America’s Humiliating Defeat

The Iran deal has been described as a “humiliation” for the United States, since the upshot is that America gets little that it didn’t already have before the war, and Iran gets security guarantees and a big pile of money. Donald Trump’s agreement leaves Iran a theocratic state free to arm itself with ballistic missiles and drones and to murder its own citizens. Its terms suggest that this much-despised state will, after a 60-day period of free passage through the Strait of Hormuz, have the ability to regulate maritime traffic.Normally one would have to pay a lot of money to a discreet professional to be humiliated this badly. Watching Trump and his aides sell the deal is in some ways as humiliating as the deal itself. “If other countries have” ballistic missiles, Trump said at the G7 conference yesterday, “it’s a little bit unfair” for Iran “not to have some.” Elimination of those missiles was one of the primary aims of the war, and thousands of Iranians, as well as more than a dozen Americans, died contesting it. Trump began his remarks today by stressing that the United States could have kept up the bombing if it wished “for another three weeks, two weeks, four weeks, two years. You would never have the Hormuz Strait open.” Keeping the strait open is one of the main purposes of the United States Navy, so these words sound a lot like an admission that the military of the United States cannot do its job, and might be equally vulnerable elsewhere, too.[Jonathan Chait: All the sad hawks]Humiliation, however, is distinct from defeat. Only the United States was humiliated; both countries have experienced a catastrophic loss. The defeat for the United States is the more obvious of the two: a loss of standing and the confirmation that even a rich country cannot force its will on a poor but determined one. For Iran, the defeat is subtler. Bordering countries once considered it a problem neighbor and now know it to be an outright threat. They are arming themselves accordin