The Third Gulf War does not look like it will end soon, because President Donald J. Trump’s determination to prevent Iran from having nuclear weapons exposes America’s inability to achieve geopolitical goals through war—after we ended the Second World War with two nuclear weapons ourselves.
When Secretary of War Peter B. Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff J. Daniel “Razin’” Caine present their battle update briefings the message is always the same: The Pentagon is executing flawlessly both tactically and operationally, so any failure of this war to achieve the president’s geopolitical goals is someone else’s fault.
Hegseth and Caine read from lists of targets destroyed and Iranian attacks thwarted almost gleefully as they lay down their marker and shift the blame for geopolitical failure back across the Potomac River.
Not their department.
America committed to wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan—real wars, hot wars with multi-year commitments, billions of dollars and thousands of casualties, and in each case, the stated geopolitical goals for the war were dismissed as not worth the effort. We just decided to move on.
It should also be noted that the initial goal of the Iraq War was to end its nuclear and chemical weapons programs, and having found none, President George W. Bush decided to stay in Iraq to reconstruct it as a Western-style democracy. In the case of Iraq, the geopolitical goal had been achieved before the war started, so a new one was created on the spot, so as not to lose momentum.
There has never been a president like Trump, now his challenge is to exploit everything the Pentagon has accomplished and convert it into geopolitical victory.
History is not on his side, but never bet against DJT.