The Failure of Trump’s Strike Against Iran

The Failure of Trump’s Strike Against Iran

Andrew Bacevich on the Middle East, Henry Louis Gates on American Slavery, and Jelani Cobb on Joe McCarthy.

Start Making Sense and Jon Wiener
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Trump’s strike that killed Iran’s Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani continues a long, failed history of American actions based on the idea that the US military can shape the Middle East in accord with our wishes. That’s what Andrew Bacevich argues—his new book is The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered its Cold War Victory.

Plus: Henry Louis Gates discovers slave owners—and also slaves—in the family histories of some surprising people—on the PBS series Finding Your Roots. On this season’s premiere, Anjelica Houston learned that one of her ancestors, who died in Maryland in 1811, was a slave owner, and that in his will he acknowledged fathering four slave children. Gates, the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University, also talks about his collaboration with historian Eric Foner on the award-winning PBS documentary on Reconstruction.

Also: Joe McCarthy as a predecessor of Donald Trump: The connections and similarities (“McCarthy was willing to assert things that he knew weren’t true, and did it with aplomb”) are traced by Jelani Cobb of The New Yorker and the Columbia University faculty. He’s a contributor to the new McCarthy episode of the PBS series American Experience.

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Even before February 28, the reasons for Donald Trump’s imploding approval rating were abundantly clear: untrammeled corruption and personal enrichment to the tune of billions of dollars during an affordability crisis, a foreign policy guided only by his own derelict sense of morality, and the deployment of a murderous campaign of occupation, detention, and deportation on American streets. 

Now an undeclared, unauthorized, unpopular, and unconstitutional war of aggression against Iran has spread like wildfire through the region and into Europe. A new “forever war”—with an ever-increasing likelihood of American troops on the ground—may very well be upon us.  

As we’ve seen over and over, this administration uses lies, misdirection, and attempts to flood the zone to justify its abuses of power at home and abroad. Just as Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth offer erratic and contradictory rationales for the attacks on Iran, the administration is also spreading the lie that the upcoming midterm elections are under threat from noncitizens on voter rolls. When these lies go unchecked, they become the basis for further authoritarian encroachment and war. 

In these dark times, independent journalism is uniquely able to uncover the falsehoods that threaten our republic—and civilians around the world—and shine a bright light on the truth. 

The Nation’s experienced team of writers, editors, and fact-checkers understands the scale of what we’re up against and the urgency with which we have to act. That’s why we’re publishing critical reporting and analysis of the war on Iran, ICE violence at home, new forms of voter suppression emerging in the courts, and much more. 

But this journalism is possible only with your support.

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Start Making Sense Start Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.  


Jon Wiener Jon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.


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