TITLE: Trump was wrong on Iran
SUBTITLE: Day 154 of the four week war
AUTHOR: Peter Banks
DATE: 2026-07-31
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/trump-was-wrong-on-iran
SOURCE: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/trump-was-wrong-on-iran

I’ve been putting off writing this article for a while now, because it was my sincere hope that Trump and co. had been secretly executing some master plan, and that the apparent chaos and confusion were all simply a ploy. But as the months tick by and the stumbles only seem to pile up, at some point it becomes fairly clear that their plan failed. Meaning now we are in some liminal, ill-defined phase where both sides are feeling each other out to determine if it is worth going at it again in earnest.

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Back in March, two weeks into this war, I wrote that someone had to be deeply wrong about Iran — that the competing narratives were fundamentally incompatible, and that time would sort out who was detached from reality. Five months later, time has delivered its verdict, and it turns Trump’s critics in the media and the diplomatic establishment have overwhelmingly been vindicated in their opinion that air strikes alone could not force substantive regime change, and that Trump had no Plan B if that failed.

So today I want to do two things: review the current state of the war, and look at how each side’s narrative — my own included — stacks up.

The state of the war

Tactically, the situation is still disastrous for the Iranians. We will probably never know the true scale of their losses, but undeniably they have had tens of billions of dollars in equipment destroyed and thousands of men killed — estimates of Iranian military dead run from 3,000 to more than 6,000, with Iran’s own count standing at 3,468 killed and more than 27,170 injured. Their navy and air force functionally ceased to exist in the war’s first weeks and may never come back. The old regime elite, which had grown up in the pre-revolutionary world, has been hollowed out — Khamenei, Larijani, Khatib, and dozens of senior commanders are dead — and in their place is a new generation of Iranians whose ability is still an open question.

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But strategically, the Iranians are arguably in the best position they have ever been in.

The major threat to regime survival — a domestic revolution — totally failed to appear. Mojtaba Khamenei sits, or possibly lies comatose, where his father once ruled, and five months of bombing have produced no meaningful defection, fracture, or uprising.

Not only this, but the long-standing threat that Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz has been shown to be real, even while facing down blistering strikes and massive military inferiority. As part of the various failed peace negotiations the strait has been reopened, and as of yet the international oil market has held together, but it is now clear that Iran holds a veto on all trade going through the strait.

Still, even if on paper this looks like a victory for the Iranians, it is a victory only for their state apparatus. The hope that this war would replace the clerical elite with a class more open to a Saudi-style arrangement is basically exhausted, leaving them with few choices. There doesn’t seem to be either the desire or the capability within the Iranian government right now to stop the fighting, which leaves them little chance of being reintegrated into the international community. Their best bet at this point is to become a besieged state like North Korea and hold together through military discipline.

Not only that, but their victory is totally contingent on America being unwilling to finish them off — leaving them currently trending towards victory in the narrowest, most rickety sense possible.

America: brilliant and stuck

The situation is reversed for America. Tactically we have continued to perform brilliantly, and our April rescue of the downed F-15 crew was a feat no other nation on the planet could have pulled off — two aviators recovered from hostile Iranian territory over fifty hours of operations, one of whom had spent two days evading Iranian forces in mountainous terrain while treating his own wounds. Can’t wait to see the movie we make about it in 20 years.

But we have shown ourselves to have no taste for the blood that war inevitably brings, even as Trump casually boasts about our willingness to potentially inflict wanton cruelty. 

Since the bombing has failed to produce regime change, we have arrived at a strategic dead end. Congress lacks the ability to rein in the Trump administration, so the war continues over their formal objection — and over it again, and again — and with a Trump obviously desirous for a “Deal” and continuing to pretend they are begging him for one.

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This was never a war I would have begun. It seemed foolish to me from the outset, but I was open to being incorrect. Still, we are in this war now, and our options are either to “finish” the fight and suffer the inevitable losses that putting boots on the ground would bring, or to admit defeat and back down, no matter how badly bloodied the Iranians are.

What about the rest of the world?

Globally, no one has come out better off than they were before the war.

China has shown itself to be a basically inert force on the global stage — it declined even to help reopen the strait its own economy depends on — and the sheer cost of this war should raise eyebrows in Beijing about any Taiwan timeline. Russia has had whatever remained of its military prestige wiped away by the uselessness of its equipment in a conventional fight with the Americans, reducing Russian kit to, at best, the tools of the poor or the guerrilla. 

The EU has been nothing but their specialty, complain. And totally lack the ability to discipline America a for a flagrantly illegal war. Even continuing to passively assist us, while lodging their displeasure. 

But Israel is probably the biggest losers of this war, since apparently none of their strategic objectives have been accomplished despite the consumption of a huge amount of treasure and international goodwill. They could object here: Khamenei is dead, the Iranian navy and air force are gone, and the missile-fire rate collapsed. All true. But degradation was never the war aim — the war aim, to the extent one was ever articulated, was an Iran that could no longer threaten its neighbors or the world economy. Obviously that has totally failed. We will see how much damage the Iranian nuclear program actually took when they inevitably begin trying to work on a bomb again.

So who was right?

The international experts and centrist analysts who said this war lacked either a mechanism for victory or even a proper conception of what victory would look like. That isn’t to say all of them were correct, or that they even agreed with each other — plenty of them predicted an oil catastrophe that didn’t come, or an imperial collapse that hasn’t materialized. But the basic flavor of their critique was accurate.

Running the three narratives from March through the July 2026 filter:

Narrative 1 — “The US is losing militarily.” Still wrong. The tactical picture never stopped being lopsided.

Narrative 2 — “The war is functionally over, and we won.” Dead. Trump said in March that “we already won the war in many ways”. The ceasefire that followed collapsed, was extended indefinitely, was replaced by a fourteen-point memorandum of understanding signed on June 17, and collapsed again in the second week of July, after which the US and Iran have continued to trade blows. Whatever this is, it is not over, and it is not Desert Storm.

Narrative 3 — “This was dumb.” Closest to right. There appears to be no mechanism for victory, no definition of victory, and a president who will neither escalate to a decision nor accept the appearance of defeat.

What about me?

Here is what I predicted back in March:

I predict, with enormous error bars given the uncertainty, that the US seizes Kharg Island and possibly the other Gulf islands and occupies them as a strategic military zone. This will become our Gibraltar — a small, defensible chokepoint that gives Washington permanent leverage over the world’s trade lanes.

Meanwhile the bombing campaign will continue for weeks, maybe a couple of months, systematically degrading the Iranian state’s ability to function as a military power. This will push oil prices above $100 for a while, but once the war is concluded they will return to roughly $60 again.

The IRGC’s production infrastructure gets hammered until there is simply nothing left to reconstitute in the near term and at some point, and I’d guess late April or May, whatever remains of the Iranian leadership asks for a ceasefire on American terms. Trump, who loves a deal and loves declaring victory even more, will agree, which allows the regime to technically survive but in a deeply cowed form. Iran will no longer pose a credible threat to anyone for the next decade at least, and my modal prediction is they will become a mostly “normal” country before 2030.

Without Kharg Island they cannot sell oil at scale, which means they cannot fund proxies or rebuild their military, and thus they cannot project power beyond their borders.

This war will be mostly forgotten by Americans because the left will have little interest in talking about what looks like a substantive Trumpian victory and the right won’t want to remind people that they were to blame for the inflationary shock we are headed toward.

Going through each of my predictions:

The military picture — mostly right. I said the tactical situation for Iran was catastrophic, that the war was displaying the overwhelming dominance of the US military, and that the casualty ratios were approaching colonial-era absurdity. That has held.

The regime survives — partially right. I predicted the regime would technically survive in a cowed form. It is true that the regime still survives, although how cowed it will be is still very much in the air.

Muted international costs — correct. I guessed the international cost would be muted in the short run and ambiguous enough in the long run to become a point of argument rather than a hinge event. Five months on: the EU has complained and done nothing, no coalition has formed to punish us, and the Gulf states remain operationally aligned even while privately furious.

Kharg Island — wrong. I predicted we would seize it and hold it as an American Gibraltar. We obviously have not captured the island yet, though we have bombed its military infrastructure repeatedly while leaving the oil terminals standing. That being said, Trump’s own explanation for sparing them was “don’t touch the oil, because maybe we’ll take over Kharg Island”. So it is possible I will still be vindicated on this.

A ceasefire on American terms by late April or May — wrong. A ceasefire did arrive, on April 8, brokered by Pakistan rather than dictated by Washington, and it almost immediately collapsed.

Oil back to $60 — wrong. The spike happened as predicted, and then some: Brent crossed $100 in the war’s second week and peaked at the end of April. It did fall below $70 in early July before it went back into the eighties where it sits today.

Iran neutralized for a decade — wrong. Iranian forces hit three vessels in two days at the start of this month, which is what tore up the memorandum. Whatever else Iran has lost, it has not lost the ability to impose costs on the world economy at will.

The war would be forgotten — probably wrong. We won’t know how this will all play out, but I suspect the war will remain a stain on Trump’s legacy going forward. His poll numbers continue to worsen by the day — thirty-two percent with Quinnipiac, an all-time low, and sixty percent of voters now opposed to the war outright.

What should be done?

We have to finish this war with a victory.

The entire global system is best conceived of through the lens of an American imperial project. That means we cannot be defeated by a rebellious province without risking a crisis of the entire system. This isn’t to say that an Iranian win — even a total one — would bring about the collapse of the American order. But it would invite more challenges, and those challenges we would have to fight at a far higher cost than it would take to simply end this war now.

We don’t need to conquer the country or attempt some engineered regime change. But the strait has to be reopened permanently, and it has to be clear to everyone that America won.

That won’t be free of either cost or Human death, but victory is the way to keep a system — which for all its flaws is basically good — together, and so defeat is unacceptable.
