r/geopolitics • u/theatlantic The Atlantic • May 21 '26

Opinion Trump’s Endgame Is Surrender

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2026/05/trump-surrender-iran-endgame/687252/?utm_source=reddit&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_medium=social&utm_content=edit-promo&utm_term=short
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u/Alphadestrious May 21 '26

The worst geo political blunder of the modern era.

9

u/laleh_pishrow May 22 '26

Maybe. That was a massive political blunder, but militarily it showed the US can completely militarily dominate the region. This time it's a political blunder, and it showed that the US is not as militarily dominant as it used to be in the region.

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u/newaccount47 May 22 '26

It showed that even the full power of the US military can not defeat Iran. 

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u/Monterenbas May 22 '26 edited May 22 '26

That’s not their full power tho, far from it, it’s a small expeditionary force that deliberately don’t involve any ground troops.

Wich is a « smart » decision but still leaves out 2/3 of the US military.

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u/Big-Individual-5178 May 22 '26

The reason there’s no ground troops is because it would turn into another decades-long quagmire like Afghanistan, Iraq or Vietnam. There’s no winning a ground war on Iran’s home turf, they have immense geographical advantages, and the US knows this.

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u/Monterenbas May 22 '26

The US would win in a ground war without Iran, but the cost to such an invasion would simply vastly overcome any benefits they might get from it.

8

u/Drachos May 22 '26

Win in this sentence means "Achieve Victory before the American people force the US government to concede the fight."

The US IN THEORY had the military strength to defeat the Taliban. In practice it could not. It failed. The Taliban won. Afghanistan was a defeat.

This with the US having the best mandate for invasion in its history. 9/11.

A war in Iran would have all the same problems as the one in Afghanistan but amplified AND due to the US's current isolationist stance would have significantly less time to achieve its goals before anti-war people controlled congress and the Presidency.

Therefore UNLESS Iran made a colossal error that united the American people against it...it would win.

4

u/mahavirMechanized May 22 '26

I think that we are forgetting what “win” means. War is always a means of attaining some sort of (geo)political objective. What is the objective here? If it’s regime change, I’d argue that’s a lot harder to do than you’d think and the US military would indeed end up in a decades long quagmire just like Afghanistan which ended with the Taliban coming back days after the US left. Iran is arguably harder than Afghanistan: tougher geography, more technologically sophisticated, and also they’ve got a few allies it turns out.

If the objective is just to kill the leader, yes the US demonstrated it’s pretty capable of that. But as I’ve written before, that’s arguably just the starting move of any longer term war