Remember me
Donald Trump must be the loneliest war leader in US history. His refusal to engage in pre-war diplomacy means he has no international coalition for support in the Gulf. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has forced the president to ask other countries – including China, France, Japan and the UK – to send their navies to open the waterway. The response has been a collective grimace and a “no, thank you”. Other nations don’t have either the means or the will to help Trump clear up his mess. The Germans are refusing to participate in any military activity, including efforts to reopen the strait. The Indians are negotiating directly with Tehran to get their tankers through. Britain might send minesweeping drones but doesn’t have any ships on hand. Trump is left to wage war with only the Israelis at his side.
Where this all leads is not within Trump’s control. Even if the president wanted to pull back, it wouldn’t necessarily mean an end to the fighting. The mullahs have called for a jihad against Israel and Trump. Israeli opposition parties are pressing Benjamin Netanyahu to be more belligerent. Pockets of violence are flaring up in Gulf states such as Bahrain. Trump cannot extract himself until the oil is flowing again; otherwise the entire operation will look like a loss. For perhaps the first time in his second term, his political fate is fully at the mercy of events.
All the time Trump spends posting about Kharg Island or trash-talking Keir Starmer is time he is not spending on the midterms. His team desperately wants him to talk about the cost of living, as inflation and utility bills soar for millions of ordinary Americans. The stakes in November are high. If the Democrats win the House, impeachment proceedings will likely follow. Other members of the administration, such as the former homeland security secretary Kristi Noem, may also be investigated.
The war has divided and confused the entire Maga movement. The president’s ego – which has held a disparate group together for so long – is now making unity impossible. Trump’s instinctive, freewheeling political style works when he is slashing at domestic enemies with social media posts. But when his attention turns abroad and those posts become missiles, things start to go south fast. Maga is struggling to justify the war to itself. Trump’s politics were never coherent, but certain Maga figures knew what they wanted to achieve – key to that was keeping the US out of ill-defined and costly wars. Consider Elbridge Colby, the patrician under-secretary in the war department and a JD Vance ally. Colby spent the 2010s arguing that the US cannot fight wars in the Middle East while also confronting China. He is seen as the intellectual ballast of the realist foreign policy that is supposed to run Trump’s theatrical, threat-fuelled diplomacy.
Subscribe to the New Statesman today and save 75%
But Colby’s pivot to the Indo-Pacific has once again been delayed. Missile systems in South Korea have reportedly been transported to the Middle East. A unit of Marines usually stationed in Japan has been redeployed to protect oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. A charitable China hawk might argue that knocking out its allies, Venezuela and Iran, makes the US stronger in the long term. But officials tend to read rationality into Trump’s impulses. There is no evidence the president’s decision to fight Iran had anything to do with China.
Officials are at a loss. On 5 March Colby was criticised at an Armed Services Committee hearing in Congress. Contorting himself to reconcile his past scepticism about striking Iran with Trump’s actions, he said he was a “flexible realist”. “I’m a loyal lieutenant to the president,” he repeated.
To get a sense of how Trump’s base has fractured, watch Tucker Carlson’s stream from election night in 2024 at Mar-a-Lago. The former Fox News star sounded genuinely happy that night. Precincts around the country were confirming Trump’s resurrection. Carlson’s political project to usurp the “deep state”, keep America out of foreign wars and purge DEI from the government looked secure. At the start of the show, he jokes to the then congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene: “We are moments from getting another tranche of election results. It looks like Kamala Harris has won the state of Vermont. Is it over?” Cue his squeal-like laugh. Despite her fear that the Democrats would try to steal the election, Greene laughed along with him. They were winning.
They are not laughing now. Greene has been cast out from Maga, giving up her seat after falling out with Trump over the Epstein files. On his podcast, Carlson is waging a war against the war, forced to blame the Israelis for turning Trump against his better angels rather than blaming the dear leader himself. He has accused the CIA of snooping on his text messages to contacts in Iran to “frame” him for an undisclosed crime. Carlson went up against the deep state and lost. Maga, in their eyes, is losing too.
Carlson’s other guests that night included Nigel Farage, Donald Trump Jr and Elon Musk. Farage has had to distance himself from the war, as his loyalty to the president and the British public’s opposition to the strikes collided. Musk is now a background figure in the administration. Trump’s family are cashing in on the only undeniable fact about the patriarch: he’s still the president. His chief diplomatic envoy and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who does not actually have a formal role in the White House, has been raising billions in the Middle East for his investment fund. Where peace and swamp-draining were once promised, Trump’s supporters have got grift and war.
[Further reading: Meet Pete Hegseth, boss of Operation Big Tough Men In Hot Places]
Content from our partnersRelated
This article appears in the 18 Mar 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The new world war
Comments (0)