Trump Has No Plan for Fixing His Iran Debacle. The Democrats Need One.

The Iran war is not going well. That has been true more or less since the end of its first week, after the U.S. military’s initial bombardment ended, but it is really not going well now. President Trump’s highly touted “economic D-Day” against Iran has flopped, in part because of the administration’s incompetence and in part because it couldn’t marshal China or Russia to help out, which means Tehran still has a crucial financial lifeline. Meanwhile, the munitions stockpile is so depleted that several members of the military’s top brass have warned Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth against prolonging the war, fearing that the U.S. would be too weak to “confront threats elsewhere,” according to The Washington Post. And then, on Tuesday, Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll resigned after clashing with Hegseth in part about the handling of the war. In other words, the Iran war is making the U.S. less safe, and the U.S. appears no closer to defeating Iran than it was in late February. But Trump continues, pathetically, to insist the U.S. has won the war—even as the countries resume tit-for-tat strikes. On Monday, he declared on Truth Social that Iran was “officially a Failed Nation. IT IS DEAD! They have no Navy, they have no Air Force, they have no currency, they are not paying their soldiers or police, Inflation is at 300%, and their leadership is in total disarray and incapable of properly representing the country.” He has been making similar claims for months, and yet Iran is still standing and the Strait of Hormuz, which was wide open before the war began, is still closed. The most powerful country in the world is somehow in a stalemate with a “DEAD” and “Failed Nation.”These deluded rants, coupled with Hegseth’s slow Pentagon purge of anyone who isn’t a loyalist, point to something quite dark. Trump’s deep-seated fear of ground operations has (blessedly) kept the war from turning into something even worse, but no bona fide war has ever been won by a combination of air power and economic sanctions alone. There are few signs that anything can bring this conflict to close. When combined with the warnings from top generals about just how overstretched the military is right now, the situation looks even dire—not just for the U.S., but for global stability. And it will probably get worse before it gets better. It almost certainly will not get better before next year, when the Democrats, assuming the November midterm elections go as expected, will be assuming control of at least one chamber of Congress. It may not improve before the 2028 presidential election, when Iran could be a pivotal issue, either directly (if the war is still ongoing) or indirectly (if the war’s fallout persists—especially the economic impacts, such as massive inflation, caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz). And yet, Democrats aren’t really talking much about Iran, beyond using it as a cudgel to damage Trump and Republicans ahead of the midterms. To be clear, that is the right political strategy. There are few reasons why Democrats should advance their own plans for resolving a thorny geopolitical issue that is entirely Trump’s responsibility. In launching the war, he chose to ignore intelligence reports that suggested Iran would not fall easily—and that it could close the Strait of Hormuz—out of the hubristic belief that massive U.S. airstrikes would generate regime change without having to put boots on the ground. The economic and human consequences of this mistake should be placed solely at the feet of Trump and the Republican Party that enabled him. This is their war, and the Democrats have no reason to help him stop it. Even if they did, he wouldn’t listen anyway. Moreover, a competing plan for resolution of that war—even if it was wise or plausible or both—would only distract from the facts of that war, all of which are very damaging to Trump and the GOP. Democrats should focus most of their political attention on rising costs and a depleted military—for now. But there is an argument that as the midterms approach, Democrats can press a successful policy to end the war that is also good politics. There have been signs throughout the war that Iran would end it if the U.S. adopted an agreement that is more or less similar to the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which ensured that Iran’s nuclear program remained peaceful in exchange for the gradual unfreezing of economic assets. There are some caveats, the main one being that Iran would almost certainly want a more favorable version of the JCPOA that included as much as $20 billion in unfrozen assets (versus $2 billion in the original), partly as reparation costs for the damage wrought by U.S. bombs.Still, the fact is that the JCPOA, though much maligned at the time as a “giveaway” to Iran that weakened the U.S., worked as intended. It certainly worked far better than Trump’s war has. Democrats’ pushing a return to the Iran deal—as way to bring peace, constrain Iran’s nuclear ambitions, reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and give the military time to restock—would provide a useful contrast to the current administration. It would also hint at what the next Democrat administration must do: rebuild the numerous alliances and relationships that Trump was broken. Given the domestic wreckage being caused by this administration’s foreign policy, that message surely would hold some appeal for American voters this fall.