Donald Trump built a political brand on two things above all else: the claim that he wins where others fail, and the conviction that America’s Middle East wars were catastrophic mistakes. He said the Iraq invasion was “a big fat mistake.” He ran against forever wars and won twice doing it. Then he started one — and declared victory before the dust had settled. The ceasefire with Iran now in place is real, fragile, and riddled with the same structural contradictions that doomed every American attempt before it to produce a durable outcome in the Middle East.
The military cost of Operation Epic Fury reached at least $40 billion by mid-June, with Trump requesting a further $87 billion in supplemental funding, the majority tied directly to the war. Altogether, the conflict has cost US taxpayers and consumers at least $132 billion according to Moody’s Analytics — and that figure is still climbing. One Harvard economist has projected that the total cost will likely exceed $1 trillion over time. For a president who sold himself as a dealmaker who gets results cheaply, those are numbers that require a lot of spin.
The Historical Trap, Repeated
Since the end of the Vietnam War, every US president has had the trajectory of his time in office shaped by conflict and repeated blunders in the Arab world. During the last half century, the US has sent more weapons, spent more money, committed more troops, lost more lives, and expended more political capital there than anywhere else — and yet, time and again, it has failed.
The pattern is worth tracing precisely because Trump dismissed it so confidently. Jimmy Carter inherited the 1979 Iranian revolution and watched it swallow his presidency through the hostage crisis and a botched rescue mission. Ronald Reagan yoked American credibility to Israeli military objectives in Lebanon and paid for it with the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing — still the deadliest single-day loss of US military personnel between Vietnam and September 11. George H.W. Bush expelled Iraq from Kuwait, then chose not to support the uprisings that followed, allowing Saddam Hussein to survive and crush his own population. George W. Bush finished what his father started — catastrophically. He sold fantasies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and links between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, then presided over a war that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and cost the United States nearly $1.8 trillion. Obama intervened in Libya, toppled Gaddafi, and watched the country descend into civil war — later calling the failure to plan for the aftermath the worst mistake of his presidency.
Like every administration before it, the Trump administration insisted its new war with Iran would be smarter, savvier, and cleaner. “Back then, we had dumb presidents, and now we have a president who actually knows how to accomplish America’s national security objectives,” Vance said. That line has aged poorly. The war did not produce regime change in Tehran. Airpower alone was never sufficient to collapse the regime, and punitive measures were unlikely to make Tehran concede on matters it has consistently stressed are nonnegotiable.
The Ceasefire That Doesn’t Resolve Anything
What exists now is a 60-day window dressed up as a peace deal. The MoU halted the fighting and began reopening the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-fifth of global oil and LNG normally flows — the administration’s one concrete, undeniable achievement. But the architecture around it is full of holes.
The Senate approved a war powers resolution seeking to block US military action against Iran, a remarkable development that signals how little confidence even Republican lawmakers have in the administration’s management of the conflict. One senator pressed Defense Secretary Hegseth on whether the military had achieved “a series of tactical successes but are on the verge of a strategic loss” — a charge Hegseth deflected without actually refuting.
Iran, meanwhile, retains its most powerful card. Tehran has threatened to “completely” close the Strait of Hormuz and strike vital infrastructure across the region, including energy and desalination facilities critical for drinking water. That threat does not expire with a ceasefire announcement. The Islamic Republic’s leadership knows it can extract concessions from Washington by deploying the Hormuz option, and nothing in the current framework changes that calculus.
At the center of the pressure that pushed Trump into this war is Benjamin Netanyahu, who for more than three decades has warned that an Iranian nuclear weapon is imminent, repeatedly pressing Washington to confront Tehran militarily. Netanyahu got the war he wanted. He did not get the outcome — regime change, the elimination of Hezbollah, and a permanently dismantled Iranian nuclear program. Despite the ceasefire, Israel launched “Operation Eternal Darkness,” targeting all of Hezbollah’s command and control centers in southern Lebanon, Beirut, and the Beqaa Valley, making clear that Israel’s war aims have not aligned with — and may actively undermine — any durable US-Iran settlement.
The 60-Day Gamble
The nuclear file is where the framework is most exposed. The proposed $300 billion reconstruction fund remains entirely conditional, its structure unclear and its financing unconfirmed. Trump himself denied that the United States would contribute any funds directly. The broader sanctions architecture stays in place until a final nuclear agreement is reached — an agreement that must be completed in 60 days, with inexperienced US negotiators, a hardline new government in Tehran, and Israeli strikes continuing in Lebanon. Iran, the US, and Israel agreed to a two-week ceasefire brokered by Pakistan beginning on April 8, but the ceasefire immediately came under strain as Iran refused to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz, blaming ongoing Israeli attacks on Lebanon.
Trump told Axios he has not yet learned that there are limits to his power. The problem with America’s Middle East record isn’t just the wars, lives, and treasure lost — it’s that Washington has never acknowledged these failures or appeared to learn from them. That pattern holds. The men who drafted the conditions for this war have walked into the same sand trap that swallowed their predecessors, wearing different shoes and carrying the same shovel.
The ceasefire may hold through the summer. The Strait may stay open long enough for oil markets to stabilize. But a genuinely durable outcome would require a degree of consistency, credibility, and diplomatic patience that this administration has not demonstrated anywhere. By treating military action as an end in itself, Washington risks open-ended conflict with no clear exit strategy — a description that fits this war as neatly as it fit every one before it. Trump is not exceptional. He is, on the evidence, quite ordinary in his capacity to get stuck.
Original analysis inspired by John Feffer from Foreign Policy in Focus. Additional research and verification conducted through multiple sources.
