While we don’t know all the details yet, it seems pretty clear that Trump did not gain anything from his war with Iran that wasn’t already there before the war. If anything, it looks like a serious step back from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that President Obama negotiated in 2015 and Trump cancelled in his first term in the White House.

It seems the biggest accomplishment of the peace deal is the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. That’s good news for the world economy, but the Strait had been open before the war. Beyond that, there is the commitment by Iran not to develop a nuclear weapon, which was a central feature of the JCPOA. And there are yet to be determined commitments to have Iran’s stocks of enriched uranium monitored or removed. The JCPOA included very explicit monitoring by outsiders of its nuclear facilities and resulted in the shipment of 98 percent of its enriched uranium out of the country.   

But it would be unrealistic to expect a reality TV show star like Donald Trump, and his team of self-dealing real estate baron negotiators, to get as good a deal as President Obama. It should not be surprising that the United States went backward from the standpoint of keeping Iran from getting nuclear weapons.

Given how unprepared the United States military was to deal with the sort of enemy posed by Iran, it is hard to understand how Trump made the decision to go to war in the first place. According to Trump’s own account, he didn’t anticipate that Iran would close off the Strait of Hormuz to shipping and attack its neighbors. 

This is more than a bit incredible, since virtually everyone recognized the Strait as a potential choke point for 20 percent of the world’s oil. With Trump and his partner, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, openly threatening the destruction of Iran’s regime, what did the country have to lose by taking these drastic steps?

It is incredible that Trump would have initiated his war without fully anticipating this response from Iran. That reflects either Trump’s inability to listen to and process information, which is very plausible, or the fact that his top advisors, like Pete Hegseth, did not clearly convey the risks. That is also very plausible.

In either case, Trump and Hegseth took the US into a war that it was unable to win. Thousands of people have died in Iran and many more were killed in Lebanon, where the war is continuing. Ordinarily, a Secretary of Defense who had led the country down such a blind alley would be out of a job. Fortunately for Secretary Hegseth, under Trump, only loyalty matters, not competence. 

The country and the world are paying a big price for his lack of competence in allowing the United States, along with Israel, to initiate a war that never should have happened.