If Obama Had Done What Trump Just Did on Iran, He’d Be Crucified

The United States just unambiguously lost a war that it started for no good reason. A sane country would remove the imbecile who did this immediately.

When I read history, I often wonder what it must have felt like to live those events in real time, as I’m sure you do. Did it seem an ominous moment in June 1914 when Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz-Ferdinand? If I were a Briton in September 1938, would I have had an uneasy sense of foreboding watching the newsreel of Neville Chamberlain stepping off that plane from Munich?

I think such thoughts this week because I have no doubt that future historians and readers of history will surely wonder what the ever-living fuck we were all thinking when Donald Trump both started and then lost his immoral and pointless war with Iran. What we have just witnessed is almost beyond belief, and would be beyond belief if we didn’t all know going in that Trump is such an aggressively and willfully stupid human being, utterly impervious to knowledge and facts, serenely cocooned in his carapace of ignorance, surrounded by flatterers who patronize him as one does a child and who scream at Americans about his nonexistent genius, courage, and virility. They exist in a fantasyland.

But we live in the real world, and in the real world, this war was a disaster in every imaginable sense. Let’s tally up the damage:

First of all, there was already a diplomatic agreement with Iran that was working; the International Atomic Energy Agency reported repeatedly that Iran was abiding by the Obama-era JCPOA deal. There was no need for Donald Trump to do anything.

But of course, the deal was the handiwork of Barack Obama—the Kenyan Marxist who made a few jokes at Trump’s expense at a dinner one time; so Trump tore it to pieces.

Almost instantly, Iran started enriching uranium at levels well above the 3.67 percent limit set by the JCPOA. And why not? Trump broke the agreement. Of course they started enriching uranium at high levels again.

In other words: The fact that Iran once again became a nuclear threat is entirely Donald Trump’s fault.

With respect to its capability to build a nuclear weapon, Iran’s “breakout time,” in the preferred parlance of diplomacy, went from 12 months to seven days. That is not a typo.

So Trump discovers this one day. Maybe Benjamin Netanyahu explained it to him. We’ll learn that whole story at some future point. In any case, out of nowhere on the last day of February, with no warning, no prep, no nothing, Trump starts a war. Within hours, we bomb a school, killing around 120 children.

From a purely military standpoint, the war goes fine. We suffer few casualties, although we do kill 3,500 or more people. But Iran counters by doing the thing that every expert in the world knew Iran would do if it was ever attacked: It asserts its control over the Strait of Hormuz. If you want to come through, you have to pay to play. Up go the gas prices.

Now Trump is trapped. And he’s starting to get bored because the regime didn’t collapse in two weeks like he thought it would. He wants out. So he sends his corrupt son-in-law, in bed with the Saudis and in the middle of trying to humiliate Albania for no good reason, to sort things out.

That brings us to this week: the outlines of a deal that looks for all the world like a complete surrender. The United States of America, for only the second time in its 237 years on this earth, has unambiguously lost a war.

People can debate the above. I’m counting Vietnam, obviously; there’s no doubt about that one. I reckon the War of 1812 and the Korean War as stalemates. Under the Treaty of Ghent, the United States and Britain just agreed to go back to the way things were before the war, and with respect to Korea, the line was the 38th parallel pre-bellum and postbellum.

Some will say Iraq was a loss, but I rate it, too, as kind of a draw. It sure wasn’t a win of the sort Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz told us to expect. It cost many trillions of dollars and killed hundreds of thousands. To a mixed result: Today, Iraq is a democracy, of a sort, but it’s a long way from being free. But I perhaps charitably call it a draw because the U.S. did achieve the core stated aim: It deposed Saddam Hussein.

Here, though, we have not achieved any of Trump’s shifting stated claims. There’s no regime change—or, to the extent that Trump has managed to change the regime, it’s even more hard-line and more powerful in the region than it was before the war!

And that’s before we and other nations fork over the infamous $300 billion, just a mind-boggling figure. Conservatives wanted Barack Obama impeached over the money he agreed to pay Iran (which was Iran’s money, frozen in U.S. banks), which was $1.7 billion. Trump is going to hand Iran 176 times that amount. And it’s going to end up being more, because the $300 billion is separate from whatever frozen assets Trump decides to unfreeze. Word around the campfire is that we are talking about another $25 billion or so.  

Some perspective on how much $325 billion is. The total U.S. foreign aid budget for 2025 was about $60 billion. More pointedly: Estimates vary, but it seems that Iran spends around $1 billion a year propping up Hezbollah. Imagine how much they’ll be able to spend when their Trumpy ship comes in!

The one slender thread on which the Trump administration is now hanging its hopes is that in the coming negotiations, it’ll get Iran to surrender its current stockpile of enriched uranium. That, admittedly, would be something that the JCPOA didn’t do. If they pull that off, even I will say good for them.

But for Iran, of course, this is a nearly inconceivable concession. What seems more likely to happen is that the two sides will agree to terms calling for Iran to dilute its highly enriched uranium under international supervision. Trump will sell this as a great victory. But this “down-blending,” as it’s called, was also in the JCPOA!

Above, I called this war immoral and pointless. The pointless part speaks for itself. It has accomplished nothing except making Iran stronger and the United States weaker. If Barack Obama or Joe Biden had done this, not only would they have been instantly impeached if the Republicans controlled the House, but the entire Democratic Party would have been discredited on foreign policy matters for a generation at least.

But the immoral part is worse. Trump started a war, killed a few thousand people, got tired of it, and surrendered to one of the most reactionary regimes on earth, which went on a gleeful killing spree of its own citizens earlier this year. Since the commencement of these hostilities in February, Iran has executed 44 more people and detained another 6,000. That’s the regime Donald Trump just strengthened and is about to hand many billions of dollars to. “Immoral” barely scratches the surface.

This is an epic failure. It’s not quite September 1938. But that’s only because Iran’s mullahs don’t have Hitler’s global ambitions. Morally, it’s a Neville Chamberlain moment of a sort the United States has never experienced. The icing on the cake would be Trump taking to Truth Social and boasting about “peace in our time.” A man who signed a treaty at Versailles is ignorant enough of history to not even know why that phrase resonates.

The Not-So-Secret Impulse Behind Trump’s Vulgar, Garish Birthday Party

In the real world, a weak and insecure Donald Trump is being humiliated by Iran. Ah, but Sunday night, he’ll be a manly man among manly men.

The president turns 80 on Sunday, and, as with everything pertaining to Donald Trump, his need to place himself at the center of our attention is pathological. He could not just have a dinner at the White House, or a party at Mar-a-Lago. No; he had to build a massive arena on real estate that belongs to the people of the United States to host a vulgar, garish event that is one of the most violent forms of spectacle available to the human race today. Trump will be sitting there like some Roman emperor at the Colosseum watching enslaved men try to stave off lions. The man who wanted law enforcement to shoot protesters “in the knees” is probably bummed he couldn’t just replicate that.

But if you can’t have lions, six UFC fights are the next best thing. Granted, UFC fighting is very popular in the United States and across the world. I’ve read various accounts this week contending that UFC fighting has supplanted hockey as the fourth-most-popular sport on television, behind the big three of football, baseball, and basketball. I’ve also read that its popularity may have peaked; here’s a 2025 piece by a sportswriter who has followed “combat sports” for 15 years, showing that the number of matches is in steep decline. “The United States, long the backbone of [mixed martial arts], has seen a sharp decline in activity,” wrote John S. Nash. “In 2009, more than 6,266 professional fights took place across the country. This would be the pinnacle for American MMA contests. By 2024, that number had dropped to just over 3,027—a 52 percent decrease.”

Still—it’s popular. Fine. But guess what’s strikingly, overwhelmingly not popular? The idea of hosting such fights at the White House, on grounds we tend to associate with understated, democratic solemnity. A poll released Thursday found that just … wait for it … 16 percent of Americans considered it appropriate to hold MMA cage matches on the White House grounds. Meanwhile, 46 percent opposed. Even among Republicans, only 31 percent considered it appropriate. Yet a narrow plurality of Republicans in the survey backed the event, by said 31 percent to 22 percent.

Democrats opposed it by huge margins, 75 to 5 percent. Independents were strongly against it too, by 45 to 11 percent. So once again, it’s Republicans—no; specifically, it’s MAGA Republicans, because they’re undoubtedly that 31 percent—who are way out of step with what real Americans think. Yet they—Trump, his lackeys, and all those Soviet-style propagandists on Fox and Newsmax and One America and elsewhere—will of........

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