Donald Trump has lost his Iran war. He is the Iranian hostage. Unlike the US embassy personnel captured as hostages for 444 days, Trump threw himself into Iranian hands. Less than a month into his “short-term excursion”, his stated objectives have been scattered to the winds. There is no regime change, no uprising and no access to oil wealth along the Venezuelan model. The decapitation gambit – assassinating Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and senior Iranian leadership – has failed to destroy the regime. Despite the massacre, it is Trump who stands exposed to slings and arrows for the rashest military adventure since Custer at Little Bighorn.

Iran maintains a chokehold on the strait of Hormuz and, through its narrowest passage of 21 miles, on the global economy. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development forecasts a spike of inflation to 4.2% in the US, a 40% increase since Trump returned to office. The stock market has dived into correction territory. Iran has also demonstrated its capacity to wreak existential destruction on the Gulf states whose rulers’ delusion of their invulnerability and US protection has been shattered. “I’m the opposite of desperate,” Trump declared on 26 March. “I don’t care.”

Trump’s self-defense is feigned indifference to his fiasco. His denial is too vehement to be remotely convincing. He calls out to Nato countries to rescue him while he insults them as “cowards” and says that he “no longer needs” their help. In 1990, when Trump’s Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City was headed off the cliff into one of his six bankruptcies, Donald’s father, Fred Trump, appeared as a stealth white knight to buy $3.35m in chips, which the New Jersey Casino Control Commission a year later ruled was illegal. Now, there is no one to arrive to enable a miraculous escape.

If there is any consistency to Trump’s policy, it is a series of frantic attempts to justify his original blunder and extricate himself from its dire consequences. His latest 15-point proposal to the Iranians has dispensed with regime change and focuses instead on restarting the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program that he unilaterally broke off. He wishes to trade that in exchange for opening the strait. “Mission accomplished” would apparently be to return to square one, where things stood before he careened into war. The Iranians, however, deny there are any negotiations and have rejected his latest offer “until complete victory”.

Iran has proved the victor in the art of the deal. On 6 March, already frustrated by the refusal of the regime to concede, Trump demanded “unconditional surrender”. On 20 March, Trump raised his white flag.........

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