As the United States lurches closer to a ground war in Iran, the country could not be further from the promised land.
Where is the “new golden era in America” that House Speaker Mike Johnson spoke of on Wednesday night at a fundraising dinner at Union Station in Washington, DC, where he bestowed an “America First” golden statue upon President Donald Trump?
Gas prices are up. Jobs are down. New polls indicate that Americans are becoming increasingly restive with the Iran war, which has transmogrified from what Trump called an “incursion” into preparations for a ground campaign as early as this weekend.
On Truth Social, Trump indulged in his habitual bluster: “NATO NATIONS HAVE DONE ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO HELP WITH THE LUNATIC NATION, NOW MILITARILY DECIMATED, OF IRAN. THE U.S.A. NEEDS NOTHING FROM NATO, BUT `NEVER FORGET’ THIS VERY IMPORTANT POINT IN TIME! President DONALD J. TRUMP”
For a nation that is supposedly “decimated,” Iran sure seems to be doing a lot of damage. Several American military bases in the Gulf region are uninhabitable. Israel’s air defenses have been exposed as wanting. The Washington Post is reporting that the Pentagon will likely be unable to fulfill the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List initiative, which has seen NATO countries fund military equipment for Ukraine. Instead, it will be diverted to the Middle East. At the same time, fuel shortages in Asia and rising energy prices in Europe mean that America is increasingly regarded as a reckless predator rather than a reliable ally.
In a searching essay in The New York Times, Lydia Polgreen invoked the Scottish political scientist DW Brogan’s famous December 1952 Harper’s Review essay on the illusion of American omnipotence. Brogan traveled around America during the McCarthy era and concluded that many Americans were constitutionally incapable of accepting that they had suffered defeat abroad because they lacked the ability to remake the world in their own image. Instead, he wrote, they were intent on blaming an internal enemy. In the case of China’s fall to communism in 1949, they searched for subversives at home to assign blame.
Right now, Trump is apparently amassing the forces to attempt an operation to seize Kharg Island. This is being presented, according to Axios, as a “final blow.” Whether it would represent finality, however, is another matter. Iran is mining the island. Forewarned is forearmed. Congressional Republicans are starting to get antsy. Congressman Mike Rogers (R-AL), the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, observed on Wednesday that “We want to know more about what’s going on. We’re just not getting enough answers.”
Then there is Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC). “The justifications presented to the American public for the war in Iran were not the same military objectives we were briefed on today in the House Armed Services Committee,” Mace declared in a post on X. Trump may well be heading into a new Gallipoli, the disastrous amphibious landing against the Ottoman Empire during World War I that Winston Churchill championed and almost terminated his political career.
Should Trump launch a failed ground invasion, he will almost surely seek to blame its failure not on his capricious decision to go to war in Iran but on domestic traitors. According to a recent Quinnipiac poll, 74 percent of Americans are opposed to a ground invasion in the first place. They do not seem to suffer from any illusions of omnipotence in the Middle East—quite the contrary.
The figure who appears to have embraced that mirage is Trump, who views himself as omnipotent, at home and abroad. The main driver of his approach to foreign affairs does not seem to be “America First,” “restraint,” “isolationism,” or any of the other principles that have been affixed to him ever since he vowed to avoid senseless and endless wars abroad. Now that he is on the cusp of embarking upon one himself, it is clear that the only durable and driving force behind his thinking is the relentless hunt for resources.
Trump has said that he wants to make Venezuela the 51st state and that it would experience its own “golden age.” His interior secretary, Doug Burgum, bragged that the administration has seized $100 million in gold from Venezuela. Meanwhile, Trump has visions of controlling Iran’s oil supplies.
As he flails in Iran, Trump is vowing to send in the National Guard into American airports to fix another mess that he has singlehandedly created. Trump’s inability to accept defeat does not bode well for the next three years, as his sole mission will be to lash out at his real and perceived enemies. Golden age, indeed.
About the Author: Jacob Heilbrunn
Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of The National Interest and is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. He is the author of They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons, which The New York Times included on its 100 notable books of the year in 2008, and America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators. He has written on both foreign and domestic issues for numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Reuters, Washington Monthly, and The Weekly Standard. He has also written for German publications such as Cicero, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Der Tagesspiegel.
