Shorter Bret Stephens: If Donald Trump were a completely different person the Iran war would have been a good idea

That’s the sum total of Bret Stephens’s assessment of what he, correctly for once, identifies as a catastrophic debacle. One might wonder, under the circumstances, why Stephens was the war’s most enthusiastic cheerleader among elite pundits. This cry of outrage does not raise that question, let alone answer it. Instead, it’s a right-wing version of the classic Marxist complaint that “true socialism” — let alone actual communism — was never attempted by various supposed national champions of those ideologies:

Trump got spooked after the regime didn’t instantly crumble and energy prices shot up. He then effectively abandoned the war he had started after less than six weeks of sustained combat — combat in which the United States lost fewer service members than in the 1983 invasion of Grenada. He compounded the error with an almost comical succession of military threats and last-minute climb-downs, each of them signaling indecision and weakness to Iranian adversaries practiced in the study of weakness.

Tehran took the measure of Trump’s courage. What it found was a bone spur.

All this may seem odd for a president who once loudly complained that the United States hadn’t “fought to win” a war since 1945, who demanded “unconditional surrender” from Tehran and who had repeatedly lambasted his predecessor for the humiliating exit from Afghanistan. Then again, it’s not odd for a president whose very essence is betrayal of everyone and everything, his own words not least.

Though the details of the deal remain murky — a telling indicator of its likely shoddiness, since the administration would surely trumpet the terms of a strong agreement — it’s already clear that Trump has betrayed his promise to the Iranian people, after they were massacred in January to quell antigovernment protests, that “help is on its way.” As in Venezuela, to say nothing of China and Russia, this administration’s message to oppressed people everywhere is that their rights come last.

Trump is also on his way to betraying Israel, our principal ally in this fight, by pushing Jerusalem to stand down in its effort to stop Hezbollah’s attacks on its north, in that way handing Tehran the victory of creating a diplomatic linkage between Lebanon and Hormuz. If Iran is now allowed to extract some kind of service fee for permitting ships to transit the Strait, Trump will have also betrayed our allies in the Persian Gulf by giving Iran financial and strategic leverage to which it has no right, and which it didn’t previously have.

The worst betrayal, however, is of Americans who supported the war — not only neocons like me but also most of Trump’s MAGA base — because we believed that Iran, which has waged a 47-year war against us, posed an increasingly intolerable threat to our security and vital interests.

This cease-fire neither ends nor eases that threat; it hardens and magnifies it. It removes the one point of U.S. leverage over Iran — the naval blockade of its ports — before there’s any negotiation over its nuclear program, which the Iranians will almost surely drag out until Trump is out of office. It reminds the world of the adage that while it can be dangerous to be America’s enemy, it is fatal to be its friend. And it gives Iran’s leaders something even more vital: The confidence that, whatever Trump may threaten, they can withstand the most any American president or Israeli prime minister can throw at them.

There’s a word for this: debacle. Not because the war, for all its costs or errors of execution, was a mistake. It’s because this pretense of a peace is an act of geopolitical self-harm that will haunt our standing in the world for years to come.

I would love to pose the following question to Stephens: Is anything that Donald Trump has said and done since he started this war in the slightest bit surprising? Is it, for example, in any way surprising that the war, whatever merits such an enterprise might have conceivably had in the abstract, was fought with almost unlimited amounts of stupidity, incompetence, and corruption?

As a Never Trumper Stephens would of course have to admit that the answer to those questions is a resounding “no.” As an OG neo-con, however, Stephens allowed himself to be swept away by a preposterous fantasy narrative, in which the Iranian regime was going to crumble under the a wave of American and Israeli bombs, and therefore no massive land invasion of a country of 100 million people — something that even the most delusional cheerleaders for the war, like Stephens, must have realized was never in the cards — would have to happen.

Instead, Iran is now ruled by the most hardline elements of the regime, dissent in the country has been crushed completely, the regime is immediately (as in as of today) pocketing immense sums in the oil it is now allowed to sell again, and America’s military credibility has taken an enormous blow.

All this, again, was not only predictable, but was in fact predicted by essentially everyone in possession of their senses who contemplated not the seductively abstract question of a war with Iran, but the horrifyingly concrete prospect of a war with Iran managed by Donald Trump, a demented narcissistic idiot with the attention span of a fruit fly and the morals of a pimp.

In summation: The Aristocrats!