President Donald Trump failed to make a case for war against Iran when he finally addressed the public more than a month after launching the military operation, according to an analysis.
In a new column published Thursday morning by MS NOW, journalist Paul Waldman analyzed the 79-year-old president's prime time address from the White House and found he did little to communicate the war's necessity or why risking American lives and the global economy was worth the effort.
"A decidedly lethargic president argued both that the war was necessary — lest Iran rain destruction down on America and much of the world — and that the war is going great and will soon be over," Waldman wrote. "If there is anyone not already on board with Trump’s war who would have been convinced by that speech, it’s hard to imagine who and where they are."
The torpid president leaned hard on his rhetorical crutches – the military, he said, has delivered “victories like few people had ever seen before" and the unspecified objectives "very shortly" – and he dubiously insisted "America has plenty of gas" despite the oil blockade at the Strait of Hormuz.
"But a significant chunk of Trump’s speech was given over to a fact-challenged attack on the international nuclear agreement reached with Iran when Barack Obama was president," Waldman wrote. "It’s worth reminding ourselves of that history, because it show a path we could have taken, had Trump not been so foolish and jealous of Obama."
Trump pulled out of that nuclear deal in 2018 over the objections of his top officials, claiming Iran would come crawling back for a new agreement – which they never did – and Waldman said the president would now gladly accept the terms of that previous plan of action.
"Only in Trump’s mind could an agreement that included close monitoring of Iran’s nuclear program have made it more likely Iran could build nuclear weapons than with no monitoring at all," Waldman wrote. "But Trump began this war without thinking through the political effects — not just here at home but also in Iran and beyond. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz and his shifting statements on the topic show just how irrational his prosecution of the war has been."
Iran has dug in for a protracted conflict that Trump clearly has no appetite for, but Waldman said the president also seems to have no plan for wrapping up the military operation without major concessions that leave the U.S. worse off than before he agreed to join Israel in the bombing campaign that killed off the country's top leaders.
"History is replete with disastrous wars, launched for terrible reasons and carried out with blundering incompetence," Waldman said. "But in modern times we may never have seen a war go sideways as quickly as the one that Trump started in Iran, with an Iranian regime still holding on to power and the world plunged into an energy crisis. And though he tried to slap some gold paint on this catastrophe, Trump still hasn’t made a case for why his Iran war was anything but a terrible idea."