Trump and America are staring down multi-front strategic defeat

After starting a disastrous war of choice against Iran which has had massive, ongoing ramifications for the global economy with 20% of global oil and gas flows getting bottled up by the closed Strait of Hormuz, Trump is now scrambling to negotiate some kind of deal after turning himself and America into international pariahs. What makes this considerably worse for Trump is that the reported details of the deal are worse than those of the Obama-negotiated JCPOA, which Trump tore up while moving the American embassy to Jerusalem in his first term.

What this means is that Iran has now demonstrated decisive control over the Strait of Hormuz, has de facto had sanctions lifted, and appears to be coming out of the war with a clear strategic victory, as Israel and America failed at not only regime change, but any significant degradation of Iranian ability to control the Strait. Already, Senator Ted Cruz and Israeli leaders are expressing grave concern about the apparently imminent deal Trump is using to extricate himself from the Iranian briar patch. It is largely believed that Trump imagined the operation going like the Maduro kidnapping—quick, clean, decisive.

Unfortunately for Trump, the Iranian regime had been preparing for exactly this existential war against America for decades, building out not only asymmetrical kinetic capacity, but also decentralized redundancy in command structures, allowing the regime to maintain continuity despite American and Israeli assassinations of leadership. Even should he more fully commit to the war, there is no guarantee of any real upside, and a firm certainty that a ground invasion of Iran would be extremely messy at the least. He has backed himself and America into a corner from which there are only bad moves available.

However, America is not staring down a single defeat in Iran. It is staring down at least three major geopolitical defeats, if not four or more.

They are as follows: 1) Failure to achieve strategic victory in Iran, 2) failure to achieve significant strategic victory in Ukraine, 3) crashing the world economy with a war of choice, and 4) deeply alienating Europe and Canada by attempting to annex the territory of EU/NATO member states and making references to making Canada “the 51st state.”

Trumpist populism is now an active liability on the European rightwing, which increasingly views it as a vehicle for American domination and Zionism. Peter Magyar, the Hungarian politician who ousted Orban, shares Orban’s positions on many issues, but notably does not have the same Trumpist associations.

As for Ukraine, it is now guaranteed to lose at least 20% of its pre-2014 territory, along with a good 8 million or so people in the newly-annexed Russian territory, along with over 4 million refugees who’ve mostly permanently settled in their host countries after four years of war. A four-year-old Ukrainian child brought to the UK in 2022 is now an eight-year-old whose only real conscious memories are of Britain. At a certain point, the sunk cost fallacies and socialization flip permanently towards staying in the host country, even for patriotic Ukrainians.

Rump Ukraine will emerge massively depopulated (Recent data from the Ministry of Social Policy estimates 22-25 million people in government-controlled territory), with ruined infrastructure, massive debt, an extremely old population which is currently estimated to be 46% pensioners, and hundreds of billions of dollars worth of reconstruction to do, with zero fiscal ability to do it.

Russia does not need to physically control all of Ukraine if the rump state is unviable and lacks enough military age men to pose any real threat. Indeed, it is far better for Russia to avoid trying to besiege and occupy every major Ukrainian city from Kharkov to Lwów, an endeavor which would undoubtedly be a disaster even against a collapsing Ukraine. Limited, if not total Russian strategic victory is guaranteed now. Aside from the diplomatic blunders, that is at least three major geopolitical defeats—Iran, Russia, and crashing the global economy.

That’s not all, though. By “going nuclear” against Russia with sanctions, America exposed the exact mechanisms and extent of its coercive power through sanctions mechanisms. It has also proven that it is more or less impossible to cut an economy the size of Russia’s off from the rest of the world. The Chinese have been taking notes this entire time, learning precisely how to sanctions-proof themselves, and also gaining crucial intelligence and insight into American and NATO capacities through both the war in Ukraine and against Iran. America has fully tipped its hand against the weaker of its three major enemies (Russia, Iran, and China), leaving it vulnerable to its most important and powerful enemy, China. Indeed, Xi Jingping recently pressured Trump on Taiwan in person, as well as subtly implying that America is the declining power in the Thucydides Trap between China and America.

A certain degree of decline has been baked into America’s position ever since its zenith as 50% of the global economy after WWII, but Trump has essentially done a speed run of imperial decline by simultaneously antagonizing Russia, Iran, and China, creating a Eurasian, anti-American solidarity bloc in the process. Zbigniew Brzezinski warned against antagonizing those three specific countries at once, and imagined peeling Russia off from China in a reverse Kissinger move. The possibility of driving a significant wedge between these three, such as it existed prior to 2014 or the War against Iran in 2026, is more or less totally foreclosed now.

There is also the not-insignificant matter of global disgust and revulsion at Israeli ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank with American support, ventures which have done much to alienate global opinion and totally tarnish any veneer of morality or humanitarianism left on American foreign policy. Yes, many countries and people have hated Israel and America for a long time, but seeing ethnic cleansing get live-streamed on every major social media app fundamentally changes the playing field from the legacy media days. American and Israeli cruelty and violence are broadcast on a loop to teenagers and twenty-somethings on TikTok, radicalizing many on the issue in the process. Losing the social media battle is yet another strategic loss to add to the growing pile.

Rather than Obama’s or Biden’s managed decline, Trump has accelerated it by essentially mashing buttons on the control pad of American empire. Mash the sanctions and tariffs buttons here, mash the military interventions ones there, and get beaten the whole time by opponents calmly landing combos. Rather than the “pivot to Asia,” we got a pivot to even more and dumber Middle Eastern wars, which is a total betrayal of the MAGA base and Trump’s own campaign promises.

There is also the little matter of the total domestic failure of ICE, whose incompetence has delegitimized anti-immigration politics for many ordinary Americans.

The worst is yet to come, though. The midterms are almost assuredly going to be a bloodbath for the Republicans, opening up the possibility of Democrat dominance of both Chambers of Congress and impeachment proceedings against Trump as a corollary. One can only imagine how many committee hearings the Dems will be having and how many subpoenas they’ll be handing out once they get their hands back on the wheel. Figures like Elon Musk are already preemptively preparing for the depositions.

The walls are rapidly closing in, and the pile of defeats is looking downright Assyrian. Anybody selling this second Trump term as any kind of victory is either delusional or paid at this point, and it will be interesting to see how both the GOP and the American people deal with the considerable aftermath of major defeats which may have been inevitable but were nonetheless exacerbated by Trump’s impulsiveness and incompetence.

The New American Century seems to be over before it even began. If you have children, teaching them Mandarin Chinese might not be a bad idea.