On 28 August 2026, I was on “The Chris Hedges Report” talking mainly about the ongoing disaster in Iran. Chris was interested in pushing me to explain why I believe the Iran war is the greatest strategic blunder in US history. Of course, that is really saying something when you realize it has at least two serious competitors that took place during Chris’s and my lifetimes: the Vietnam and Iraq wars.
Iran is number one in my opinion, because 1) we went into that war based on the false claim that Iran was on the verge of acquiring a nuclear weapon; 2) we had a theory of victory — air power alone would produce regime change — that has never worked and was not going to work this time; 3) we had no contingency plan for dealing with the likelihood that Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz; 4) we failed to achieve any of our four principal objectives — regime change, ending Iran’s nuclear enrichment capability, ending Iran’s long-range missile capability, and ending Iran’s support for Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis; 5) the Strait was closed, which has already done significant damage to the international economy and could do much more — remember President Trump worries about following in Herbert Hoover’s footsteps; 6) we seriously undermined our carefully crafted alliance structure in the Gulf; 7) virtually all of our bases in the region have either been badly damaged or destroyed, to the point where we have moved most of our military assets out of the Gulf region and will probably not be able to return; 8) we have run down our stocks of key weapons to the point where we have weakened our deterrent postures in East Asia, Europe, and even the Western Hemisphere; 9) we have done enormous damage to our reputation as a reliable and wise ally; 10) we have markedly improved Iran’s strategic position in the Gulf region; and 11) there does not appear to be much chance — perhaps no chance — that we will get a nuclear deal of any sort with Iran, which was once considered of the utmost importance. In fact, there is a reasonable chance Iran will acquire nuclear weapons. President Trump has certainly given Iranian leaders — and other leaders of non-nuclear states around the world — a powerful incentive to acquire a nuclear deterrent.
It is difficult to imagine a more stunning strategic failure.
What if it doesn’t matter that the war with Iran seems to be a strategic blunder? What if the true power structures don’t care? As Julian Assange once has said, “the goal is not successful wars but endless wars”. What if all the talk about “nuclear weapons”, is just to get people to buy into “forever wars”, which you cannot sell? And by the way – isn’t the overall goal to disrupt China and to buy time in the US’s desperate pursuit of maintaining global hegemony, just like the war in Ukraine is a proxy war against Russia for the same reasons? What is failure doesn’t matter as long as that wars keep going and are disrupting Russia and China? Some people make an awful lot of money on this – in fact they seem to feed on chaos and disasters. If ordinary people around the world lived in peace and had time and energy to see the charade and do something about it these power structures would be dismantled. Now all that people have time to do is to survive, live in fear and/or live on in their “comfortable numbness” to quote Pink Floyd.
I think #12 will also be hugely important, and that is the increasing likelihood that the closure of the Straight and possibly other shipping choke points will sustain a shortage of fertilizer and result in widespread famine. That still leaves the question of who will ultimately get the blame, we who started the war, or those whose blockade prevented the oil from being shipped .
#13. Global realignment, with China taking over allegiances and alignments that the U.S. has become increasingly dependent on and economically addicted to. This war of choice has demonstrated that we have become not only untrustworthy and capricious, but once again, as in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, incapable of successfully fighting the wars we've taken on. Not only have we put our Middle East allies in harm's may without any choice and probably no or little notice, we've ended up demonstrating that our protection was delusional. They must all be looking for a new framework that doesn't depend on a paper tiger.
It's hard to imagine anything more consequential, short of reaching for battlefield nukes.