Trump Risks Another American ‘Forever War’

During his 2024 campaign the Felon promised there would be no more forever foreign wars. Like virtually everything else that comes out of his mouth - including his whining last night about elections -  this promise has proven to be a lie as the war of choice against Iran is shaping up to be a potential "forever war" and the Felon contemplates military action against Cuba.  Adding to the debacle is the reality that the Felon has never had a long term strategy in Iran. He merely thought he'd attack and Iran would capitulate and the war would be quickly over like his military adventure in Venezuela. The driving motivation? The Felon's hubris, delusions of grandeur and a need for distractions to redirect the media focus from the Epstein scandal. No plan, an unhinged Secretary of Defense and the alienation of allies all further compound the mess of the Felon's own creation.  Don't expect the Felon to accept responsibility for this disaster any time soon. A piece in the New York Times looks at how the Felon may be sliding America into a forever war of his own - a war that is almost universally opposed by a majority of Americans. Here are excerpts:

No one starts a war expecting it to last forever. Yet, since Vietnam, American presidents have repeatedly gotten into conflicts that seem like they could last forever, at least until the next president — or the one after that — decides that the expense and political pain are not worth it, declares victory and goes home.

On Iran, [the Felon] President Trump may have fallen into the same trap.

He campaigned for office vowing to end wars, not start them, and to never get involved in a forever war, let alone one in the Middle East. And yet he risks doing so in Iran, his critics say.

The war that Israel and the United States began with such force has alternated between moments of negotiation and military strikes. They have failed so far to reach Mr. Trump’s stated goals of regime change or ending Iran’s nuclear program, while the war has created a new, seemingly intractable problem, bottling up the Strait of Hormuz.

[A] frustrated Mr. Trump finds himself back at war, the cease-fire broken, the strait blocked. The memorandum of understanding he said “achieves everything we set out to accomplish” — despite wildly divergent interpretations of it — is in tatters after less than a month.

[S]aid Ali Vaez, Iran project director for the International Crisis Group. [said] Without a long-term strategy to produce a sustainable settlement, he said, there’s a risk of creating “the circumstances for a forever war.”

The idea of the “forever wars” began with 9/11 and the “global war on terror,” pulling the United States into long military engagements, with troops on the ground, in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Those conflicts, which began by toppling hostile regimes before turning into counterinsurgency campaigns, ended either inconclusively or in defeat after considerable expenditure and loss of life.

Powerful leaders with powerful militaries are prone to fall into “the short-war fallacy,” said Lawrence D. Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College, London, who last year wrote an article, “The Age of Forever Wars.” “They think they can win quickly and not suffer adverse consequences,” he said.

Like Mr. Trump in Iran and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Ukraine, “they fail to appreciate the limits of military power and so set objectives that can be achieved, if at all, only through prolonged struggle,” Mr. Freedman said.

And even the most sophisticated military forces are not enough, if there’s no strategy to turn battlefield superiority into lasting political and diplomatic success. Mr. Trump faces the added challenge of trying to win using only air and sea power, without politically unpalatable use of ground troops on Iranian soil.

The Persian Gulf war of 1991 was quick and succeeded in its aims, because President George H.W. Bush had a limited political objective — drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. That was a lesson lost on his son, President George W. Bush, in the second war against Iraq, which ended up enhancing Iran’s power in the region.

There is an argument, sometimes made by Mr. Trump himself, that he went to war in Iran to finally end what he considered a 47-year war between the United States and Iran, which began with the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979 and the taking of more than 60 American hostages.

Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Mr. Trump, urged by Israel, has also inserted himself in a parallel “forever war” — the one between Israel and Iran, which is being played out with Iran’s proxies in Lebanon, the Palestinian territories and Yemen.

[The Felon] seems to be doubling down, albeit with no clear path to a diplomatic settlement. And his commitment to keep the Strait of Hormuz open, while Iran insists on maintaining control, could mean a very long American military engagement, even with the help of allies.

Still, the Iran war is different, especially compared to Afghanistan and the second war against Iraq. In both of those wars, thousands of American troops were on the ground for long periods of time and ended up fighting militias and terrorists opposed to new governments propped up by the United States — not fighting a state like Iran.

And unlike the case in Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan, Iran can inflict economic pain on the United States by blocking access to the Strait of Hormuz, which gives Tehran more effective leverage and is a prime reason it will refuse to give up control.

There will be no return to the situation before the war, said Suzanne Maloney, director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. As in Iraq, American assumptions and misperceptions changed the balance of power in the region, she said, and now the days of the Strait of Hormuz fully free for transit are probably over.

There can be “a new normal,” she said, “but with a much higher American force posture in the region” given Iran’s ability to hit ships whenever it pleases.

But a negotiated end to the war in Iran still feels far away. Both sides have proven they can’t even stick to a minimal framework agreement that defers all the substantive issues to the future, Mr. Vaez said. If they can’t even do that, he added, “that could remove the last barrier between episodic confrontation and a forever war.”