere that technological status immunizes war to its costs. 

This last mentality has been folded into decades of conservatives playing opportunistic aggro meathead about military policy. What began as gentlemanly red-baiting and homophobia about the Ivy League fancyboys who “lost” China is now basically just War by Marine Todd, a masculinized and desperately compensatory slice through the Gordian knot of everything you refuse to understand, because confusing things are gay. For every problem, if you’re not some kind of pussy, there’s a bullet as its solution. The war on Iran is what happens when you build the whole army out of an alloy of “one hit, bro, and they’re gonna go down” forged together with “if I’d been at Golgotha with my AR, none of the shit they did to Jesus woulda gone down like that.” It can’t effect changes in the real world, because all its missiles are sighted on the World of Imagination. The target can never be in reach, assuming a real one is ever chosen, besides a background assumption that Muslims dying is, on the whole, a safer option than their not dying.

This is an August lineage, with many stops, but then ”Flowers for Algernon” is a 300-page book for a reason. Nixon and Kissinger undermined peace talks for a war they knew was unwinnable with a plan they didn’t have, except — you guessed it — more dominance, more bombing, more force and much less of these effeminate rules-based international orders. Their followers witnessed them committing any crime they wanted in service of that war, then blamed Democrats for stabbing them — and whole divisions of phantom abandoned POWs — in the back. After pursuing an arms race against phantom weapons with phantom weapons, we celebrate Ronald Reagan for bringing down the Soviet Union the same way that sometimes you can wait three days for something to arrive at your house free via Amazon Prime, or you can spend $500 to get it there this morning. Those in power on 9/11 knew the real culprit all along was Bill Clinton, just as the GOP knew Barack Obama’s following their escalation wish list cost us Iraq. They’ll tell it to you straight: Only Joe Biden could stop the nearly three full Republican presidential terms preceding him from winning the war in Afghanistan. 

Against a backdrop of burning skies and broken children and graves dug out of ground covered in soot and dust, there is the world historic moral offense of Donald Trump as the make-believe solution for a make-believe crisis — the only salesman for a base fed 50-plus years of more rancid and violent make-believe. His failure is sui generis, as must any solution be, a bespoke lament configuration for the Trump id puzzle box. If anyone could decide that Donald Trump’s war simultaneously didn’t matter, was a tremendous victory, was a defeat authored by Democrats, was a total capitulation of those animal Iranians, was an honorable peace agreed to by a storied Persian people Donald Trump has frankly hearrrd ALOTTABOUT — it is Donald Trump. If anyone would believe him, it is his fans, and if any group would go along with it regardless, it is his party.

Things might finally be too far gone for that. Iran has no interest in ending American pain at the pump or sticker shock at the grocery. They couldn’t stop what’s coming anyway; no one can. Not the prices, not loss of status in the global economy, not the decades-long hobbling of American influence and force projection — it’s like knowing the earthquake registered and is already over, but the tsunami hasn’t reached shore yet. As with all else about Trump, he wants the majesty of theocratic monarchy and the simple satisfactions of death and maiming and emasculation and pleading, but none of the obligations. 

Traditionally, wars of dynastic humiliation and territorial aggrandizement have ended with the losers doing something Donald Trump’s spent his life avoiding: paying the bill that comes due. Just as new glory flowed to the conqueror, the loser was obliged to make reparation in defeat. When loss became inevitable, the monarch did the honorable and nation-saving thing, sued for peace, formally acknowledged that his actions come at a cost, and paid it. 

For once, Trump should pay for it himself, ideally with his literal person. He’s never prioritized consent before, so his should be immaterial. His value only increases with his resistance anyway. Unfortunately, his pet Supreme Court will probably bring the Eighth Amendment out of retirement for presidents. He still has everything to give.

A Republican Party serious about rescuing their midterm prospects, stock portfolios and the American 21st century has a lot of constitutional options at its disposal. It may not be able to hand over Trump and his rat-king of a family or some oceanfront in Gaza prime for condos that he just picked up, but it can take a war away from the idiot who keeps resetting the “Weeks Since the Dumbest Decision of Your Lifetime” count to zero. For a malignant narcissist and the strain of violent and deceitful malignancy of which he is the purest example, humiliation is an emasculating and total reparation — an end to a war with an imaginary pretext, at the expense of a clown who imagined himself a colossus who bestrode the Earth. For those of us in the real world, it’s the cheapest option left.