War games: Trump spinning loss, pat on head, in war into a win – The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
OPINION | JOHN BRUMMETT
Donald Trump was done with his failed war on Iran and ready to move oil through the Strait of Hormuz.
That, you see, would cause American gasoline prices to start dropping and American families’ 401(k)s and IRAs to start fattening. All of that, Trump believed, would accrue to his ego’s benefit and his party’s political benefit in the midterm election.
He wanted the credit as the late-arriving firefighter who put out a few burning embers from the roaring blaze he started that caused extensive unchecked damage.
Sensing Trump’s position of personal need, Iran gave him a partial placation–a pat on the head.
The United States and Iran have agreed to the following: Trump will get the Strait opened and thus a reprieve. All other disputed items–such as Iran’s nuclear reserves, the elimination or reduction of which was very purpose of the war in some of Trump’s erratic versions–will continue to be negotiated.
We’ll be back to where we were before Trump let Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu lead him into a war on the thinking that a barrage of bombing would inspire Iranian citizens to take to the streets to install their own government. Trump was expecting Venezuelan-caliber ease.
That didn’t happen because those Iranian citizens were afraid of being slaughtered by the even meaner regime that quickly got in place to replace the one Trump and Bibi were so proud to have wiped out.
What happened, in a nutshell, was that there was only so much bombing and drone-attacking that the world’s richest and greatest superpower could do against a madly extremist regime that had enough leverage–the Strait–to hang in longer than a president with a short attention span could maintain interest.
Left, then, with the option of a tuck-tail retreat that he’ll try to spin into victory for the gullible or sending American troops to actual warfare, Trump tucked tail and spun that his tail wasn’t tucked because he’s a cage fighter.
On Sunday, he called The New York Times–not in response to request or by arrangement of his press people. The reporter wrote that he could hear Trump’s family assembling for his 80th birthday dinner in the background.
Trump wanted to contest any intimation–and it is a matter of wide intimation, because it’s a matter of pending fact–that, after the needless expense of a bombing war, he was basically settling for Barack Obama’s Iran deal that he ridiculed and canceled.
I say “pending fact” because it’s possible that in these ongoing negotiations to which everything but the Strait is being deferred, Trump will get something better than Obama’s non-warring deal. I have no expectation of that, but we should certainly remain open to it.
Trump for now has been given only an economic and political reprieve on oil and an excuse to spin the gullible at home.
To that end, Trump told The Times in his call that Obama paid cash for his deal and that he didn’t (discounting the billion a day spent on the war) and that Obama got no meaningful interruption of Iran’s nuclear stockpiling, but that he did.
In truth, though, the issues Trump’s team are deferring to continued negotiations include the return of billions of frozen Iranian assets–which is as good as cash–and the real meat of the nuclear issue, meaning what Iran has and what it will do with it and how the world can verify what it might claim.
Obama made the only actual deal. Trump merely got out of a jam by deferring a deal.
Losing a war isn’t as hard on the psyche as it used to be, with this war exclusively by air and drone, and when the loss comes with the promise of lower gasoline prices and healthier personal savings, and when deals can be proclaimed simply by an agreement to talk about them later.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett feed on X, formerly Twitter.
John Brummett’s career in news began when he was in high school, as a part-time reporter for the Arkansas Democrat. He moved to the Arkansas Gazette in 1977.
He wrote a political column for the Gazette from 1986 to 1990. He was an editor for the Arkansas Times from 1990 to 1992.
In 1994, his book, “High Wire: From the Back Roads to the Beltway, the Education of Bill Clinton,” was published by Hyperion of New York City. He became a columnist with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in 1994. In 2000, he signed a deal with Donrey Media Group, now known as Stephens Media, and wrote for them for 11 years.
He rejoined Democrat-Gazette as a columnist on Oct. 24, 2011.
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