When I read history, I often wonder
what it must have felt like to live those events in real time, as I’m sure you
do. Did it seem an ominous moment in June 1914 when Gavrilo Princip shot
Archduke Franz-Ferdinand? If I were a Briton in September 1938, would I have had
an uneasy sense of foreboding watching the newsreel of Neville Chamberlain
stepping off that plane from Munich?

I think such thoughts this week
because I have no doubt that future historians and readers of history will
surely wonder what the ever-living fuck we were all thinking when Donald Trump both
started and then lost his immoral and pointless war with Iran. What we have just
witnessed is almost beyond belief, and would be beyond belief if we didn’t all
know going in that Trump is such an aggressively and willfully stupid human
being, utterly impervious to knowledge and facts, serenely cocooned in his
carapace of ignorance, surrounded by flatterers who patronize him as one does a
child and who scream at Americans about his nonexistent genius, courage, and
virility. They exist in a fantasyland.

But we live in the real world, and
in the real world, this war was a disaster in every imaginable sense. Let’s
tally up the damage:

• First of all, there was already a diplomatic
  agreement with Iran that was working; the International Atomic Energy Agency reported
  repeatedly that Iran was abiding by the Obama-era JCPOA deal. There was no
  need for Donald Trump to do anything.
• But of course, the deal was the handiwork of Barack
  Obama—the Kenyan Marxist who made a few jokes at Trump’s expense at a dinner
  one time; so Trump tore it to pieces.
• Almost instantly, Iran started
  enriching uranium at levels well above the 3.67 percent limit set by the
  JCPOA. And why not? Trump broke the agreement. Of course they started enriching
  uranium at high levels again.
• In other words: The fact that Iran once again
  became a nuclear threat is entirely Donald Trump’s fault.
• With
  respect to its capability to build a nuclear weapon, Iran’s “breakout time,” in the
  preferred parlance of diplomacy, went
  from 12 months to seven days. That is not a typo.
• So
  Trump discovers this one day. Maybe Benjamin Netanyahu explained it to him. We’ll
  learn that whole story at some future point. In any case, out of nowhere on the
  last day of February, with no warning, no prep, no nothing, Trump starts a war.
  Within hours, we bomb a school, killing around 120 children.
• From
  a purely military standpoint, the war goes fine. We suffer few casualties,
  although we do kill 3,500 or more people. But Iran counters by doing the
  thing that every expert in the world knew Iran would do if it was ever
  attacked: It asserts its control over the Strait of Hormuz. If you want to come
  through, you have to pay to play. Up go the gas prices.
• Now
  Trump is trapped. And he’s starting to get bored because the regime didn’t
  collapse in two weeks like he thought it would. He wants out. So he sends his
  corrupt son-in-law, in bed with the Saudis and in the middle of trying to humiliate Albania for no good reason, to sort
  things out.
• That
  brings us to this week: the outlines of a deal that looks for all the world
  like a complete surrender. The United States of America, for only the second
  time in its 237 years on this earth, has unambiguously lost a war.

People can debate the above. I’m counting Vietnam,
obviously; there’s no doubt about that one. I reckon the War of 1812 and the
Korean War as stalemates. Under the Treaty of Ghent, the United States and
Britain just agreed to go back to the way things were before the war, and with
respect to Korea, the line was the 38th parallel pre-bellum and postbellum.

Some will say Iraq was a loss, but I rate it, too, as kind
of a draw. It sure wasn’t a win of the sort Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz told
us to expect. It cost many trillions of dollars and killed hundreds of
thousands. To a mixed result: Today, Iraq is a democracy, of a sort, but it’s a long way from being free. But I perhaps charitably call
it a draw because the U.S. did achieve the core stated aim: It deposed Saddam
Hussein.

Here, though, we have not achieved any of Trump’s shifting
stated claims. There’s no regime change—or, to the extent that Trump has
managed to change the regime, it’s even more hard-line and more powerful in the
region than it was before the war!

And that’s before we and other nations fork over the
infamous $300 billion, just a mind-boggling figure. Conservatives wanted Barack
Obama impeached over the money he agreed to pay Iran (which was Iran’s money,
frozen in U.S. banks), which was $1.7 billion. Trump is going to hand Iran 176
times that amount. And it’s going to end up being more, because the $300
billion is separate from whatever frozen assets Trump decides to unfreeze. Word
around the campfire is that we are talking about another $25 billion or so.  

Some perspective on how much $325 billion is. The total U.S.
foreign aid budget for 2025 was about $60 billion. More pointedly: Estimates
vary, but it seems that Iran spends around $1 billion a year propping up Hezbollah.
Imagine how much they’ll be able to spend when their Trumpy ship comes in!

The one slender thread on which the Trump administration is
now hanging its hopes is that in the coming negotiations, it’ll get Iran to
surrender its current stockpile of enriched uranium. That, admittedly, would be
something that the JCPOA didn’t do. If they pull that off, even I will say good
for them.

But for Iran, of course, this is a nearly inconceivable
concession. What seems more likely to happen is that the two sides will agree
to terms calling for Iran to dilute its highly enriched uranium under
international supervision. Trump will sell this as a great victory. But this
“down-blending,” as it’s called, was also in the JCPOA!

Above, I called this war immoral and pointless. The
pointless part speaks for itself. It has accomplished nothing except making
Iran stronger and the United States weaker. If Barack Obama or Joe Biden had
done this, not only would they have been instantly impeached if the Republicans
controlled the House, but the entire Democratic Party would have been
discredited on foreign policy matters for a generation at least.

But the immoral part is worse. Trump started a war, killed a
few thousand people, got tired of it, and surrendered to one of the most
reactionary regimes on earth, which went on a gleeful killing spree of its own
citizens earlier this year. Since the commencement of these hostilities in February, Iran
has executed 44 more people and detained another 6,000. That’s
the regime Donald Trump just strengthened and is about to hand many billions of
dollars to. “Immoral” barely scratches the surface.

This is an epic failure. It’s not quite September 1938. But
that’s only because Iran’s mullahs don’t have Hitler’s global ambitions. Morally,
it’s a Neville Chamberlain moment of a sort the United States has never
experienced. The icing on the cake would be Trump taking to Truth Social and
boasting about “peace in our time.” A man who signed a treaty at Versailles
is ignorant enough of history to not even know why that phrase resonates.