For Republicans, the War Is a Political Gordian Knot

Politics Iran would be unwinnable for any president. But Trump is particularly ill-suited to run a forever war. (The White House via X Account/Anadolu via Getty Images) In the final weeks before Democrats officially replace the GOP “trifecta” with majorities so large they effectively repeal the 1994 “Republican revolution,” one of the most important questions in American politics is: What was President Donald Trump thinking when he listened to the Iran hawks? Of course, that question will be explored thoroughly in the coming decades, regardless of whether Trump’s Oliver Hardy successfully extricates himself from the latest fine mess the neoconservatives’ Stan Laurel has gotten us into. So perhaps a more interesting question is what the Iran hawks were thinking when they decided Trump would be the best vehicle for their aims. How could they expect him to see through to the end the war that even George W. Bush wouldn’t—and couldn’t—give them? When trying to escape blame for the midterm rout the war inflicted on Republicans, these hawks often point out that Trump’s job approval ratings were already low before he attacked Iran. Indeed, Trump’s numbers would have been bad enough for a normal midterm election loss, assuming he didn’t find ways to resuscitate them (such as by allowing inflation to continue to fall rather than by causing it go back up). But they weren’t bad enough to lose Kansas or Mississippi, nor had the president yet completely blown his credibility on the economy. But the question Iran hawks ought to have pondered (and apparently didn’t) is how a president who was already underwater in the polls, and who has usually been underwater for most of his decade in national politics, was going to sustain public support for a military venture likely to last longer than the Venezuela operation. Trump himself had never attempted an intervention with such obvious and long-lasting electoral and economic consequences. His decision not to make a real case to the voters or seek authorization from Congress are among the signs he did not expect an engagement of this duration. Our old friend George W. Bush spent down his once sky-high approval ratings in the sands of Iraq, putting them near record lows well before the 2007-08 financial crisis. Even W’s father, who received a tremendous boost from his shorter and more successful Persian Gulf adventure, couldn’t sustain those numbers once the 1990–91 recession hit and public perceptions of the economy soured. This caper was like a combination of the type of war that annihilated Dubya’s political capital and Poppy’s “read my lips” campaign-promise violation. And just as the elder Bush’s tax increase arguably worsened preexisting economic problems, Trump’s Iran energy shock indisputably poured gasoline—high-price gasoline at that—on the embers of an inflationary fire that might otherwise have burnt itself out. Trump has never really agreed with the Iran hawks about what was necessary for success, even as he gave them their war. He has never been willing to pursue a military operation of that size. He did not lead a political coalition that would be unified in support of such a war, and was reliant on working-class voters who would not and could not absorb its domestic economic costs. For the coalition necessary to keep Trump’s party in power, the war and the economy cannot be so neatly separated as hawks like to imagine. And the war itself was unpopular right from the beginning, before it produced the biggest costs for ordinary Americans. Republicans who might have waged the Iran war in the way its supporters envisioned didn’t, for three reasons. One is that Bush—the likeliest champion of a drive to Tehran—was already bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan. The second is that Bush’s conflicts did not go well enough to make the political case for another war, even if there had been the money or military capacity available to fight it. Third, Republicans who wanted new wars or continued to defend the old ones couldn’t get elected president. Subscribe Today Get daily emails in your inbox Trump solved all these problems for the Iran hawks. Convinced that the relative successes of his more limited military interventions across two terms compared to Bush’s more open-ended ones meant he had found the cheat code to avoiding forever wars, he stumbled into an entirely new problem. Will it be worth the cost, even by the Iran hawks’ own standards? The war doesn’t yet seem likely to end the regime, and over the longer term it could have the opposite of its intended effect on Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. Trump was a leader who was simultaneously supportive of Israel and skeptical of Middle Eastern wars. Now leaders who wish to signal the latter increasingly eschew the former. But maybe the damage inflicted on Iranian military capacity will be sufficient to justify this campaign in the minds of its supporters. The voters, at any rate, feel differently. And while some of the Republicans who lost their elections as a result may deserve it, the Trump 2024 voters enduring higher gas and diesel prices surely don’t.