Why Iran could choose to escalate the war

October 4, 2026 — 1:54pm

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In early March, nine days after starting his war with Iran, President Donald Trump held a news conference to crow about his “military success, the likes of which people haven’t seen”.

“We’re winning very decisively,” he claimed, and “the result will be lower oil prices”.

Instead, Trump’s Iran war should be taught for decades as a model of how not to conduct either war or foreign policy. It’s an example of how hubris can swamp a presidency and lead it to military solutions for difficult global problems – and, in the process, make everything worse.

“The unsettling reality is that the conflict is nowhere near over,” Ali Vaez of the International Crisis Group writes in a Foreign Affairs essay titled The New Forever War.

Still, the Trumpian myopia persists, with the administration continuing to claim that its pressure on Iran is a smashing success. “The blockade is working; it’s working like nothing we’ve ever seen,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox News in September.

Hmm. Diesel prices at a few places in California have hit $US9.99 ($14.40) a gallon, the maximum price those pumps can display. The United States has already spent more than $43 billion on the war, by a lowball Pentagon estimate. Higher prices caused by the war have cost the typical American family about $US1000, according to economist Mark Zandi. More broadly, the US has depleted its arsenal, cost American and Iranian lives, possibly committed war crimes, exposed........

© The Age