The Iranians do not have very many advantages in the war the United States has launched on them, but they do have a few. One is a willingness to suffer and die and to pay economic costs that evidently exceeds the present American capacity for such sacrifice; the second, unexpected though the fact may be, is a critical edge in the matter of political intelligence: Washington has consistently misunderstood the nature of the ayatollahs’ regime in Tehran for going on 50 years now, but the Iranians seem to have a reasonably good handle on the character of the current U.S. administration.
For lo these many years, I have been advising observers not to make the mistake of overcomplicating Donald Trump. The ayatollahs, of all people, seem to have got to the core of the issue before most American political commentators.
Trump describes himself (and his admirers describe him) as pragmatic, a man of common sense, which is the nice way of saying that he is a man without principles or fixed moral commitments, and even the single limited virtue to which he occasionally pays tribute is a one-way street: Loyalty to Trump is all-important, but loyalty from Trump—ask Mrs. Trump or Mrs. Trump or Mrs. Trump about that. Some simple men are saints and may be most easily understood in terms of their saintly virtues: St. Francis was good and gentle because he was good and gentle. Trump is the mirror image of the simple saint: He’s a simple man whose actions are most directly and accurately described as the ordinary daily application of his vices: laziness, vindictiveness, greed, vanity, arrogance, cowardice, and, above all, stupidity. He is a rage-addled dimwit with a savantic gift for manipulating lesser fools and a vulnerability to manipulation by men who are similarly vicious but more capable: Vladimir Putin, J.D. Vance, Stephen Miller, even one or two of his idiot children. Stronger men can push him around, and weaker men succeed by flattering him. His enemies can manipulate him at least as easily as his allies.
That is why Salena Zito got it wrong in her famous aphorism about taking Trump seriously rather than literally: As strange as it is to say about a man who notionally controls a nuclear arsenal sufficient to obliterate all known sentient life in this universe, it is impossible to take him seriously as a man or as a political force. Trump is serious in the sense that one may take a brain tumor as a serious thing but not a thing you’d have an argument with or lose a chess match to.
Trump’s escalating threats against Iran leapt very quickly from mere war crimes (targeting civilian infrastructure) to outright genocide (“a whole civilization will die tonight”), and the bosses in Tehran ran that through their Trump decoder rings to reveal the true message: “I am terrified by the closing of the Strait of Hormuz and have no idea how to get myself out of this mess.”
Tehran took him up on his ceasefire talk not because the ayatollahs were cowed by his imbecilic threats but because a ceasefire works to their advantage and costs them, for the moment, nothing. They put out that risible ceasefire framework—under which the United States would pay them reparations and remove its forces from the Middle East, along with other demands that were one brandy snifter full of M&Ms short of a 1980s Van Halen tour rider—knowing that Trump would have to swallow the insult and pretend that there were some other sort of negotiation under way when there isn’t.
Of course Trump went for that. To whom could he turn for advice? Secretary of State Marco Rubio is an oleaginous little sycophant, and he probably is the best of the lot, standing head and shoulders above Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a Fox News clown whose great achievement so far has been to avoid appearing obviously drunk on the job. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is a conspiracy kook and Putinist who is so wildly incompetent that even Trump seems to have noticed; Deputy National Security Adviser Robert Gabriel Jr.’s great qualification for the post is having been a producer on Laura Ingraham’s insipid talk show.
Little wonder, then, that the Iranians do not seem to take Trump seriously.
The Iranians take American bombs and missiles seriously, but—unlike many Americans—they seem to understand that the relevant objectives for the United States in this conflict are political rather than military. The U.S. military did not need to demonstrate that it could, under orders, massacre Iranians on the ground or in the air (or in girls’ schools) as easily as American forces recently massacred boatloads of seagoing civilians in the Caribbean on the thinnest of pretexts. That the U.S. government is able to achieve its desired military outcome in any conventional confrontation with any military anywhere in the world is understood and hardly contested, as much as a frank admission of the fact would bruise the pride of a few old men in Beijing. When it comes to killing people and destroying property, the United States has no equal in the world unless someone somewhere decides to get froggy with the nukes—that is one reason (not the only one) the Iranians are keen to possess nuclear weapons.
But as to securing the desired political outcome—Washington’s record is less impressive as seen from the point of view of Pyongyang, Hanoi, Baghdad, and Tripoli, and, no doubt, from Moscow and Beijing.
And so it is in Tehran.
Children, as Epictetus observed, play at being one thing and then another and then another, and the unserious man “will behave like children who sometimes play like wrestlers, sometimes gladiators, sometimes blow a trumpet, and sometimes act a tragedy when they have seen and admired these shows.” His advice to the would-be philosopher, applicable to any citizen who would take on real responsibility: “Do not, like children, be sometimes a philosopher, then a publican, then an orator, and then one of Caesar’s officers. These things are not consistent. You must be one man, either good or bad. You must cultivate either your own ruling faculty or be dominated by external things.”
Trump is famously dominated by external forces—by the last person who had his ear, by the last thing he saw on Fox News or heard from radio commentator Mark Levin. Lacking a moral center or intellectual ability, Trump can campaign for a Nobel Peace Prize one day and threaten the overnight extermination of a civilization the next without being very serious about either project. He is not serious in the way George H.W. Bush or Helmut Kohl or Margaret Thatcher were serious—he is serious in the way cancer is.
As serious as a heart attack, as the saying goes, but more predictable.
And so while our forces can bomb Iran into rubble and then make the rubble bounce, that will not be enough to win. Winning in Iran is a political project, one that requires intelligence, imagination, and courage, qualities that Donald Trump does not possess. Perhaps he could borrow some, in case anyone around him had any to spare and assuming that the president would recognize these commodities in the unlikely case they were presented to him.
