Trump’s war is failing and Iran’s in for the long fight

March 31, 2026 — 4:00am

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From its very beginning, the Islamic Republic of Iran famously demonised the US as the “Great Satan”. So when the White House last week threatened to “unleash hell”, Iran’s leaders were thoroughly unsurprised. They’d been expecting it. And preparing for decades.

“By the time the current war began, Iran had spent 35 years learning how to fight – and how to survive – against far more powerful adversaries,” writes Middle East expert Narges Bajoghli of Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in the journal Foreign Affairs. “Those lessons are visible in Iran’s conduct today.”

What about Donald Trump? He’s been talking about launching war on Iran for just as long. It was 1988 when the future presidential candidate demanded that the US seize Iran’s oil assets.

“Why couldn’t we go in there and take some of their oilfields near the coast?” he asked a Rotary Club event in New Hampshire. On Monday (AEDT) he told the Financial Times: “To be honest with you, my favourite thing is to take the oil in Iran.” His lines are unchanged across the decades.

The question is whether he’s spent any of the intervening years preparing seriously for such a mission or just talking about it. Because, so far, as the Australian strategist and retired major general Mick Ryan puts it, “Iran is much closer to achieving its theory of victory than the US is to achieving........

© Brisbane Times