How to Ignore a War |
On Wednesday night, President Trump told Americans — once more — that the war in Iran has (almost) been won.
The month-old conflict has been a fount of “Mission Accomplished” moments from the president. “The war is very complete — pretty much,” he said ten days after the first missile strike. The “fight is Militarily WON,” he said 11 days and thousands of strikes after that. On March 27 — day 28 of the war — Trump notified the nation, “We’re two weeks ahead of schedule.” Last night’s speech was more of the same. “We are on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly, very shortly.”
The president is scrambling to capitalize on the twisted ways that Americans have learned to process war since 9/11. His fear is that we will rebuke his presidency en masse if he drags the U.S. into another dead-end conflict. But a lifeline is coming into focus: If he supplies us with enough time and distractions, we might simply forget a war is happening.
Trump’s logic of foreign policy in his second term has mirrored his domestic PR: Break so much, so fast, that no one can really keep track or — for the average exhausted American — care. We might bomb Cuba; we may attack Greenland. There’s a dizzying sense of constant discord and vague details. All is negotiation and leverage, and therefore accepted as a gambit, rather than a cogent argument for bombs or sanctions. Whether or not it’s purposeful, it’s familiar. We may be at war, but it’s either too vague or too chaotic to really follow what’s happening.
Yet it’s starting to look like his framing of the war in Iran could benefit from a softer touch. A Pew survey conducted in mid-March found that 59 percent of Americans think Trump’s decision to use military force there is wrong. Respondents were twice as likely to say the war is not going well than going well. An Ipsos survey conducted the same week found that 55 percent of Americans would not support sending ground troops. These findings chime with Trump’s dire approval ratings, which have plummeted in concert with the war’s mounting costs, both human and financial.
It’s early enough in the process that people are still angry on moral grounds. “It’s pathetic,” one Michigan resident told NBC News about the Iran war. “He said he was gonna try and get out of wars,” said another who voted for Trump. “I think it wasn’t necessary,” a Texas resident told BBC News. And even if anger fades, the economic ripples could keep spreading: Trump’s approval numbers have cratered on his signature issue in part because Iran’s retaliatory blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has pushed Americans’ average gas price over $4 a gallon.
As Trump’s off-ramps for exiting Iran close, it’s in his interest for the war to fade into ambience — as the war in Afghanistan eventually did. By 2021, that conflict registered to most Americans as background noise. You’d be hard pressed at the time to find someone who could explain the latest rationale for sending troops. (Despite being at war there for two decades, how many Afghan cities can the average American name?) We blinked, and suddenly the children who were born after we invaded in 2001 were old enough to enlist and go do whatever the rest of the Marines were doing there. It felt strange to even call it a war.
It wasn’t until President Biden fulfilled his — and Trump’s — campaign promise to withdraw that the war became suddenly, hideously “real” again. And by then, it was a political liability. “The humiliation in Afghanistan set off the collapse of American credibility and respect all around the world,” Trump said of Biden’s withdrawal. The political lesson Trump took from Afghanistan is not that war is bad in and of itself — only a war that voters can see lacks resolution, that is simultaneously front of mind and short on clear victories. How far is Trump willing to go to avoid his own such humiliation in a war that looks harder to resolve by the day?
The administration’s focus on lethal strikes and never formally declaring war has seemed less like a military strategy than an outgrowth of how Trump and his allies understood what angered people about the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. The key, it appears, is assuring that people can’t get a firm grasp of what is happening. Part of the challenge is that every decision Trump makes in Iran leads to fallout that recasts the war’s initial objectives. What seemed to be early strategic victories — like the decimation of Iran’s military — no longer look so decisive after Iran’s military seized the Persian Gulf’s only shipping route. Hence the administration’s inexhaustible claims that we have already won. Hence Hegseth’s implied PR doctrine regarding the conflict: non-explanation. The point — as far as the rest of us are concerned — is bombast, violence, “Epic Fury.” “Get it right,” Hegseth told uncooperative reporters.
You can easily envision Trump’s daily routine in this propaganda environment — zoning out to the highlight reels of “stuff blowing up” that have replaced more detailed progress reports, according to NBC News. The effect is warfare that is both everywhere and nowhere, a liminal state between delusion and reality. The Strait of Hormuz, the president declares, “will automatically open.” Gas prices will “plummet.” All will be forgiven.
There is a hopeful — if not necessarily convincing — way of interpreting the backlash to this agenda. Democrats in Congress think Trump will pay a steep political cost for declaring war, which is why they’ve been angling to force him to do so. However, since invoking the War Powers Resolution has failed, they’ve made the deployment of ground troops their hard line. “I cannot overstate what a disastrous decision it would be for President Trump to order American boots on the ground,” tweeted Senator Elizabeth Warren. Middle East political analyst Firas Modad wrote that if U.S. troops are deployed, Trump can no longer simply “declare victory and leave.” Joe Kent, who recently quit his job running Trump’s counterterrorism center, said, “This would be a catastrophic escalation.” A ground incursion, they all seem to agree, would be the point at which Trump has really gone too far.
Never mind that U.S. troops who were stationed at our 13 military bases in the region have already been chased out by Iranian strikes. Never mind that Iranians didn’t automatically install a democracy just because Trump helped Israel assassinate the ayatollah. Never mind that the president is being advised to shut up about what’s happening. “I won’t use the word ‘war,’” he said, “because they say if you use the word ‘war,’ that’s maybe not a good thing to do.” Perhaps he’ll feel the squeeze once troop deaths start to register. The irony of casting a ground surge — which today seems imminent with at least 4,000 new U.S. troops arriving in the region this week — as a point of no return is that 13 American servicemembers have already been killed in the conflict.
There may be further political costs for Trump to suffer. But atrocities fade easily under his emerging rubric. American acts of war in Venezuela earlier this year are already distant memories. We are choking Cuba economically and threatening to invade, and it still feels abstract. The Navy’s deadly bombing of a girls’ elementary school in Minab on day one of the Iran war has quietly been absorbed into Trump’s narrative of inexorable triumph. The greatest danger of turning wars into ambience is that the political benefits become self-sustaining. At a certain point, the only way to lose — the only true humiliation — is to stop.
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