“He lost the war.” John Mearsheimer does not often speak in four words.
The University of Chicago political scientist has spent four decades arguing that great powers miscalculate when they overreach.
This fall, he delivered his verdict on Trump’s Iran campaign with a bluntness rare even for him.
“This is a devastating defeat for the United States,” he said.
Asked what Washington could do to regain leverage, Mearsheimer found the question almost beside the point.
Iran, he argued, is not overplaying its hand. It is simply waiting.
The timeline explains why.
The United States and Israel opened the war on February 28 with a plan for rapid regime change.
According to the *New York Times, Trump’s aides privately dismissed it as “farcical”: the plan rested on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s belief that a joint strike would send Iranians into the streets within days.
The strikes continued for 39 days before a ceasefire took hold on April 8.
The uprising never came.
When Netanyahu later pressed for a joint appeal urging Iranians to rise up, Trump refused outright.
“Why ... should we tell people to take to the streets when they’ll just get mowed down,” he told Netanyahu, according to Axios.
Netanyahu went ahead alone. During a Persian festival, he urged Iranians to flood the streets. Almost no one came.
The ceasefire held for three months. It collapsed on July 8.
The war that Washington calls “Operation Epic Fury” has continued ever since.
There has been no second uprising, no fallen government, and no exit.
Mearsheimer’s reading of that record is unsparing.
Iran “still has its missiles, nuclear capabilities and regional proxies”. It has “fended off regime change”.
Geostrategically, he argues, it “is stronger than ever” despite suffering heavy casualties and billions of dollars in infrastructure losses.
“Nobody can tell a plausible story about how this war ends,” he said.
The belief that air power alone can produce regime change is, in his words, “a delusional perspective”.
Any serious student of military history, he argues, should have rejected it from the start.
Trump has conceded none of this. Instead, he has settled on a timetable.
“I think they were very close to having one” regime, he said of the uprising.
He then told *TIME magazine that the war would probably end “right after the election” before adding, with characteristic hedging, “maybe before”.
In September, Trump rejected an Iranian proposal for a seven-day ceasefire that would have reopened the Strait of Hormuz.
According to the Wall Street Journal, he told aides that he expected to resume major strikes after the midterms unless Tehran satisfied him first.
“I don’t think you could ever have peace” with Iran, Trump has said.
He has also insisted that “by annihilating Iran, we’ve created peace in the world”.
The sentence does not quite parse. Neither, his critics argue, does the strategy behind it.
That criticism now stretches across the ideological map.
Representative Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Republican who has emerged as the war’s most persistent congressional opponent, calls it flatly unconstitutional.
Congress, he notes, never authorised it.
Massie has also accused the Pentagon of manipulating its own casualty count.
He points to a *New York Times report that the department quietly reduced its death toll from 18 to 14.
It did so by claiming, in Massie’s words, that “there have been two Iran wars separated by a brief ceasefire”.
He calls the distinction “this absurd ruse”.
Massie warns that the campaign “will radicalise new generations of terrorists”.
He has introduced articles of impeachment against the defence secretary over the war.
Tucker Carlson, once among Trump’s most reliable broadcast allies, also broke with the president during the war’s opening days.
He branded the conflict “Israel’s war” and accused Trump of subordinating American interests to Netanyahu’s.
By April, Carlson was telling his audience that he felt he had “misled” listeners who had voted for Trump partly on his word.
The economic warnings have escalated with the political ones.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) now projects global growth of just 3.1% in 2026, while inflation is expected to climb to 4.7%.
It explicitly attributes both trends to the war’s disruption of oil and gas markets.
IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva has described the resulting energy shock as “large but contained so far”.
Yet she has also cautioned that “even if the war in the Gulf were to end soon, the problem of high energy prices would likely persist for some time”.
The World Bank’s assessment is harsher still for the region closest to the fighting.
Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) economies are projected to contract by an average of 4.3% this year.
That represents a downward revision of nearly six full percentage points from the World Bank’s spring forecast.
Neither institution is given to alarmism. Their numbers describe a war that has already cost the global economy real growth, regardless of how it ends.
The regional danger extends far beyond Iran’s borders.
Iran-aligned Houthi forces have already struck Saudi oil facilities, tankers, and transport hubs. Explosions have rattled Riyadh itself.
Mearsheimer has warned that a desperate, cornered Washington could pull the Gulf states, Jordan, and Israel deeper into a war none of them started.
Iran’s proxies give Tehran reach far beyond its own territory, even as its formal military absorbs the damage.
A second American campaign after the midterms would rest on the assumption that the outcome will somehow differ, even if the strategy does not.
Rather than containing the danger, such a campaign risks widening it.
Mearsheimer, Massie, and the IMF approach the war from different vantage points.
Yet each describes the same underlying failure: a campaign that achieved none of its stated aims and possesses no credible theory for achieving them later.
A president who built his political identity on ending wars now owns one with no visible finish line.
He faces a reportedly furious rupture with the ally who persuaded him to enter it. Only the midterm calendar now stands between him and a decision he has all but promised to make badly.
If the renewed campaign Trump has signaled for after November produces the same result as the first, the verdict will be difficult to escape: a regime still standing, an economy still bleeding, and a region still bracing for the next round.
The reckoning will not be measured only in barrels of oil or points of GDP.
It will be measured by how this war is remembered alongside every other American war that promised a quick victory and failed to deliver one.
- The writer is a prominent news anchor, programme presenter and media instructor.