In recent days, several NYT stories on Iran have raised questions about who in the US, if anyone, has a full grasp on the chessboard they’re playing.
First was a pretty hilarious story from David Sanger, which said as much about Sanger’s own beliefs about presidential power as Trump’s infirmities. Deep in the story, Sanger describes the swagger that Trump exhibited in a June interview, a swagger that came after months of successful cons from Trump on Iran.
A month ago, he exuded confidence that he had found the way to declare victory. On June 17, Mr. Trump signed with a flourish — at the Palace of Versailles, where World War I officially ended in 1919 — a hastily written, 14-point cease-fire agreement.
At the time, Mr. Trump said that a new, more “reasonable” set of Iranian leaders had seen the light, and were being driven by economic interests.
“I believe they have had enough,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with The Times on June 14. He argued that he was able to get the deal because he was threatening a massive attack, prompting Iran to fold.
“We were going in for the big one, and they said, ‘Please don’t do it, we will make a deal.’ And we made a deal right after that,” he said.
It lasted only two weeks.
But the story begins by describing Trump being surprised that he doesn’t have as much power as he said when he was successfully conning David Sanger earlier in June.
But in recent weeks, he has seemed trapped, his presidency gradually consumed by a war he cannot find his way out of.
He has discovered limits on his power that he could have scarcely imagined as he began full combat operations on Feb. 28, when he set out goals for a swift end to Iran’s nuclear program and the overthrow of the country’s government.
Five months later, those goals remain almost entirely unaccomplished. And Mr. Trump, once confident that overwhelming force would enable him to pursue in Iran what he proudly called the “Venezuela model” — a change of government to one amenable to U.S. control — is now hesitant to plunge back into major combat operations that his intelligence agencies assess are unlikely to work as well in Tehran.
He has been unable to control surging oil prices, or their effects on the stock market. The shipping that crawled to a stop in the Strait of Hormuz, then was opened for a few short weeks, is back to a trickle, with a second choke point, between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, now threatened. And while the president has threatened to take Kharg Island, where Iran ships oil, or to seize its underground stores of enriched uranium, he has said publicly that he knows there is no appetite for sending in ground troops.
Those limits have left him deeply frustrated, his aides say, and have made him more erratic, even by Trumpian standards.
On Saturday, NYT published a story describing various Iranian sources crowing that they had used Trump’s last ceasefire to expand the battlefield, which NYT took to mean to Hezbollah and the Houthis.
“We are playing a grand game of chess; the militias are Iran’s chess pieces to be moved wisely at the right time and place, for maximum impact,” Mehdi Rahmati, an analyst in Iran and an expert on the regional militias, said in a phone interview.
Aside from lobbing missiles and drones at military bases housing U.S. troops, the attacks have been calibrated to avoid direct confrontations with American or Israeli forces, which could lead to harsh retaliation against Iran, analysts said. Igniting a fire at the Saudi oil facility drew the kingdom into the war, but the Saudi response targeted Iraqi militias accused of the attack rather than Iran.
Iran mobilized its proxy forces for a variety of reasons, analysts said. First and foremost, the strategy aims to limit oil exports from the region, driving up gas prices in the United States ahead of the U.S. midterm elections and reducing revenue for Washington’s Arab allies.
The same day as that proxy story, NYT published a worthwhile story describing how no one trusts American hegemony anymore.
To America’s allies, President Trump’s war in Iran, now in its sixth month, seems headed for a strategic defeat.
They worry that the inability of the United States to turn military superiority into a sustainably changed Iran has displayed a vulnerability that Russia and China will welcome. In addition, Mr. Trump’s goals remain unmet, and the U.S. military is running short on key armaments that it needs for global reach.
For the moment, Iran is seemingly resolute under a more radical government, its nuclear and ballistic missile programs are degraded but not destroyed, and the Strait of Hormuz is effectively under its control. The war has left both the United States and Israel in weaker positions — and blaming each other for the mess.
[snip]
Many countries disliked the global order as it was, Mr. Niblett said, but there was one. “Now America has confirmed itself as a force of disorder and everyone is drawing lessons from it, and trying to be less dependent,” he said. “No one wants to be subject to a whipsaw foreign policy that doesn’t know its limits, and that is a strategic defeat.”
Then there’s the David French column making the rounds worrying this could turn into World War. Early on, he wonders whether strategy is the word for what led Trump to invade Iran … but later in the column, he suggests there has been a change in what he still calls a “strategy.”
This was always the most likely outcome. The president chose to take on a much more powerful country than, say, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003 while using far less force than we employed to topple the Iraqi government.
What did he expect would happen?
Oh, right, we know. He thought he could topple a vicious, deeply embedded authoritarian regime with a few targeted airstrikes and a fantasized popular uprising. As he has said many times, he expected a version of his Venezuela outcome, and when the Venezuela strategy failed, if “strategy” is the word, there was no real Plan B — other than to bomb Iran more and hope for capitulation.
[snip]
Let’s put all this together: The initial American strategy failed, the war with Iran is consuming the entire region, Iran and Ukraine are risking a face-off, there is evidence that both Russia and China are escalating their military commitments, American munitions stocks are dwindling, and Trump is raging.
In between those comments, French lists a lot of things that have been true from the start:
French is not wrong to worry the scope of the Iran war will grow, nor is he wrong to note that the risk stems in significant part from Trump’s unreliability. But again, all that’s been true from the very start.
So has Trump’s stubborn refusal to stop coddling Russia and China, steps that would be necessary to shift US posture.
The thing I find most curious, though, is that NYT’s stories on cyberattacks striking American water systems are relegated to separate stories which only tangentially focus on the war.
The scope of cyberattacks on U.S. water systems has grown to include at least seven states and may be far wider, officials and experts warned, as the authorities raced to safeguard the nation’s water supply against an assault that increasingly appeared to be the work of Iran.
While there were no indications that any water supply had been altered or made unsafe to drink, state and local officials throughout the country were on high alert for potential problems in vulnerable computers that are commonly used to monitor and adjust water quality, including chemical-treatment levels and water pressure. Minnesota first publicly reported the attacks, and now Michigan says its systems have also been targeted.
The attack has little precedent, experts said, but has long been the stuff of nightmares and sensationalized Hollywood thrillers: an apparent cyberattack by a foreign power during a time of war that could, at least in theory, jeopardize the health and safety of Americans.
[snip]
Alex Orleans, a former U.S. government cybersecurity contractor who specializes in tracking Iranian hacking groups, said Tehran had been engaging in a wide variety of hacking operations against U.S., Israeli and Middle Eastern targets since the start of the war in February. But the intrusions into the U.S. water systems appeared to be a significant escalation.
“What’s unprecedented here is that we’re seeing direct, tangible effects to live industrial control systems inside U.S. critical infrastructure,” said Mr. Orleans, who is now the chief of threat intelligence at Sublime Security, an email protection company. [my emphasis]
This, in spite of the March attack by Iranian hackers on Stryker explicitly described as retaliation for the attack on a school in Minab.
And of course, Trump’s response to allowing US swing states to be attacked during a war he started is to blame his political adversaries.– to claim being hacked by Iran is a sign of incompetence even though Trump’s own campaign was hacked by Iran, too.
The Commander in Chief refuses to defend the homeland against the country he invaded. And he gets away with it, in significant part, because we can’t even conceive of a war in which the US might be targeted in the same way the US targets others — by striking water facilities.
Whiskey Pete Hegseth’s DOD is at such a loss they’re crowdsourcing solutions to the war that competent people would never have started.
The request from a senior officer at the US military command carrying out President Donald Trump’s war with Iran came in an email: We need ideas.
“We are looking for new creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran,” an officer in US Central Command’s intelligence branch wrote in a message sent Wednesday to a broad group of military analysts, according to a source familiar with the message. A second source also said that a senior US military officer sent the message last week soliciting new ideas for how to deal with Iran.
The crowdsourcing-style query, which military officials said was unusual over email, is one sign of the limited — and potentially unpalatable —options available to Trump to force Iran into a deal on his terms. Hoping to find an alternative, the official at CENTCOM kicked off the brainstorming session via email to see if anyone had a better idea. The second source said CENTCOM is looking at everything, acknowledging it needs to reevaluate the strategy.
That’ll work. Crowdsourcing while your opponent totally reframes the chessboard.
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