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Does the president really want to be compared to Jimmy Carter (may his soul rest), but in donald trumpIn this case, the parallels are now hard to ignore. Carter’s presidency was overtaken by a shelter crisis Iranwhere in 1979 followers of Ayatollah Khomeini captured 66 Americans and held them (or most of them, at least) for more than a year. The impasse played out like a televised drama: it was a cool climb to Ted Koppel’s film. night line – and became entwined in the public’s mind with runaway inflation, interest rates and gas prices, as Carter pleaded with Americans to turn down their thermostats and put on sweaters. All of this indicated that the country was in a spiral and that the president was overcome.
Nearly half a century later, Trump stumbled upon his own relentless hostage crisis in Iran, this time entirely of his own making. For several weeks, Iran has held the Derecho or Hormuz – and, by extension, the global economy – at gunpoint. The chances of permanently ending the standoff appear to fluctuate day by day, as Trump desperately searches for a way out of the conundrum. As I write this, the most likely outcome appears to be a humiliating capitulation by Trump, in which Iran will loosen its grip on oil in exchange for a bunch of vague talking points about future achievements.
Once again, Americans have come to conflate stagnation with rising costs and economic instability, both of which are sure to last long after the military crisis has passed. In May, Trump’s approval ratings fell to the 35 percent range, not as low as Carter’s nadir, but nowhere near as high as Carter’s ratings were in the first months after the introductions were made.
In recent weeks, discussion over strategy in Iran has given way to a debate over whether the entire enterprise was worth the economic costs. After years of battling post-pandemic inflation, Americans are seeing another rise in the price of gasoline and food, while hopes for the lower interest rates that Trump continues to promise have dimmed. The Pentagon has spent, conservatively speaking, more than $30 billion on the war and has asked Congress for $1.5 trillion in the next budget, roughly a 50 percent increase over the previous year.
Meanwhile, Trump has dismissed rising gas prices as “peanuts.” When asked recently whether he considered the costs to American consumers when trying to reach a deal with Iran, he gave what was – even for him – an impressive answer. “Not even a little bit,” Trump said. “The only thing that matters when I talk about Iran is that they can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about the financial situation of the Americans.” If AI server farms don’t overwhelm the country’s power grid, the number of Democratic ad creators downloading that clip might.
It’s not normally my thing to defend Trump, but before we caricature him as a hopelessly out-of-touch billionaire warmonger, we should consider the possibility that he was right. If one is pressured to go to war, and if the fate of innocent Americans and their foreign allies depends on the outcome, then it is short-sighted to focus on what it will cost taxpayers in the short term. It could also be economically foolish, since an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel or the United States would almost certainly have worse economic consequences for everyone. Nothing in Trump’s statement is all that out of alignment with how previous wartime presidents viewed looming threats, except perhaps the courage to say it out loud.
In the last century, the United States fought World War II, followed by long engagements in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and that doesn’t even take into account the covert conflicts waged around the world in the name of defeating communism, or the trillions of dollars spent on the arms race. And yet, despite all that, we rarely talk about war as a spreadsheet analysis.
We argued, almost to the breaking point, about the loss of American lives, particularly in Vietnam, and some people put bumper stickers on their cars that said things like, “It’s going to be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to have a bake sale to buy a bomber.” But overall, the monetary costs of the war were a footnote in the policy debate. This was partly because the country remained, even after the height of the industrial age, prosperous enough to look the other way, but also because we took for granted the economic burden of being a superpower. If war had to be fought, who else was going to do it?
So there is a world in which I would agree with Trump’s response and might even find it admirable. Except we don’t live in that world: we live in the real world. And in this world, there are so many flaws in Trump’s theory of the case that it’s hard to know where to start.
FOR ONE, Iran did not actually have a nuclear weapon and was not about to have one. That’s not me playing nuclear detective; that’s Trump’s own Defense Department, which estimated last year that it would be about nine years before Iran could test a weapon, a timeline that could have been pushed even further with some kind of deal involving a monitoring regime, if anyone had thought of that. Oh wait, someone did! But Trump broke that agreement the moment he arrived at the White House, because it had Barack Obama’s signature.
It is true that Iran was much closer to having the enriched uranium needed to design a bomb. But even now, Trump and his Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, have no apparent plan to recover that uranium, unless it involves sending Jack Ryan (whom Hegseth may well think is real). Instead, as I write, Trump is negotiating a deal that will look a lot like Obama’s deal in the way it eliminates what Trump calls “nuclear dust,” except that it will also free up far more cash for the Iranian regime than Obama ever released. And in any case, this regime will ultimately be further determined to get a bomb, since without it Iran will have very little leverage to prevent another attack.
Furthermore, if Trump’s war was out of necessity, rather than choice, why didn’t he bother to make that case beforehand? In the brief period before the war (a blink of an eye compared to the time George W. Bush spent selling his invasion of Iraq), Trump talked more about Iranian protesters and regime change than about any urgent nuclear threat. And that was before his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, revealed the most plausible reason for the attack: Israel was going to do it anyway, so, you know, why not? The truth is that Trump, who consistently campaigned against foreign wars, somehow didn’t think he needed a clear justification for starting one, so it’s not really surprising that two-thirds of the public disapprove of the whole venture.
And this idea that American families should sacrifice themselves for the cause would seem a lot less irritating if the president weren’t so busy spending public money on every ridiculous, Nero-esque whim that crosses his mind. We’re all supposed to tighten our belts and carpool more while Trump spends hundreds of billions of our dollars on a ballroom, a statue garden, and a giant Napoleonic arch, not to mention striking a deal with his own administration that will basically protect him and his kids from having to pay taxes again, plus possibly wasting cash, again. his cash: to supporters who were unfairly persecuted for the patriotic act of storming the Capitol and attempting to kill their representatives. All of this makes the “I can’t worry about your household finances” stance sound a little hollow.
The bottom line is this: Trump is absolutely right that the economic cost of the war was not the real issue here. It is the war itself and the way he got us into it that is now crippling his presidency. I’m not very good at formulating concise, general rules for life’s often complicated situations, but if I had one for a president, it would be this: If the argument about a war centers on the economic costs, then you probably shouldn’t fight it in the first place. Because when Americans clearly see the need for military intervention, they don’t care what it costs. And if you can’t make them see reason, then you don’t have to ask them to sacrifice.
After all, that is the essence of leadership: persuading people to put the national interest above their own. Carter was a completely decent man who failed that test. Trump checks just one of those boxes.
