It’s OK to Want Trump to Lose This War

This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM Eastern. Our guest will be Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the author of three remarkable books on the relationship between the United States, Israel and Iran. For as long as I’ve followed Trita’s work, he’s been warning that if hawks in Washington got their way, we would end up with the kind of catastrophe we’re currently witnessing in the Middle East. I want to ask him how this war will end— if it ever truly does— and what Iran, the Middle East and the world will look like afterwards. Please join us.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Alex Kane writes about the Democratic presidential candidates who are turning against Israel.

Mohammad Eslami and Zeynab Malakouti on how Iran will use the Strait of Hormuz to end sanctions and isolate the US.

Nate Silver on why Trump’s approval rating will likely never recover from this war.

Ziad Abu-Rish on why Lebanon won’t disarm Hezbollah.

For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Occupied Thoughts podcast, I talked to Mara Kronenfeld, Executive Director of UNRWA USA, about what UNRWA does, and about the lies spread told about it.

I talked to the Wisdom of Crowds podcast about whether Israel, or any state, has a right to exist.

Last week, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza won the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction.

Appearances

On April 19, I’ll be speaking in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

On May 6, I’ll be speaking to the Joint Christian Advocacy Summit in Washington, DC.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, I’ve been noticing that some of the people who still support this war are saying that those of us who oppose it want America to lose. This is a kind of a common rhetorical strategy one hears during war. It kind of diverts the conversation away from the legitimacy and wisdom of a war to suggesting that people in that country who oppose the war are kind of unpatriotic. So, it’s the kind of thing that was said during Vietnam. It’s, I’m sure, the kind of thing that Vladimir Putin and his comrades have been saying in Russia to people who oppose the war in Ukraine.

And it is a tricky charge to deal with, right? Because even in an unjust war, one could imagine that feeling like you wanted your country to lose would be a difficult thing. But I think there are cases in which one has to forthrightly say, yes, I want my country to lose. Those circumstances would be one in which there was a war that had overwhelming popular support among the people in your country, but you thought it was wrong, and you wanted your country to lose.

In Israel, for instance, this is a war that has overwhelming popular support. Even Netanyahu’s Jewish political opponents support it. It has widespread support among Jewish Israelis. So, if you say, it’s hard to say in this war I want Netanyahu to lose without saying I want Israel to lose because Netanyahu is waging the war with the support of Israel’s Jewish citizens, who are the vast majority of Israel’s citizens.

In the United States, though, I think it’s different. Which is to say, I think one can say that I want Donald Trump to lose this war—and I do—without saying that I want America to lose the war, that I think we can distinguish this as Donald Trump’s war without saying it’s America’s war. Why? First of all, because the American public has never supported this war from the very beginning, and because there was never a process of consulting the American people about going to war, as should have been required by the Constitution, in which Congress would have voted to authorize the war. There hasn’t been such a vote, and I think if there were such a vote, the pro-war position would lose. So, this really is a war without popular support, without popular consultation, and in that way, I think one can distinguish it as Trump’s war without saying it’s America’s war.

It’s also the case that I think if Donald Trump loses this war, America will be better off. That America and Americans will be better off if Donald Trump loses than if Donald Trump wins. First of all, that’s because the consequences of Donald Trump losing this war will not be catastrophic for Americans. We can imagine circumstances where if you say you want your country to lose the war, that means you want… that means accepting that your country is going to be occupied, invaded.

Let’s say you were a German who wanted the Nazis to lose World War II. I would say that that person deserves a lot of—is an admirable person. But you would say so knowing that Germany losing that war would mean Germany ending up in ruins. You can say you want Donald Trump to lose this war against Iran, while recognizing the United States could lose the war, Trump can fail to achieve his aims vis-a-vis this war, and it will not lead to the United States being occupied, ruined, destroyed.

In fact, I think one can argue that Americans would be better off if Trump loses this war than if Trump wins, partly because Trump winning would empower him. This is already a man who’s seizing in blatantly unconstitutional ways, massive amounts of power, and extinguishing the rights of Americans, and potentially even extinguishing America as a liberal democracy. And the degree to which he’d be empowered by a victory in this war would actually empower him to go even further. And so, if one cares about America’s survival as a liberal democracy, you actually want Donald Trump to be disempowered, not to be empowered.

I also think it’s better for the world if Donald Trump loses this war, because if he wins this war, he will then likely use this as a template for further kinds of aggression. Part of the reason we’re in this place we are in the first place is because Donald Trump believes that he won the war in Venezuela by decapitating the regime. God only knows, imagine, can only imagine what he would do if he were able to do that same thing in Iran, what would be the next country that he—in his kind of mega-maniacal, imperial visions as kind of the world’s king—where else he might attack after that: Greenland or God knows where else.

So, I think one can say that the United States, and actually the world in general, will be better off if Donald Trump loses this war than if Donald Trump wins the war. And this kind of war, which is criminal, which is illegal, in which Donald Trump is every day boasting of the new war crimes that he’s going to inflict upon the Iranian people, this kind of war has to end in defeat if it’s going to be less likely that it continues, that it happens in the future, not only for Donald Trump, but for other leaders around the world, right? That leaders learn from one another, so the more successful this is, the more likely we will see more wars, criminal legal wars, with massive war crimes launched, not just for the United States, but by other countries around the world.

One might argue that we shouldn’t root for Donald Trump to lose, because then that means the Iranian regime stays in power, is even stronger, and so the Iranian people are losers. That one could make an argument, potentially, that we should want Donald Trump to win, because that would also be a victory for the Iranian people, who therefore would be liberated from their regime.

The problem with that argument, seems to me, is that Donald Trump’s real goal has never been, actually, to liberate the Iranian people. He’s been very clear that what he really wanted was a kind of Venezuela-style situation, in which he decapitated some level of the Islamic Republic and got some more compliant people there who, like Delcy Rodriguez in Venezuela, would repress their own people, but would basically make oil deals with Trump and his friends and be compliant with Donald Trump.

So, I can understand the desire of people to not want the Islamic Republic to win. It’s a horrible regime. It’s done brutal and terrible things to its people. I very much do hope that that regime falls and is replaced by a more tolerant, more representative, you know, ideally a liberal democratic regime.

But I think to say that we should want Donald Trump to win because it would bring about that result for the Iranian people is very, very naive, given everything we know about Donald Trump and his deep preference for autocrats, particularly autocrats who put money in his pocket, as opposed to the messiness of actual democracy, which tends to mean that he has less control.

So, I think we can say, in this case, that we want, legitimately, that we want Donald Trump to lose this war. But for Donald Trump to lose this war is not for America to lose. Indeed, it may be part of America winning, in the sense that America survives as a liberal democracy, and that America can move away from the kind of utterly nakedly, appallingly, grotesquely lawless and violent state that it’s become, and I think America is more likely to move away from that if Donald Trump loses this war than if he wins.

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