When losing the war feels like a relief

Trump bent the knee to Iran yesterday instead of murdering their entire civilization. Thank god.

Man with his dog flees from bombs in Tehran. Photo by Pooria Hatami

My stomach lurched yesterday as I watched the videos of Iranians forming human chains around their bridges and power plants as the seconds ticked away toward the arbitrary 8 p.m. deadline Trump had set for when their “whole civilization will die.” Some interpreted his post as a nuclear bomb threat; I was equally worried about the slow, painful deaths the population might face if he used regular bombs to destroy their power and water and food supplies and commit ecological terrorism on a population of 92 million people.

Imagine having to wait around to see what kind of bombs a genocidal madman across the world is going to use to kill you and your children and whether or not he was being serious, after he tweeted about your murder with the casualness of promoting a new TV show. Imagine having to hold hands with your neighbor around the local power plant to block a bomb from plunging your city into darkness, knowing that Pete Hegseth is probably the kind of man who would be more inclined to nuke the place if he saw you standing next to it.

To most of the world’s relief, Trump was bluffing this time when he threatened genocide. And Iran had called his bluff, refusing to negotiate with him at all despite his increasingly unhinged threats. As the deadline approached, it appears that Trump got nervous and sought a quick escape hatch from his own bluff. He asked Pakistan, as a “mediator,” to throw together a quick two-week deal that basically gave Iran everything it wanted: a ceasefire for Iran and its allies, explicit control over the Strait of Hormuz including a $2 million-per-ship toll paid to Iran (as reparations for our attacks), and acceptance of Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, among other perks.

All of this leaves the United States worse off than where we were before we started this nonsensical $45 billion war, which has killed 13 Americans and 3,500 Iranians (including 240 school children) and replaced the Supreme Leader with his younger, more hardline son. We have a worse deal in place now than Obama’s Iran deal, which he had secured diplomatically without any bloodshed or war crimes, and we’ve destroyed our own reputation as a sane, stable country while wrecking the global economy and spiking the price of oil. In other words, we have lost this war by every possible metric: strategically, economically, legally, morally, ethically. Iran stood up to Trump, and he folded like the paper tiger he is.

Of course, this isn’t to suggest that the war is over or the deal buttoned up or the ceasefire even happening. Israel immediately violated the ceasefire last night, as they tend to do, and started bombing the hell out of Lebanon again. Israel is reportedly angry that Trump left them out of ceasefire negotiations in his haste to get a deal done before 8 p.m., considering that Netanyahu needs to be in a forever war in order to cling to power. In light of Israel’s attacks, Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz within 24 hours of agreeing to open it, and now Trump looks even more like a fool with his pants down for getting nothing out of this agreement and leaving the world economy in freefall.

AND STILL, I would much prefer this national humiliation as an outcome to one of the darkest days in American history than waking up to the news of armageddon. Yesterday really felt like it could go either way—a 50-50 probability for me. There are no guardrails on Trump because Congress has apparently rolled over and died. The president is a known bluffer, to be sure, but he’s also extremely vulnerable to manipulation and surrounded by unhinged warmongers who see Muslim kids as animals. Pete Hegseth, who’s really talking like a radical religious extremist lately, has spent the last few weeks firing all the top brass in the military because they’re the kinds of men who would refuse illegal orders and push back on his war crimes. The idea that one of these overgrown boys who treats war like a videogame would get a little too hopped up on steroids or whatever and push the mass murder button is not actually that far-fetched to me.

I would love to have a country to feel patriotic about. I would love for Congress to step up, relocate their spines, and impeach and remove both Trump and Hegseth before we all have to sit through another day waiting to see whether our senile president is going to follow-up on the casual evening genocide he threatened. But the United States has put me in a position where I want us to lose this war we started, because that’s preferable to the horrors of the alternative. The moral and ethical response to the Iranian regime killing protesters is not to kill hundreds of thousands more of them ourselves. We are the bad guys now.