President Trump was triumphant when he announced that his 106-day war with Iran had ended.
This initial agreement, which Trump signed at Versailles a few days later, meant the conflict was really “over” — more so than when Secretary of State Marco Rubio assured reporters that it was “over” in the first week of May, or when he again told Congress that it was “over” in the first week of June.
More finished than the dozens of times that Trump suggested that a deal was close at hand. The valedictory messaging has been discordant, given what we know. The administration framed the war as a win, the result of a “decisive military victory.
” True, Iran’s arsenal is smaller, its military weaker, its economy battered. But its government is still in place and has not ended its nuclear program or cut off the regional terrorist groups it sponsors. It is now led by the son of its last leader.
Trump boasted that, during this 60-day cease-fire, ships could move through the Strait of Hormuz “toll free” — as they could four months ago, before the conflict.
And the United States will release frozen Iranian assets, lift sanctions and (with partner nations) commit at least $300 billion for reconstruction.
Already, the war is estimated to have cost Washington more than $100 billion — and Trump’s political standing with a national supermajority that thought the adventure was a bad idea. But beyond those costs is another, potentially longer-lasting one. The toll of the war was felt heavily at U. S.
bases across the Middle East, which were thought to offer regional allies a security guarantee, assuring them of their safety under the American protective umbrella. The Iran war has exposed the fragility of that promise.
The Navy’s base in Bahrain — one of the few in the region that hosts military families — was hastily evacuated before an Iranian attack damaged it. The Combined Air Operations Center at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar is now reportedly inoperable.
“This chain of bases across the Middle East were really effective — it was like having a string of pearls surrounding Iran,” says Vali Nasr, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University. But, he adds, “The way in which the U. S.
was not able to defend them, and the way that they were damaged, has a nonmonetary cost to it that is quite significant. ” Around the world, at least 51 nations host American military bases. These outposts let the U. S.
project power and influence abroad and provide economic and military security to its allies. But after this war, friendly nations are weighing the risks of supporting the American war machine. “For any patriotic citizen of Qatar or any other Gulf country, the question arose over whether hosting U.
S. military bases was worth it,” Maryam Al-Kuwari, a scholar of international relations at Qatar University, wrote in a briefing paper for her policy institute, the Arab Center. U. S.
diplomats in Bahrain have warned of an emerging perception, fueled in part by Iranian social media bots, that the Americans left the nation alone to defend for itself.
In this respect, the administration’s contradictions and obfuscations about the status, cost, rationale and resolution of the war reveal something different than officials intend. It’s not just that they appear to be in denial about what the conflict means.
It has enabled the rest of the world to clearly see what the White House cannot acknowledge: The United States is no longer the world’s unquestioned hegemon, and the promise of its protection is not absolute. The war in Iran marks the end of any lingering illusions of American omnipotence.
Almost every end of empire has been accompanied by a particular kind of wishful thinking — call it self-deception, call it willful misdirection — to process the new reality.
The administration’s mixed messaging about the anticlimactic cease-fire was a symptom of a destabilizing and consequential trend: “The back and forth, to me, is the superpower coming to terms with the fact that it lost a very big strategic war,” says Narges Bajoghli, a professor at Johns Hopkins who specializes in Iran.
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