Trump’s Iran war exit turns U.S. power into retreat

U.S. retreat – A decade after Donald Trump’s “I alone can fix it” moment in Cleveland, the article argues the Trump years and his return to the White House have left U.S. credibility battered—culminating, it says, in a conditional end to a U.S.-Israel confrontation with Iran

On a sweltering summer night in Cleveland 10 years ago. the sight of Donald Trump stepping onto a convention stage still reads like a shock to the body: his acceptance speech at the 2016 Republican convention—dubbed the “I alone can fix it” speech—and the sudden realization in that moment that he was likely to be elected president.

The writer at the time described it as “one of the most traumatic experiences of my career. ” writing that it “hit 7.5 on the Nuremberg scale.” That level of alarm wasn’t just personal. It marked. the piece says. the beginning of a deeper understanding that Trump’s rise wasn’t a detour from normal democratic rhythms—it was closer to an exposure of what the author calls “unsavory but unavoidable truths about America.”.

A decade later, the central claim is stark: the illusion that the United States was either great or good has been destroyed, and the country has “entirely abandoned the nation’s role as self-appointed leader of the so-called free world.”

The argument builds toward one concrete flashpoint. After Trump returned to the White House last year. the article says. he was “determined to wreak revenge on a long list of real or imagined enemies and to leave his mark on the world.” It credits his administration with doing both—while insisting the mark on the world has been the opposite of what his stated aims would suggest.

That is where the piece puts its weight: it depicts the current administration’s approach as an incoherent mix of expansionist. isolationist and protectionist policies. It describes the worldview as a “wannabe late-medieval fortress-state” that expels “outsiders. ” but also a military superpower that “imposes its will anywhere and everywhere.” In the author’s telling. that contradiction ends—not just in policy disagreement—but in humiliation and surrender on multiple foreign-policy fronts.

The most consequential example. the piece argues. is a decision it says risked becoming one of the most disastrous foreign-policy mistakes in American history: allowing Benjamin Netanyahu to lure or goad the U.S. into an unprovoked war with Iran. The article frames the end state as a conditional “full-scale U.S. retreat” and a “memorandum of understanding” that. it says. accomplishes none of the stated Israeli or American objectives while offering Iran what it calls an “enormous material and propaganda victory.”.

The article concedes the political story could be even uglier at home. It says it is plausible the ceasefire deal will be used to torpedo JD Vance’s presidential hopes. but it dismisses the idea of it being a strategic masterpiece—describing it instead as “more like the result of a game of 52 pick-up than ingenious 4-D chess strategy.”.

But the retreat, in the piece’s view, doesn’t stand alone. It follows a conflict the author describes as a massive embarrassment for the U.S. in ways most Americans “did their best to ignore.”

On the global stage. the piece says. the war was mostly conducted by Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon. in a style the author portrays as “bro-tastic. ” promising grandiose acts of violence and destruction while theatrically imploring Jesus Christ for guidance and support. The writer compares how the war was consumed by Americans to a mediated spectacle rather than a lived catastrophe. invoking Jean Baudrillard’s 1991 essay collection “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.” In that framing. the war “took place” for the people of Iran. Lebanon and other places. while for Americans it felt like “a third-rate alternate-history streaming series that was rapidly canceled.”.

The piece then adds a second, sharper tension—how the author says Israeli leadership believed the operation would land. It cites a Foreign Policy essay by left-leaning Israeli journalist Joshua Leifer. arguing Netanyahu must have believed he was fulfilling a long-standing dream of joint Israeli-American military action to topple the Iranian regime and install Israel as the Middle East’s unchallenged hegemonic power. The author quotes Leifer’s description of the imagined vision: “U.S. and Israeli fighter jets flying tandem over Tehran, Israeli officers ensconced in U.S. Central Command’s Florida headquarters.”.

In the article’s telling, the timing was off. It describes the blowback from that hubris as potentially rippling “decades into the future.” The Tehran regime. the piece says. survived the onslaught. installed new hard-line leaders. and “now looks stronger than before.” It says Americans’ expectations were once again misled by the promises of painless “regime change. ” and it points to “moderates” who “once again fell. Charlie Brown style.”.

Trump, the author writes, bailed out when the war began to look like an unwinnable slog, and even his own followers grew restless.

The U.S.-Israel relationship is described as paying a price that the article says deepened after Gaza and shifted U.S. public opinion. Leifer is quoted as writing that the relationship has “entered a period of terminal decline.”

The piece also reaches backward for context, returning to a period the author says predates Trump’s rise. It claims that even 15 years ago there was “near-unanimous support for Israel” across both American political parties, according to Leifer. It says pro-Palestinian voices were largely exiled to the far-left margins and that criticism of the growing political power of the pro-Israel lobby was dismissed as crackpot antisemitism.

Then, according to Leifer as presented by the article, Trump’s emergence changed the posture of American politics. The piece says the “Israel-advocacy complex” “ditched any pretense of bipartisanship. ” and that in Trump’s first term he embraced a “hawkish pro-Israel line” far to the right of any previous president. It further says Leifer concludes that Trump “has done more to push rank-and-file Democrats away from Israel than any pro-Palestinian activist.”.

So, the article argues, the war with Iran was a failure in its own terms. It may also have caused a rupture with Israel the author calls permanent—especially in a world where Israel is already treated as a pariah state by much of the world.

But the article’s strongest insistence is that the surrender was both “moral and economic.” It says Trump’s war drove crude oil prices into the stratosphere at precisely the moment when capital markets began to realize that renewable energy wasn’t merely a better long-term alternative to fossil fuels. but also more affordable and more efficient.

It then makes its most direct symbolic comparison: “The United States and Israel fought Iran, and China won,” a sentence it says is the first sentence of an analysis by China analyst Ryan Hass for Brookings.

From that perspective, the article says, the U.S. squandered resources and global credibility in what Hass calls a counterproductive and pointless struggle for military hegemony. The alternative. in Hass’s account. is that China stayed focused on what the article describes as this century’s “defining geopolitical contest: the battle for technological leadership.”.

Whether the Iran war helped or hurt the global energy transition is presented as complicated. In the short term. the article says. it will probably drive some countries back to coal and accelerate oil drilling in the Western Hemisphere. But over the longer term. it says. the shock is “likely to accelerate a transition to renewables like solar and wind as well as nuclear power. ” pointing to a quote attributed to Patricia Cohen of the New York Times about “over the longer term” energy shocks following Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine invasion in 2022.

The piece adds that electric batteries have become far more efficient over the last several years and that electric cars are more affordable than ever. It says that in April, wind and solar power produced more electricity globally than natural gas, for the first time.

From the Chinese point of view, the author calls the timing “exquisite,” and says that under Trump the U.S. went “all-in on fossil fuels” while actively working to crush renewable technologies—framed as driven by corruption and cronyism. macho ideology and “misguided mid-century nostalgia. ” summed up in a “Spoiler alert” that covers all three.

The article says China dominates global markets in “wind turbines. high-voltage cables. transformers. solar panels. batteries. software to manage energy flows and more.” It also says Chinese industrial strategy has produced those items beyond domestic demand. flooding overseas markets at low prices to take advantage of a moment like the one the piece describes.

For proof the article points readers to Europe, where it says Chinese-made BYD hatchbacks and SUVs have become popular, often with starting prices below $30,000. The piece adds a U.S. caveat: while those cars are “not technically banned in the U.S.,” it says they are subject to a 100% tariff.

From there, the author draws a parallel between strategic conflict and economic competition, calling it either “ruthless economic warfare” or “capitalist competition,” and saying the Chinese have excelled in the arena.

The Trump energy retreat to policies described as “the 1970s,” the article argues, isn’t just a miscalculation. It calls it a symptom of what Hass calls America’s “open divergences” with partners over the war’s legitimacy. execution and fallout—divergences that the article says “risk metastasizing to other issue areas over time.”.

The article then returns to Europe in a different emotional register—residual loyalty to the transatlantic alliance. tempered by frustration at punitive tariffs. lectures about immigration and energy. support for neofascist parties. “arbitrary overseas interventions. ” and recurring threats to invade Greenland.

By the end, the piece warns against assuming the shift is complete. It says it is “too early” to declare a clear moment of transition in America’s role in the world and that a new president would arrive in a few years. It insists the idea that the greatest military and economic power in history will “just shrivel up and blow away” is unrealistic.

Still, it argues that for most people in most of the world, the U.S. no longer looks like the guarantor of stability it claims to be. It points to Hass’s claim that when China tells small nations in Asia the U.S. couldn’t handle “a second-rate regional military power like Iran,” there is no obvious counterargument.

The article closes by emphasizing what it calls Hass’s “narrative contrast.” In that contrast. China portrays itself as a straightforward business partner and “reliable steward of the international order. ” while America is framed as “a violent and reckless pursuer of its own interests.” The author ends with the bitter refrain that those interests are “definitely not yours or mine.”.

And then, in the final turn, the piece announces a pause from its own reporting—going on a three-week hiatus while the writer takes a badly needed vacation, with the stated hope of experiencing the world rather than writing about it, returning in mid-July.

United States politics Trump Iran war Israel Benjamin Netanyahu Pete Hegseth JD Vance U.S. foreign policy crude oil prices renewable energy China Ryan Hass Brookings Joshua Leifer ceasefire memorandum of understanding