It turns out that an agreement with Iran is valid for only slightly more than two Scaramuccis. After dealing a significant blow to Iran’s war machine, Donald Trump hoped to extricate the country from further conflict in the Persian Gulf. Last month’s memorandum of understanding set a 60-day period for further negotiations, during which oil would flow freely out of the Gulf. Iran would open the Strait of Hormuz, and the United States would lift its blockade and allow the regime to sell oil.
This was a good deal for the Islamic Republic, which received more than it relinquished, but the mullahs nonetheless tore it up. Last week, U.S. forces finally retaliated against repeated Iranian attacks on commercial shipping. The ceasefire is over, and Trump appears to be trying to force the Iranians to deal openly and honestly with him in order to end hostilities. Richard Nixon faced a similar conundrum, and Trump will only succeed if he avoids the trap Nixon fell into at the end of the Vietnam war.
Vietnam was the defining issue of the 1968 election, and Nixon ran on a plan not to win the war, but to attain “peace with honor.” That peace proved more elusive than expected, and he spent his entire first term trying to pin the North Vietnamese down at the negotiating table. By December 1972, he had had enough stalling and sent hundreds of B-52 bombers to hit targets across the North.
But Nixon had no intention of blasting the Vietnamese into submission. His goal was to extricate himself from the conflict even if South Vietnam would fall as a result of the American withdrawal. Henry Kissinger hoped the consequences to U.S. foreign policy would be minimal if the South could hold out another year or two. Kissinger aide John Negroponte mordantly observed that “we bombed them into accepting our concessions.”
Saigon held out longer than expected, but the cost of its downfall was graver than Kissinger had imagined. The images of desperate Vietnamese fleeing to the helicopters evacuating the U.S. embassy and of sailors shoving aircraft off their ship decks to make room for more refugees expressed the rage and humiliation Americans felt as the defeat became total. Those pictures haunted policymakers until they were replaced by the stomach-churning scenes at the Kabul airport in 2021.
So far, this stage of the conflict with Iran has not gone as Trump had hoped. As he told Fox News, at the beginning of the year he thought regime change was possible. Much of the senior Iranian leadership died in the early stages of the air campaign, but the regime survived their passing. The blockade and continued bombardment inflicted significant damage to the Iranian economy and military, but Iran’s closure of the Strait roiled global oil markets. Trump eventually settled for a lopsided MOU.
Thankfully, the setback with Iran is nowhere near as costly as in Vietnam. Fifty-thousand Americans lost their lives in Southeast Asia due to hostile action, whereas the number of American casualties in this conflict is far lower. This stage of the conflict with Iran has only gone on months, rather than years of ground fighting in Vietnam, and the effects of the war on the public have been much less grave.
But another defeat would nonetheless damage the country and Trump’s presidency. Americans do not like to give important concessions to a weaker foe, especially one that is obviously bent on our destruction.
The Iranians appear to have determined that they have more to gain by reigniting the war than by continuing to negotiate. They are trying to block the Strait again and relaunching attacks on the Gulf Arabs and U.S. bases in the region. The Houthis in Yemen are also threatening to disrupt shipping in the Red Sea, the other route Saudi oil can take to reach Asia.
Trump has decided “the only way you can negotiate with these people is through strength.” He described a series of increasingly painful strikes on Iranian infrastructure that will occur “unless they get to the table and negotiate.” Those strikes are now underway, and the U.S. military is once again blockading Iran.
The Trump coalition will be demoralized if this new round of fighting keeps the price of oil high enough to hurt Republicans in the midterms and results in even worse terms than the MOU. But Iran can only take so much damage before its economy collapses and the mullahs face severe internal threats to their rule.
Trump can accelerate that process. Rather than bombing the Iranians into accepting American concessions, he should bomb them into offering new ones of their own.
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