Trump's 'Unacceptable' Answer

As many observers acknowledge, the U.S. has lost the war. Trump cannot bring himself to accept that he is responsible for that defeat.

The president curtly rejected another Iranian proposal yesterday:

President Trump on Sunday rejected the latest offer from Iran to end the war with the United States, declaring that it was “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE.”

As many observers now acknowledge, the U.S. has lost the war. Trump cannot bring himself to accept that he is responsible for that defeat. He appears to have believed that he could win a great victory over Iran in a matter of days, and he can’t cope with the reality of his monumental failure.

The Iranian proposal is not so unreasonable. It reportedly includes an end to the blockade, an end to the war on all fronts, including Lebanon, sanctions relief, and the unfreezing of Iranian assets. The Iranian government wants to put off discussions around the nuclear issue until later, but it is clear that they aren’t going to agree to current U.S. demands regarding the nuclear program.

Iran is essentially proposing that the U.S. and Israel cease their aggression and make amends for the damage they have caused. Trump is signaling that he would rather prolong a ruinous conflict than agree to peace on those terms. The president is compounding his many earlier errors by refusing the latest offer.

Under the circumstances, the U.S. should jump at the chance to extricate itself from the mess it has created before the damage to the global economy gets far worse. It may not exactly be a return to the status quo ante, but that option isn’t available. This is probably as good of an offer as the U.S. is likely to get. Unfortunately, we have a president and an administration ill-equipped and unwilling to seize the opportunity for peace.

The president is too much of an Iran hawk and too beholden to other Iran hawks to admit defeat. The administration leans heavily on the shoddy analysis of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and has based its Iran policy on their terrible arguments going back to the first term. That blinds Trump and his advisers to the reality they are facing. The fanatics at FDD realize this is their last shot at the regime change war they have been seeking for decades, and they have a president in Trump gullible and foolish enough to listen to their recommendations. The war will continue as long as Trump follows the advice of these zealots.

I assume that the president has rejected the proposal because it doesn’t give him the surrender that he has been expecting all along. The specific terms are not important to him. He remains obsessed with Iranian capitulation and he is acting as if he can still get it. There is no telling how much misery the world will have to endure until his delusion ends.

The president keeps digging himself deeper into the hole he created by starting this war. He is being offered a way out of the hole, but he is too proud and foolish to take it. The longer that Trump resists accepting defeat, the costlier it will be for all of us.

An agreement to end the war will likely be humiliating for the aggressors. That’s a good thing. We should want aggressors to be humiliated to discourage other governments from committing the same crimes. Let the Iran war be a cautionary tale of how starting a war for no reason blew up in the faces of the war criminals that launched it.