Trump’s war is failing – two blind spots have made him look absurd

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During the first days of the war launched by the US and Israel against Iran on 28 February, US President Donald Trump boasted that he had won a crushing victory by killing the top Iranian leadership, destroying its air force and navy, and compelling the country to beg for a peace deal. After a shaky ceasefire was put in place on 28 April, the President insisted that the US naval blockade of Iran would prove even more effective than his bombing campaign in ensuring Iran’s total defeat.

Trump is not the first national leader in history to make embarrassing claims about having overcome a much-despised enemy, when all the world can see it is not true. Writing about the prolonged and unsuccessful attempts by the British prime minister, William Pitt, to defeat revolutionary France in the 1790s, the great 19th-century historian Lord Macaulay, wrote that “it was pitiable to hear him, year after year, proving to an admiring audience that the wicked [French] Republic was exhausted, that she could not hold out, that her credit was exhausted,” and the French currency was not worth the paper it was printed on.

In a few contemptuous words, he dismissed those who imagine that economic inferiority necessarily meant military weakness, “as if Alboin [a ruthless sixth-century barbarian king] could not turn Italy into a desert till he had negotiated a loan at 5 per cent, as if the exchequer bills of Attila had been at par”.

Pitt was a much abler man than Trump, but his baffled frustration over Britain’s failure to overcome France has much in common with the President’s confused and contradictory messaging about the outcome of a war he claimed he had won. In both these conflicts, though 200 years apart, the two key reasons why a superior military and economic power failed to conquer an inferior one are the same: national solidarity and fanatical faith.

It is often imagined that the Islamic Republic of Iran was at its peak strength from the moment Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew the Shah in a popular revolution in 1979. In reality, it was the Iraqi invasion of Iran in 1980 that really consolidated the new regime. External attacks united Iranians, including many dubious about clerical rule, who repelled Saddam Hussein’s army despite the Iraqi leader being armed and financed by the West and most of the Arab world. Khomeini was only persuaded that the odds against Iran were too great eight years later, famously saying that he would “drain the bitter cup” by agreeing to a ceasefire in 1988, but, even then, Iran had not been defeated.

Much the same is happening in the current war. Despite 13,000 American and 10,800 Israeli air strikes on Iran over five and a half weeks, the regime is politically, diplomatically and militarily stronger than it was prior to the conflict. Its popular support had been estimated by Iran specialists to be 15 to 20 per cent of the 92 million Iranian population, but that was before an American Tomahawk missile struck a girls’ school in southern Iran, killing 156 people of whom 120 were school children. Trump had promised to free Iranians from tyranny, but he was soon threatening to destroy “Iranian civilisation” and send the country “back to the Stone Age”.

The unifying impact of external attack on a divided nation is widely recognised – and is particularly true of bombing campaigns, which, whatever their pretensions to accuracy, invariably degrade into the communal punishment of an entire nation.

But Macaulay pointed to another cause of British military failure against revolutionary France which applies equally to contemporary Iran, though its importance is insufficiently appreciated. He wrote that Pitt failed to realise that he was fighting “a state which was also a sect”, and Trump has made a very similar mistake in taking on Iran.

Most Iranians may have moved away from the fanatical belief of almost half a century ago when the Shia version of Islam appeared to be the answer to all of the nation’s problems. The popular base of the regime is far smaller today, but Shi’ism still provides the ideological glue that holds together the multiple strands of power in Iran under clerical dominance. This rendered absurd Trump’s big idea – encouraged by Israel, whose goal is to destroy the Iranian state regardless of who runs it – which was to decapitate the Iranian regime, as he had done successfully in Venezuela, and replace its leader with his own stooge.

Shi’ism lies at the heart of Iranian culture, a faith that emphasises endurance in the face of suffering and unceasing resistance in response to oppression. Its equivalent to the passion and crucifixion of Jesus is the martyrdom of the Imams Hussein and Abbas, killed by their Umayyad enemies in a battle on the plains of Kerbala in Iraq in 680 AD. Commemorated annually by tens of millions of Shia, these heroic struggles 1,400 years ago are well adapted to inspire prolonged resistance against superior forces.

In their wars in Iraq, the US and its Western allies invariably underestimated the decisive role of religion. Until shortly before the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, president George W Bush was reportedly unaware that there was a split in Islam between Sunni and Shia Muslims. Yet, even among those better informed, this historic religious divide is usually misstated or misunderstood.

After the triumph of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Khomeini wanted to spread Shi’ism to the rest of the Islamic world, but this was always unrealistic. Revolutionary Shi’ism took root where there were existing Shia communities, notably in Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen, and among the smaller Shia communities in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. Iran was always a Shia, not a pan-Islamic power.

Western politicians and pundits speak of Iranian “proxies”, as if these were mercenary forces, but in practice they are Shia communities in arms which receive aid from Tehran to a greater or lesser degree. They cannot hope to spread their influence far outside their own branch of Islam, but Shia communal solidarity gives them great resilience in adversity. Hezbollah in Lebanon springs from the two million strong Lebanese Shia community and has taken a fearful battering from Israel since 2023, with Shia currently being forced out of their heartlands in south Lebanon and in south Beirut. Yet, despite fearful losses, Hezbollah fights on.

Two-thirds of the 44 million population of Iraq are Shia, a fact that helped stymie the US occupation. Though not in total control of the Iraqi Shia, the Iranians have a fair measure of authority over them. Some years after the US-led invasion, a cynical Iraqi friend told me: “I have just been to Shia southern Iraq and visited the pro-Iranian militia groups, which are under Iranian control, and I also visited the anti-Iranian groups – which are also under Iranian control.”

Having fired so many US experts on the Middle East, it is unlikely that Trump and his entourage of belligerent amateurs and crackpots know or care about the religious complexities of the conflict in which they are inescapably mired. Those fighting for their faith do not easily give up unless they are decisively defeated – and Iran is a long way from that.

Further thoughts

Britain is entering an era of identity politics, as rioters hurl missiles at the police in Southampton while using the Union Jack as their battle flag. The sort of political street violence once largely confined to Northern Ireland has spread to the mainland and is becoming the norm. At the heart of this change in political culture is escalating conflict between whites and non-whites, with immigration the most contentious issue – which mirrors the age-old conflict between Catholic and Protestant in the North.

Parallels between Northern Ireland-style politics and Britain today are obvious, though little remarked. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage strongly resembles the late Rev Ian Paisley, the charismatic, populist demagogue who became the dominant figure in the Protestant community. Paisley denounced the UK Government for being too eager to redress Catholic grievances, which he downplayed, at the expense of Protestants in much the same way as Farage speaks of “two-tier policing” in favour of non-whites. Paisley’s political vehicle, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), has much in common with Reform.

When the Good Friday Agreement ended the Troubles after 30 years in 1998, optimists expected that Northern Ireland would gradually become more like the UK mainland. By a grim irony, it is the precise opposite that is happening. When it comes to crime, the first question increasingly being asked in Britain is the racial identity of perpetrator and victim.

Such parallels are not popular with the mainland British who have long thought of Northern Ireland as a weird and violent place that can teach them nothing. Most mainland British would be baffled or insulted to be told that what might be called the “Ulsterisation” of British politics is underway and going from strength to strength. Political violence is an obvious symptom of this. Another is blaming a different community for all ills – rising crime, housing shortage, overburdened NHS. Reform hypes the physical and cultural threat facing whites just as the DUP has long portrayed the Protestants as under siege.

British racial strife is similarly infecting the North, where it take an even more violent form. A year ago, in the Protestant bastion of Ballymena, a mob drove out Romanian Roma from the town. They fled to Larne on the coast 20 miles away where they were housed for safety in a leisure centre which was in turn set ablaze by masked attackers. If you want a preview of Britain’s potential dystopian future, look at Northern Ireland’s toxic past.

Beneath the radar

The media was all geared up this week for the latest Government release of documents about the appointment of Lord Peter Mandelson as UK ambassador in Washington. One paper boasted of having 10 teams waiting to sift through the 1,500 pages for fresh evidence of wrong-doing by Mandelson and those who appointed him.

But in the event, the release was something of a damp squib. Mandelson had predictably made catty and mildly offensive remarks about Sir Keir Starmer and the Downing Street operation, but no new scandals were unmasked. Indeed, so much is now known about the Mandelson appointment that there may literally be nothing new to learn.

I still find it surprising that Starmer and Downing Street would put quite so much effort into getting Mandelson to Washington. Behind it was probably an exaggerated idea of the amount of influence a British ambassador has with any US administration. The “special relationship” between the US and Britain does not really exist in the minds of Americans, and attempts to breathe phoney life into it are embarrassing and time-wasting.

I commented on this earlier in the week, leading my friend Denis MacShane, formerly a minister at the Foreign Office, to write confirming my point. He said that when the “story first broke I made the point that from my experience as FCO minister responsible for relations with US (PM and foreign secretary did all important stuff but they needed someone to do lower-level UK-US stuff) the only time a UK ambassador would get face time with POTUS [president of the US] was when he was presenting credential or accompanying King or PM into W House if former were visiting DC but then just kept mouth shut. Idea PM or any US ambo had any influence over a POTUS is sheer fantasy.”

Cockburn’s Picks

I enjoyed this interview by Ezra Klein of the New York Times with the Israeli public intellectual Yuval Noah Harari about the impact of the wars in the Middle East on Judaism and on Israel. It goes deeper and is more sophisticated than most such discussions.