This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

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........

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