Whole Hog Politics: It was voters, not Senate Republicans, who forced Trump’s hand on Iran

[Watch Whole Hog Politics live: Join us today at 9 am ET at TheHill.com as Chris Stirewalt and host Bill Sammon break down this week’s political news and answer questions from a live online audience.]

The early returns are in, and we can pretty safely say that Americans like the peace with Iran but strongly dislike the war that it ended. 

The truce is shaky, with hour-by-hour challenges that seem to throw the whole thing into a cocked hat. More likely, though, we are watching the micro-application of Carl von Clausewitz’s dictum that “war is a continuation of politics by other means.” By harassing ships in the Strait of Hormuz that are not sticking to designated lanes — the lanes Iran will seek to use for extortion later — the Iranians are giving real-time examples of their demands in the ongoing negotiations.

One can reasonably assume that the coming months will bring more of the same as the Tehran government wheedles everything it can out of the United States and the West. That’s been the norm for Iranian foreign relations for nearly 50 years, so why expect anything different now?

Some things are different now than when the war began at the end of February, though. Iran’s conventional military and nuclear capabilities took an absolute thrashing. The Islamic state’s threats against their neighbors will ring hollower for some time to come. But the Iranians know something, too: America’s heart just isn’t in this one.

When Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho) was pleading with his colleagues not to support a symbolic war powers resolution on Tuesday, he made a couple of bold assertions. He observed that it would have “no effect” on President Trump, who he said wouldn’t “pay any attention to it.” That was pretty clearly not true, since part of what caused the president to release his famously vesuvian temper on Senate Republicans at a tense Wednesday luncheon was the rebuke he was handed in that bipartisan vote against the war.

The anger, in turn, had its own effect. Aside from Trump’s fit of pique around signing a bipartisan housing bill, the eruption probably helped peel off a couple of votes that prevented an even more restrictive — but still only symbolic — resolution from passing on Thursday. The president, who often fails to understand the difference between being important and being powerful, did not like even a symbolic rebuke because it highlighted the fact that he had already run out of options with Iran. The economic anxiety of so many American voters had already forbidden an expansion or indefinite extension of the war. The Senate pointing out that obvious fact no doubt made the president feel very testy indeed.

But Risch made another assertion about the original war powers vote: “The Iranians are going to simply stand up and walk away from negotiations. They’re going to say, ‘This thing’s over.’ The Congress has told the president of the United States, ‘Leave us alone. We can do whatever we want to do.’” 

Much in the way that he had overestimated the president’s nonchalance in the face of symbolic defeats, Risch underestimated Iran’s understanding of American politics. Not only do Iran’s foreign policy officials know how Washington works after decades of playing versions of this same game with multiple presidents, they can also read the polls.

As one new survey suggests, Americans overwhelmingly support ending the war — by a margin of more than two to one — but by similarly large margins believe it is a bad deal for the United States. From Strength in Numbers: “Only 18% of Americans say the U.S. actually achieved its goals in Iran, while nearly half — 46% — say the country should never have gone to war in the first place. Overall, 61% of adults say they are not confident the deal will stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon, as the Trump administration claims.”

A Quinnipiac University poll provides some similar numbers, with a tighter focus on partisanship. Overall, just 34 percent of voters said the war had been worth it. What’s keeping that number from being even more dire for the president is that three quarters of Republicans remained on his side. Among independent voters, though, just 29 percent thought the juice had been worth the squeeze.

This is, of course, why the president says he has his Justice Department looking to punish “Big Oil” for “gouging” consumers instead of lowering prices, pulling a page out of the Biden........

© The Hill