In 2010, JD Hamel, a writer for David Frum’s FrumForum, discussing a video that surfaced of a 2007 US helicopter attack in Baghdad, astutely wrote of the George W. Bush administration that “of all of President Bush’s mistakes, his failure to emotionally prepare the American people for war is perhaps the most severe.” Hamel was writing under a variant of his then legal name, James David Hamel, but later became known as JD Vance.
Vice President Vance’s unsuccessful effort to negotiate a settlement of the Iran War he’d wisely opposed brought that old Hamel piece to mind. If ever there was a failure of a US president to adequately prepare for war—constitutionally, strategically, and giving the public a coherent explanation, let alone inspiration to support it—the Iran War was it. It has exposed the unsoundness not only of President Trump’s judgment but of any arrangement amounting to one-man rule in which such a momentous decision can be taken unilaterally.
Trump’s behavior since the ceasefire has been erratic as well, including a blockade for which he has no international backing. A low point was Trump’s statement that a joint venture with Iran in extorting shipping would be “a beautiful thing”; this was the language of a small-time gangster trying to get in on a protection racket imposed by a stronger rival. It was also an abandonment of the principle of freedom of navigation, which the US has stood for since its earliest days, long before it was a world power or leader of alliances.
I’ll be traveling in Southeast Asia this summer, including a stop in Malacca, Malaysia, along the Strait of Malacca, a waterway even more crucial to international shipping than the Strait of Hormuz. There’s already talk of regional powers imposing tolls, as US power and influence recede amid the Trump administration’s squandering of resources and credibility. In a future crisis, China might assert control over the Strait of Malacca, confident that the US could be frozen out or reduced to a junior partner begging for a share of the action.
Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Hungary’s parliamentary election was an embarrassment to Trump and Vance, who called for his reelection, with Vance showing up just days before to make a case for Orbán (while, incredibly, complaining about foreign interference). I visited Budapest a couple years ago, and ordered some ham in the covered market, which I thought would be sliced deli ham, but instead got a slab of pork with nothing to cut it. I sank my teeth into the chewy meat and then wasn’t sure if it was even cooked, so I spat it in the garbage, wondering if I might become a casualty of food-poisoning in Orbán’s Hungary.
Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu also has praised Orbán, as part of some consortium whereby right-wing autocrats enthuse about their joint hostility to wokeness, Muslims and democratic norms. Netanyahu showing up in the Situation Room to sell Trump on the Iran War, and getting “Sounds good to me” in response, should be a case study in the capacity of con artists to deceive each other and themselves about the validity of implausible scenarios and bogus claims. The Bible’s filled with warnings against hubris, but religious Zionism and Christian nationalism both downplay the implications of this source material.
It could all be worse, though. In 260 AD, the Roman Emperor Valerian was captured in battle by the Persian King Shāpūr I. Valerian died in captivity, and some accounts claimed that the Persian ruler forced the former emperor to serve as a footstool when Shāpūr mounted his horse. It’s also said that, upon death, Valerian’s body was stuffed with straw and displayed in a temple. Others, however, claim that Valerian was allowed to live out his days quietly with fellow Roman captives, even as Rome reeled from its defeat.