Trump has lost the war. He is cornered, and a second round of bombing will not save him, even if Netanyahu joins him again. That uncomfortable sentence is now circulating among the war’s most serious critics, and eight months into Operation Epic Fury, the facts on the ground make it hard to argue otherwise.
Start with the regime Washington set out to topple. The war opened on February 28 with a decapitation strike built on the premise that killing Iran’s leadership and bombing its infrastructure would send millions into the streets to finish the job. John Mearsheimer, the University of Chicago political scientist, has delivered the verdict in four words: “He lost the war.”
Pressed on how Washington regains leverage, he called the question almost beside the point, since “this is a devastating defeat for the United States.” The regime that was supposed to fall is still standing in Tehran: no mass uprising, no toppled government, no new flag over the Supreme Leader’s office. Instead, Mearsheimer’s account says the war has left Iran “stronger than ever” geostrategically, despite absorbing enormous losses.
Robert Pape has spent three decades studying this question, and his conclusion predates the war. “For over a century, states have been trying to topple regimes with air power alone,” he told CBS News, “and I’m choosing my words carefully, it has never worked.” Pape modeled the Iran war for 20 years before it started and watched his own model play out in real time: a decapitation strike, a regime that survived it and turned “more vicious, a stronger regime than before.” He does not see an off-ramp. Asked in late July whether the war would end around the midterms, Pape said flatly, “I don’t think it’s an end to the war ... We’re seeing a longer war, not a shorter war.”
Retired Army Col Douglas Macgregor, a former senior Pentagon adviser, has made the deeper structural point: that Washington never controlled the decision to go to war in the first place. “Just as we are a co-belligerent in Ukraine,” he told journalist Rachel Blevins, “we have from the beginning been a co-belligerent in the war with Iran that Israel has started.”
Craig Murray, the former British ambassador, has pressed the same argument further, rejecting the comforting narrative that Trump stumbled into this war. “Trump always planned the attack on Iran,” he wrote on his Substack. “He was not ‘bounced into it’ by Israel.” Whichever account is closer to the truth, both describe a president without a clean exit, having tied his political fortunes to a war he does not fully control.
Jeremy Corbyn framed the opening strikes in the starkest terms available to a Western politician, calling them a violation of international law on the day they began. “The attacks on Iran by Israel and the United States are illegal, unprovoked and unjustifiable,” he wrote. “Peace and diplomacy were possible. Instead, Israel and the United States chose war. This is the behaviour of rogue states.”
Norman Finkelstein has made a related but distinct argument, pushing back on the popular theory that Israel dragged a reluctant Trump into the war; he has argued for years that American foreign policy follows its own domestic logic, with or without Israeli pressure, which, if true, makes the war’s costs even harder for Trump to disown as someone else’s mistake.
Those costs are no longer abstract. The national average price of gasoline stood at $2.98 a gallon the week before the war began. It is now above $4.27, up more than 43%, with diesel up 68% to $6.33.
Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, estimated this month that the war has cost the average American household nearly $2,000, including $1,100 in higher energy costs alone, with the bill growing by $50 a week. Inflation, which was cooling before the war, has climbed back with it. None of this has bought Washington a victory worth the price.
Iran still controls meaningful leverage over the Strait of Hormuz. Its missile stockpile, degraded but not eliminated, still reaches Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states and Israel itself when it chooses to use it.
Trump’s own standing has moved in lockstep with the war’s failure to resolve. His approval rating sits between 31 and 33% across the major polls taken this month, Reuters/Ipsos, Washington Post/ABC/Ipsos, CNN, all converging on numbers lower than at any point in either of his terms, with a majority of his own party now disapproving of his handling of the economy. He has told aides he expects to resume major strikes after the November 3 midterms if Tehran has not yielded by then, a plan that treats the election, not any battlefield or negotiating reality, as the natural pause point for a war. That sequencing answers the political question of why he has not escalated further before voters go to the polls. It does not answer the strategic one.
A further problem Trump’s own planning does not seem to have solved is Iran’s incentive to wait him out. A regime that has already survived the worst strikes of the war, that has watched gasoline prices become a bigger liability for the American president than for the Iranian one, has little reason to negotiate on Washington’s terms before an election that could weaken Trump further.
Pape’s escalation-trap framework describes exactly this dynamic: each round of bombing that fails to produce collapse tends to harden the target regime’s leadership and narrow Washington’s remaining options to more bombing, not less, because retreat now has to be justified against everything already spent.
Tehran has watched this play out for eight months. There is little reason to think its patience will run out before Washington’s does. Because nothing in the record of the past eight months suggests a second campaign would produce a different result than the first. The regime that survived a decapitation strike and a direct assault on its nuclear and missile infrastructure is not obviously more fragile today than it was in February.
Netanyahu’s renewed involvement, if it comes, adds firepower without adding a theory for how this time ends differently. Pape’s century of case studies offers no exception to point to. Mearsheimer’s assessment offers no path back to leverage. From different vantage points, both describe a president who started a war he could not finish, is now waiting out an election before deciding what to do about it, and whose own polling suggests the public has already reached its verdict on the war well ahead of him.
• The writer is a prominent news anchor, programme presenter and media instructor.