An Iran war that was supposed to be brief, and then was supposed to be over, is imposing an increasing price on Donald Trump’s presidency.
We’ve seen a second term of a Republican administration go this way before. There are distinct echoes of George W. Bush’s Iraq War — the conflict that Trump has long excoriated — in the president’s predicament. Now, the Iran war is different from Iraq. There is no ground invasion, no regime change, no occupation, no counterinsurgency. The casualties are not close to the same scale, and Trump has been fighting Iran for months, whereas George W. Bush was embroiled in Iraq for years (and so were his successors).
Yet, the political trajectory looks similar. Then, as now, an unpopular conflict is putting downward pressure on a Republican president’s approval rating. Mainstream pollsters routinely have Trump’s approval rating below 40 percent, and some put it below 35. At this juncture of Bush’s second term, his average approval rating was a roughly comparable 38 percent.
If the Iran war is not exacting nearly the same price in blood and treasure as the Iraq war, it is inflicting a direct economic cost on Americans that wasn’t present during the Iraq war. The Iran war came home the first time the average price per gallon of gasoline went above $4.
Trump would have much more leeway to engage in a protracted operation to bring Iran to heel if the public could, in effect, forget about the war for a while, but there’s a reminder every day of what’s happening in the Strait of Hormuz on gas signs across America. In the CNN poll, 28 percent approve of Trump’s handling of Iran, and 25 percent approve of his handling of inflation and 21 percent of gas prices. These issues are related.
Trump wants his presidency to matter. So rather than being content with doing whatever he could at the margins to lower prices, he went for big, legacy-defining initiatives — tariffs and the Iran war — that raised prices. In so doing, he forfeited his signature issue of economic stewardship.
In the latest Fox News poll, 33 percent approve of his handling of the economy and 67 percent disapprove. When the memorandum of understanding with Iran was signed, Trump boasted about how, by reopening the strait, it would avoid greater economic distress; he said he didn’t want to be another Herbert Hoover. Now, the strait is basically closed again. Absent another deal, he is faced with the choice of escalation or an ongoing low-level conflict, neither of which is going to be palatable to the public.
The CNN poll found that nearly three-quarters of Americans think Trump has not paid enough attention to the country’s most pressing problems. The fact is that Iran was not a priority for the public, and there was no attempt by the White House to make it one until after it had already launched the war.
Just as Bush’s success in toppling the Taliban created the predicate for the Iraq War, Trump’s stunning capture of Nicolas Maduro made it easier to believe that the Iran war would be a cakewalk. The idealistic establishment Republican and the “America First” populist both got lured into overestimating the efficacy of American military power.
Perhaps Trump will manage a satisfactory conclusion. Still, the next Republican president would be well served to be more prudent and mindful of worst-case scenarios when launching major military operations than either of his two, otherwise very different, GOP predecessors.
Rich Lowry is on X
@RichLowry.
