Done and dusted? Trump’s portrayal of the war in Iran collides with reality

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WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump is trying to cast his Iran war as all but over, a done-and-dusted success.

But after years of trying to impose his own reality on the world, he has now run into a crisis that is not bending to his narrative.

“It’s a new regime,” Mr Trump said in a Fox Business interview that aired on April 15, referring to Iran’s new leaders.

“We find them pretty reasonable to be honest with you, by comparison pretty reasonable.”

It was the latest instance of Mr Trump trying to spin a “regime change” accomplishment in Iran, even though analysts believe the war may have only increased the internal sway of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, the hardline military force that has long been a major player in Iran’s politics and economy.

The new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, has not been seen in public since he replaced his father, who was killed at the start of the war, but his elevation as head of state has been another symbol of continuity.

“Most generously you could say there is a leadership change,” said Mr Behnam Ben Taleblu, the senior director of the Iran programme at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington think-tank with a hawkish stance on Iran.

“It is incorrect for the proponents of the conflict to frame this as a change for the better.”

Indeed, trade through the Strait of Hormuz remains far from normal and Iran’s government is not bending to Mr Trump’s demands on its nuclear programme.

But in Mr Trump’s telling, US victory in Iran is already clear. In the Fox Business interview, reprising his frequent comments of the last two weeks, Mr Trump asserted that Iran’s navy, air force and anti-aircraft equipment have all been wiped out, along with many top officials.

If Iran did not rule out nuclear weapons, Mr Trump said, “we will be living with them for a little while, but I don’t know how much longer they can survive”.

In fact, analysts say, the 40 days of US-Israeli bombardment that ended with last week’s ceasefire appear to have increased the power of the military and hardliners in the Iranian system.

Despite the widespread destruction and the killings of officials by the US and Israeli militaries, the Iranian regime is acting emboldened, having demonstrated that it can wreak havoc in global trade and send US gas prices soaring.

The result is that a president who has long relied on threats and bluster as essential foreign policy tools seems to be groping for the leverage to bring Iran’s regime to heel.

Analysts say that the success of the administration’s latest effort, its blockade of Iranian ports, depends on the ability of the US and its allies to withstand the additional pressure that Iran could impose on Persian Gulf trade in response.

Ms Mona Yacoubian, a former State Department official and Middle East expert, drew a contrast in Mr Trump’s struggle with Iran to his success in exacting concessions from US allies by threatening them with tariffs.

“This is not something he has control over with the stroke of a pen,” said Ms Yacoubian, who directs the Middle East programme at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think-tank.

“This is where the President’s approach of his own charismatic and powerful personality, in my view, is not a match for the complexity, the opacity, that is the case with Iran.”

The administration has been eager to portray a ground-breaking deal with Iran as being possible. Vice-President J.D. Vance said on April 14 that Mr Trump sought a “grand bargain” in which the US would treat Iran “economically like a normal country” if it acted “like a normal country”.

“He doesn’t want a small deal,” Mr Vance said.

Mr Vance ended an extensive session of talks with Iranian officials in Pakistan last week without an agreement. He said on April 14 that the US would keep negotiating, and that “the people we were sitting across from wanted to make a deal”.

But Iran appears to have taken note of the leverage it has against Mr Trump, given the pain of rising gas prices and Republican worries that the unpopularity of the Iran war could hurt the party in the midterm elections in November.

That means that even though Iran appears ready to negotiate, its leaders could make demands of their own on matters like the future governance of the Strait of Hormuz, while still driving a hard bargain on nuclear policy, the issue that matters most to Mr Trump.

Mr Nate Swanson, a former US official who was on the Trump negotiating team with Iran until July, said the regime in Iran was not going to capitulate to Mr Trump’s demands in negotiations, “just as they did not on the battlefield”.

Mr Trump was unlikely to succeed, he said, in “trying to force transformational change on a system that feels like it just won a war”.

“Iran will only make a deal they see as being in their interest,” Mr Swanson, now at the Atlantic Council, said. “That will most likely be small and transactional.”

He also cautioned against reading too much into the perceived pragmatism of individual Iranian negotiators like Iran Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, whom Mr Trump has cast as part of a more moderate, new crop of Iranian leaders.

Without a consolidated power base, all Iranian officials will need to emphasise their hardline bona fides, he said.

“It’s not in Ghalibaf’s or anyone else’s interest to stray from the party line right now,” Mr Swanson said. NYTIMES