Brief Iran war stands to have much larger consequences for GOP with voters

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We don’t know yet what is in the deal to end hostilities in the brief U.S.-Iran war, or if the truce really will be signed on Friday. Both President Trump and Iran’s leaders are known for their theatrically capricious negotiating styles.

But assuming the agreement holds, we will be able to say “brief” because at 106 days — most of which were spent in a stalemated blockade and counter-blockade in the Persian Gulf — the conflict is a relative blip on the timeline of American military campaigns, both historical and current.

The airstrikes on alleged drug traffickers off the coast of South America have been going on for more than twice as long as the Iran “excursion,” and have killed hundreds — now including targets on land. American forces also remain engaged in Syria, Iraq, Somalia, against the Houthis in Yemen and elsewhere.

Those are slow-burn, years-long missions that mostly involve helping friendly (or at least not actively hostile) governments deal with their own insurgencies, often in environments shaped by prior American involvement. The targeted killings in the Pacific and Caribbean of individuals the Trump administration says are engaged in the drug trade do represent a profound departure from past policy. But even that is an escalation of a four-decade “war on drugs” in which the federal government tries to interrupt the supply of narcotics — mostly cocaine — to the insatiable American market.

The attack on Iran was different both in scale and in the nature of the enemy. Since the post-9/11 conflicts with Afghanistan and Iraq, American military operations have mostly been against nonstate actors or pseudo-states. The campaign to defang and maybe topple the Iranian regime in a country of more than 90 million was massive compared to skirmishing with al-Shabaab in the Somali hinterlands.

A potential war with Iran had been in the background of the U.S. foreign policy discussion for more than 20 years. As U.S. forces fought Iran’s proxies in Iraq and elsewhere in the region, the possibility that America would, as the saying went, “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” was with us always, even as domestic political conditions prevented leaders in either party from acting. The unpopularity of the wars in Iran and Afghanistan had set a political picket around direct action against the rulers in Tehran.

But Trump thought he found a way around the problem. The popularity of the airstrikes against Iran’s nuclear program a year ago combined with the success of the midnight raid to capture the then-ruler of Venezuela in January convinced Trump that a similar scenario was possible with the Iranian ayatollah and his regime — what he called in the early days of the Iran war “the perfect scenario.”

That is, of course, not what happened. Instead of deposing one ruler in a special forces raid and swiftly replacing him with a member of his regime willing to accede to American demands, Trump set off a power struggle between different Iranian factions that are divided about many things, but not about the necessity of menacing Israel and resisting American aims. Unlike the threadbare Chavistas in a hollowed-out petrostate corrupted by drug cartels, Iran proved more sincere in its decades-old commitment to a permanent Islamic revolution.

Unable to get a quick and easy, Venezuela-style win, Trump found himself exactly in the vice he had sought to avoid in his first term — the same situation that had deterred his predecessors: back down or wage a costly and unpopular ground war in Iran in pursuit of outcomes far removed from the direct concerns of most American voters.

Perhaps the president’s more hawkish advisers unwisely assumed that once the war had begun, Trump’s pride and the desperate consequences of a loss to a third-rate power like Iran would force him to commit himself to the task and “finish the job” rather than cut and run.

But by maximizing the pain for American consumers and strangling world markets by choking off the Strait of Hormuz, the Iranians were jabbing Trump right in his solar plexus. So, unwilling or unable to rally domestic support for a larger war, Trump was forced to the negotiating table.

The hawks can be happy that Iran is far weaker militarily than when the war began and that the regime, already teetering before the bombing, looks even more unsteady. There’s always next time, and with Iran as unstable as it is and Israel unlikely to accept any agreement that depends on the good offices of the Iranian-backed terrorists in neighboring Lebanon, maybe next time isn’t very far off.

But for today, we can say that the U.S.-Iran war of 2026 was “brief,” assuming it really is over. Whether it will be consequential depends on what comes next, but, for now there’s no clear, direct result of the conflict. In a decade will we even remember it? Will it join incursions into places like Bosnia and Somalia as footnotes, or will we think of it frequently because it was the prelude to a much larger conflict or of a lasting realignment?

One way, though, that the war has not been brief will be in the minds of the voters.

Whatever the president’s hawkish boosters say publicly, one can’t imagine that this outcome is satisfying for them. For those “America First” devotees on the nationalist right, meanwhile, the premise of their alliance with MAGA — “no wars for Israel” and all that — is pretty well trashed. And the swing voters without strong opinions on foreign policy — though doubtless very relieved at the prospect of tumbling energy prices — will certainly wonder what the point of it all was.

All promises of peace withstanding, we can expect the president’s numbers to rebound, but probably not entirely. His abilities as a leader, already in doubt after a bumpy opening year of his second term, will look worse to the millions of Americans who conclude that this was a bungle.

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