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Three years is longer from certain vantage points than from others. When Joe Biden entered his second year in office, deeply unpopular, nobody in either party worried he’d flail and lash out and abuse power in the vain hope of winning back the admiration of his lost supporters. To say nothing of trying to steal elections. Those three years were long, but they weren’t that long.
Today, even one year may prove longer than the world can bear. Its only true superpower is captive to a venal, faithless old man, who’s as desperate and error prone as he’s ever been.
We’ve had to live too long already with the intolerable risk of handing a man like Donald Trump the power to deploy nuclear weapons. The Republicans who now pretend to believe this is all Trump Derangement Syndrome once freely acknowledged that no responsible party or nation would do such a thing.
The allure of power convinced these Republicans to muffle their alarm, and over time, some of them surely grew complacent. In some sense, the fact that Trump’s the deranged one has insulated the world from the risks he poses, because we’re more tolerant of nonsense out of him than we would be from someone with a modicum of virtue. We all have senses and we can all see that he’s a buffoon. We write off his provocations and miscues as yet more buffoonery, and resolve to tolerate it until he passes from the scene.
Suddenly that insulation is worn thin.
Trump attacked a huge, oil-rich, geographically pivotal country, and killed all of its top leaders for no articulable reason. He blundered the world into a huge, destabilizing mess, and—unlike an illegal tariff or a blustery threat—he has no way to undo it. Iran is obviously overpowered, but its remaining leaders are at least running an OODA loop, with a clear objective in mind: the survival of their regime.
Trump, by contrast, runs on ego and domestic political imperatives, both of which Iran can exploit. But what happens if his ego injuries and other setbacks mount? If he were to become sufficiently panicked about a quickening political bleed, would he order a nuclear strike in a last ditch effort to reset the scoreboard? Are you sure? Have you seen gas prices over the past week? The labor market? His own assessment of the increased risk of asymmetric counterstrikes within the U.S.?
Or what if the regional conflict goes global. Trump spent his first year in office browbeating Volodymyr Zelensky. Within days of launching this war he approached Zelensky hat in hand for materiel and training to counter Iranian drones. This is good, viewed narrowly, insofar as it will tend to pull the compromised U.S. government closer to the right side of the Ukraine-Russia war, and the western alliance. But that doesn’t necessarily isolate Iran, so much as drive Iran deeper into the arms of Russia and China. How long will Iran remain a mere proxy for those rival powers?
What we need is for Trump to be removed from power, and for whoever replaces him to retreat, while admitting failure and regret. Short of that we definitely need the world to know that the majority of American citizens, and their representatives in the opposition party, can see that this madness and are trying to stop it.
To their credit, Democrats are overwhelmingly opposed to this war. The incumbents with the toughest elections this November are almost all against it, without worrisome caveats.
Yet many critical actors in the party continue to strategize in the present tense, looking forward only for defensive purposes. It’s the mindset of the Democrats who voted last year to pass the Laken Riley Act, or this year to fund the Department of Homeland Security, because polls ranked immigration as Trump’s best issue, and all they could imagine were future attack ads. More than ever, we need leaders perceptive enough to recognize and anticipate trends. This would come with some risk because the world is full of surprises. But people with moral imagination all knew mass deportation would be unpopular in practice, Trump’s version especially so.
We need that kind of moral imagination right now. Trump has left himself and the country exposed on many fronts, and nothing in the offing should make us suspect he will somehow regain popularity.
Nevertheless, four House Democrats provided the decisive votes on Thursday to kill a resolution, which, if enacted, would have required Trump to seek authorization for his Iran war.
Typically, this kind of vote count is a tell that Democratic leadership facilitated the outcome. That many in the party wanted the resolution to fail, but didn’t want to get caught voting against it. I am not certain that’s what happened in this instance. Skeptical as I am of these leaders, I’m told they tried in earnest to maintain unity, but that their whip effort failed, in part because the same war powers resolution had already failed in the Senate. There was little harm in members voting as they desired.
On its own terms, it’s a small embarrassment. Like an error in baseball with two outs and the bases empty. But it’s a poor omen. They will soon have to make genuinely consequential decisions, and if they provide Republicans decisive votes that allow the war to continue—or help Trump rehabilitate himself in any way—the fallout for the party will be immense. The fallout for the world likely more so.