Donald Trump’s Humiliating Iran War Defeat the Most Significant Since Vietnam

Interview with David Faris, professor of political science at Roosevelt University and author of The Kids Are All Left: How Young Voters Will Unite America, conducted by Scott Harris

trump humiliation on iran war

David Faris discusses his recent Nation magazine commentary, “The Framework for the Iran Peace Deal Means Total Humiliation for Trump,” and other developments in the status of U.S.-Iran ceasefire and peace negotiations.

SCOTT HARRIS: We begin our program this evening by welcoming to our show David Faris, professor of political science at Roosevelt University. He’s author of the book, It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. Professor Faris has written for Slate, The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic in Washington Monthly. And we’ll be talking about his recent article in the nation magazine titled, “The Framework for the Iran Peace Deal Means Total Humiliation for Trump.” Professor Faris, thanks so much for making time to be with us tonight on Counterpoint.
DAVID FARIS: Great to be with you again Scott. Thanks for having me on the show.
SCOTT HARRIS: So I’m just going to read just a short bunch of news from the last couple of days to update myself and our listeners on some things that have happened that relate to our discussion tonight. Mediators from Pakistan and Qatar say the U.S. and Iran made encouraging progress during 18 hours of negotiations in Switzerland where the two sides agreed to a roadmap toward reaching a final deal within 60 days. Last week, the U.S. and Iran officially signed the memorandum of understanding aimed at ending the war in Iran, which Trump began in late February. Vice President JD Vance, head of the U.S. delegation and Iran’s parliament speaker led the Iranian delegation. The talks took place despite new threats from President Trump in response to Iran saying it would close the Strait of Hormuz after Israeli forces continued an all-out assault into Lebanon targeting Iran’s Hezbollah allies that killed 83 civilians.
Trump posted a threat to the Iranian delegation in Switzerland on his social media account that read, “You won’t even make it back to your f—ng country.” The president claimed to have told the Iranians will take over the rest of your country. On Friday, Israel said it would agree to a new ceasefire in Lebanon, but Israel is refusing to end its occupation of southern Lebanon where Hezbollah killed four Israeli soldiers, Israel reported on Friday. All this as Israel continued to attack Gaza despite a so-called ceasefire there. Earlier on Monday, an Israeli drone killed a high school student who was on her way to take a test in Gaza City. On Saturday, Israeli strikes killed at least six people, including two children and Ahmed Wishah, a cameraman with Al Jazeera. Since 2023, Israel has killed over 260 journalists in Gaza, including at least 12 who worked for Al Jazeera.

Professor Faris, this is a lot to take in just over these last couple of days, what’s going on in Iran, the peace negotiations, Lebanon, of course, and the death that continues there. But I wanted to focus on your recent commentary first off. In that commentary, you maintain that Donald Trump’s war with Israel against Iran is America’s most strategic defeat since Vietnam. I wondered if you would please explain some of the most serious elements of this strategic defeat that you describe well in the article.

DAVID FARIS: Sure. Yeah. (Chuckles) How much time do we have? Because there’s a lot of elements to this defeat, right?

SCOTT HARRIS: We have about 22 minutes.

DAVID FARIS: Okay. So yeah, it’s hard to know where to begin, but I think at a most basic level, just in terms of the Iranian issue, right? We are exiting the war in a much worse strategic position vis-à-vis Iran and their nuclear program than we were going into the war. So it very much looks like there was a better deal on the table between the Trump administration and the Iranian negotiators before we started bombing them. And so one of the things that the war revealed was that Iran has a sort of a previously unthought of amount of leverage over the U.S., over Israel, over the global economy by virtue of its ability to close the Strait of Hormuz. And that’s bad enough as it is, right?

But I think the reason that it’s a broader strategic setback for the United States that sort of transcends our Middle East policy. It transcends the problems that we’ve had with Iran for 47 years. The reason it transcends those things is because Iran was able to damage apparently quite severely a number of American military bases in the region, a number of our radar installations, airports and ports and natural gas and oil infrastructure in a way that really calls into question the entire American global military strategy. It calls into question the ability of the United States to serve as this kind of reserve naval power, that sort of guarantees free passage on the open seas. And I think this all happened at the hands of a fairly badly equipped and weak—and really in a lot of ways Iran was reeling in February of 2026. That regime kind of looked like it was on the ropes based on the kinds of protests that were happening in the country and the economic problems they were having.

And so that very weak country was able to inflict this kind of damage on I think what we would have once thought of as one of the greatest military powers in world history. And so I think there’s a lot of potential adversaries looking at what happened in Iran and thinking, how much would it really take to knock out some of America’s bases in the Pacific, for example? Good America really defends Taiwan if there was a war between China and Taiwan and China tried to retake the island. These are the kinds of questions that people are asking now because it’s not just that we looked weak in a direct kind of material physical sense, right? We sustained a lot more damage than I think anybody thought that Iran could do to us. The problem is also that we now look weak from a commitment perspective. The president has spent months issuing what looked to be completely hollow threats against Iran.

“We’re going to do this to you. We got 48 hours.” “We’re going to do that to you.” “We’re going to erase your civilization, this and that.” And beneath all of those threats is the reality that the United States seems incapable of keeping a single narrow shipping channel open with this extraordinarily expensive Navy. And that’s one of the things that was the most shocking to me in terms of when we’re watching this war unfold. We’re watching Iran close the Strait of Hormuz and then you’re watching the president either unwilling or unable to do what is necessary and I think what all of our allies in the region thought was necessary to keep that channel open. And so to me, that really looks like a real kind of world historical unsettling of the geostrategic status quo in a way that’s like pretty bad for America’s standing in the world.

It’s pretty bad for the way that we’ve been operating. There are some things that you could see as silver linings and upsides, but I think from a pure American power perspective, this was a disaster that is like really unparalleled since the Vietnam War.

SCOTT HARRIS: Thank you for that summary of a lot of complicated factors as you went through them. Professor Faris, what role do you think Donald Trump’s often noted erratic behavior and what some describe as cognitive decline or unhinged megalomania play in launching this historically unpopular war and as you and others describe it, this humiliating defeat.

DAVID FARIS: I mean, I think that his incompetence and his impulsiveness and his refusal to learn the basics of any issue that he’s engaged in overseas first and foremost makes him really vulnerable to pressure and input from people that want to manipulate him. Again, I’m going to say maybe Israel manipulated the United States into this war, right? But certainly the Prime Minister Netanyahu exerted all the kind of leverage, the rhetorical leverage that he had, he helped along with some other people inside the U.S. government and think tanks in D.C. and all the people that have wanted to do this for a long time. They convinced the president really easily that this kind of farcical plan would unfold in exactly the way that they thought it would. And it would all be over in a few days. We could overthrow the regime with a few days of bombing.
It was a house of cards that would topple over. And I think a president who was kind of with it and on top of things who had done his homework, maybe read, I don’t know, one thing about the history of American involvement in the Middle East, consulted experts and what you can and can’t accomplish with aerial bombardment. All of these things are part and parcel of the decision to go to war in the first place. I think a properly informed president who took real stock of all of his options, consulted real area experts that must have been fired from the State Department or sidelined, had competent advisors who were not occupying multiple positions at once, like Marco Rubio is the national security advisor. He’s also the secretary of state, which is just insane. And he didn’t have any of that input and he doesn’t have the ability to think and reason for himself.
He sees these things, he sees everything in these Manichaean, kind of black and white terms, right? “Everybody else failed to get these guys. I can do it because I’m better.” And that was all part of the decision to go to war. The fact that it continued to go as badly as it did I think was in some part driven by his inability to keep his mouth shut on social media. I mean, there were multiple decisions in this war that seemed to have been made on the fly by the president while he was sitting in front of his Truth Social account or while he was shouting at reporters over the sounds of Air Force One or Marine One or whatever it was, just a lot of decisions that didn’t seem very well-thought through. One threat after another, one ultimatum after another that came and went, no one willing or able to sit him down and say like, “Look, man, every time you issue one of these ultimatums and then you bail, it makes you look worse. It makes us look worse. And it means that no one believes our threats.
Like, nobody already believed our willingness to abide by or negotiate international agreements based on some of the decisions that Trump has made, not just in this term, but also in his first term. So I think his mental unfitness for office is really central to this whole problem. I think a mentally fit president would never have done this, but had they done it, there would’ve been months if not years of planning with the very elaborate, expensive system of expertise that we have inside the federal government that is supposed to guide the president, get input from the various different executive agencies, get the military looped in, and really inform the president of the best, the medium, the worst case scenarios of how this could go. And it just seems like none of that happens, Scott.
It seems like there was a visit from Netanyahu and a few days later he was like, “All right, let’s do it.” You know, like you’re making plans to go see a movie or something. So yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. I think that his cognitive decline, it’s not just that it’s visible on TV. It’s visible in the path of records that he’s left for the United States policy-wise over the past 18 months and it’s really a disaster.
SCOTT HARRIS: Yeah. Well said. Just an example of some of these unhinged social media posts that I read earlier tonight, Donald Trump on social media during what is reported to have been positive negotiations with the Iranian delegation in Switzerland posted a threat making a direct threat to the negotiators, the Iranian negotiators, “You won’t even get home alive.” And this comes as the world knows the United States was in the midst of two previous negotiating sessions with the Iranians when they basically launched a secret attack on Iran. I mean, if the Iranians are skeptical of the United States —as the world is as well—there’s good reason for it.

DAVID FARIS: Well, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, the people who were doing the negotiating in Islamabad in April and May repeatedly had to ask Pakistan for assurances that they would help them get back to Iran safely because the entire time that we were doing the shuttle diplomacy between these seasoned Iranian negotiators and Trump’s real estate friends and his son-in-law, there was real fear that they were going to be killed. The people that weren’t negotiating with can’t even trust that we will let them live long enough to negotiate the document that they’re supposed to be negotiating towards. And that again, is because as you know, we have now attacked Iran twice in the middle of negotiation. We actually killed a number of their negotiators last summer in June, and then we killed a very large portion of their senior civilian leadership and military leadership in this surprise sneak attack on February 28 that was illegal according to any reasonable interpretation of international law.

And so it’s like the discourse in the U.S. is still like, “Oh, wow. Well, can we trust the Iranians? They’re really tricky negotiations.” And it’s like from the perspective of the rest of the world, the people that can’t be trusted in this situation is the United States. I think the Iranians really don’t believe that they can negotiate a truly binding agreement with Donald Trump in particular. For them, I think this is about just kind of stringing us along for as long as possible until the facts on the ground change or he gets bored and walks away and to kind of extract as much as possible from us upfront because for the Iranians, the end point here is much less important than what they can get out of the United States while the negotiations are happening.

I think that they really want to see the United States deliver on some sanctions relief. There’s some bureaucratic machinery in D.C. that needs to be set into motion to relieve some of those sanctions. I think that they want to see that we’re willing and able to do that, that Trump can follow through on one thing, unfreeze some assets, lift some of the sanctions and then they might believe that it’s possible to negotiate a long-term agreement with us. But everything that’s happened over the past nine years, I think any sensible negotiator would say, “We can negotiate with these guys, but I don’t trust anything that they do. I don’t trust the final document as far as I can throw it because they’ve done this to us.”

We’ve kind of stabbed them in the back so many times at this point that you can’t blame them for not believing us when we say we’re going to do X, Y, and Z. It’s really hard for anybody to believe that.

And that’s a tough situation to put your own negotiators in, to make it so difficult for them to convince their counterparts to trust them that it’s not even clear that it can be done. And that’s a real problem, not just with Iran, but with all sorts of diplomatic negotiations in the future.

SCOTT HARRIS: Credibility is a hard thing to earn back, I think.

DAVID FARIS: Indeed.

SCOTT HARRIS: We’re speaking with David Faris, professor of political science at Roosevelt University and we’re talking about his recent commentary in the Nation magazine titled, “The Framework for the Iran Peace Deal Means Total Humiliation for Trump.” Professor Farris, there are Washington war hawks right now who are pushing back against this peace agreement or the memo of understanding. Donald Trump often, as you said earlier, Donald Trump often changes his mind, 180 degrees on critically important issues depending on who spoke to him last. Do you believe that these Republican war hawks can derail the tentative peace agreement with Iran and convince Trump to reignite this war? And I just wanted to quote South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who never saw a war or conflict that he didn’t want to involve us in. I guess he said someday that President Trump will take military control of the Strait of Hormuz if the U.S.-Iran framework agreement falls apart, more rhetoric like that.

But yeah, do you think the hawks are going to blow up this deal?

DAVID FARIS: I mean, they’re trying as hard as they can, right? I like to refer to this as the Iran war industrial complex. This is a network of think tanks like the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in D.C. that are just like a thinly disguised operation to keep the United States militarily involved in the Middle East. And in particular, these guys have been at this for my entire adult life. Foundations for the Defense of Democracies was founded doing the Bush administration. I believe they’ve been pushing to bomb Iran longer than many of the people doing the bombing have been alive. There’s a lot of people in Washington that are deeply, deeply invested in the idea that the Iran problems can be solved with force, specifically with American and Israeli force and they are absolutely apoplectic that they finally convinced the president to do it or they helped convince the president to do it and it was a disaster.

So as I said in the article, it’s like war can’t fail, it can only be failed. So to these folks, it’s like, well, we could win this thing. If only we were willing to seize Kharg Island or if only we were willing to drop a special forces team and “seize the nuclear dust,” as Trump calls it, with childlike wonder and his inability to properly refer to anything on the face of the earth by its actual name.

So there’s a whole industry of thousands of very well-funded analysts whose entire mission for their entire professional careers has been to push the United States into this war, to overthrow the Islamic Republic and to rid the United States of this problem once and for all through the use of military force. That’s what they’ve been saying since the day I got out of college in 2000. And the whole thing is blown up spectacularly in their faces, right? They’re just not ready to admit it yet. And it’s not just that it didn’t work, it’s that it made the situation worse than it already was. And so there’s a real inability in these circles to understand that it’s not just that Trump has negotiated a bad framework, it’s that actually the war went badly. To these analysts, it’s like, “Oh, we could win if we were just willing to keep fighting.” It’s like Vietnam all over again, right?

We have a fight with one arm tied behind our back or whatever. They just cannot accept that there are things you cannot achieve with American military force. And this situation is like what some of these organizations were created for. It’s like what some of these people have devoted their whole careers to. Bret Stephens at the New York Times, a very influential opinion columnist, just can’t let go of the idea that this could have worked if we done it better, not really willing to look objectively at the situation and see the wreckage, not just of this war, but of America’s whole strategy in the Middle East.

Can they convince him to walk away from these negotiations? Yes. I think that they could push him into a situation where we return to the Strait of Hormuz is closed and we’re issuing ultimatums every 72 to 96 hours and it’s just like it’s a game of stasis.

I don’t think that they can push him back into war. Trump signed this humiliating document in Versailles of all places because we lost. And I think on some level he knows that and he knows that the war is killing Republicans politically before the midterms. He knows it’s dragging his approval numbers down. I think he’s starting to realize this might be like the thing that he’s remembered for. And I think it would take something really dramatic for him to start bombing Iran again because we tried to wait them out for months and they just weren’t budging. All these predictions about, “Oh, they’re going to run out of storage space for their oil” turned out to not be real. And so what are we going to do now that we weren’t doing before that isn’t like an even worse war crime than we’ve already committed that could move the needle here? And I don’t think any of them know what it is.

We’re going to go see Kharg Island three months before the midterm elections? No, that’s not happening. So I kind of think that he’s going to hold firm here, that he’s going to stick with the memorandum and we’re going to extend the negotiating window over and over again through the midterm elections and then this will be resolved one way or another after November. But it’s very hard for me to see a shooting war starting back up prior to November. But I’ve gotten them wrong before, so you never know.

SCOTT HARRIS: Really. Unpredictability is like the hallmark of this administration and Donald Trump. So I know we’re just about out of time. I wanted to ask you this: America’s military doctrine and preeminence as the world’s number one power has been shaken as you said earlier and in your commentary as a result of this war. What lessons do you think U.S. allies in the Gulf have taken away from this conflict where not only did hosting U.S. military bases in their countries make them a target of Iranian missiles and drones, but the U.S. military under “Secretary of War Crimes” Pete Hegseth could not protect them—where airports, oil, refineries, hotels were bombed by Iran. And because we don’t have a lot of time, I guess to sum up, I would ask you this, what do you think the long-term damage to America’s standing in the world will be in the aftermath of this war?

DAVID FARIS: I mean, I think it’s enormous. I mean, I think that the outcome of this conflict is going to influence the willingness of countries to host our military bases. It’s going to make global allies think twice before they believe that a deeply held long-standing alliance with the United States will be enough to keep them safe. It’s not enough to let the Trump organization build some hotels in your country and to grease the palms and to pay off the president as virtually all of these leaders have done at some point.

And it’s not enough to have treaties of mutual understanding and the defense pacts and all this stuff. It’s not enough to buy billions and billions of dollars of our weapons. None of these things were sufficient A, to shield them from Iranian missiles and drones and B, none of those things were sufficient to make the president care enough to use all of America’s military might to open the strait. What you see if you’re a leader of the Persian Gulf is you’re like, “Okay, so my main ally is unwilling to launch a long-term operation to open the Strait of Hormuz, the vital shipping channel that keeps my country afloat economically.” I think for the Persian Gulf countries, that’s going to mean out of necessity, they’re going to have to make their peace with Iran.

I think in the longer run, I think this is going to make it a lot harder for the United States to protect its power overseas via the military base strategy. We have military bases rimming the globe and for the most part, countries have been happy to host those spaces. And I think one thing you’re going to see in the coming years is some of those countries are going to rethink that strategy. Do we want to become a target of this stuff? And more importantly, does the United States have the proper technology to protect those bases and to protect the infrastructure, to protect the harbors and the pipelines and all that stuff? That’s all an open question at this point. I think drones, I’m not like a warfare expert, but it seems pretty clear from everything that I’m reading that the drone warfare has really unsettled the balance between offense and defense and warfare in the contemporary world.

And we’re in a period of flux where nobody really knows how a war would go between similarly equipped adversaries using this technology. All we know is that two vastly inferior powers in Iran and Ukraine have been able to hold off what on paper look like massively stronger countries, using very cheap drones, technology that they’re sharing with each other. I’m sure that we’re developing countermeasures and stuff, but right now it doesn’t look like a good bet to bet the survival of your country and your economy on U.S. protection. We’re a rogue power. We’re led by an incompetent, senile, declining old man who can’t be trusted for anything. The American people might give power back to somebody like that in four or eight years. I just think there’s enormous amount of damage being done to our credibility and our reputation every single day that this guy remains in office.

It’s not great.

SCOTT HARRIS: Not great at all. Professor Faris, always good to talk with you and get some sanity on the page here in this very sad and sorry book we’re reading. Thank you so much for spending time with us and we’ll look forward to a future conversation and some better news on the other end of this horror show. Thank you.

DAVID FARIS: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me on the show, Scott. I really appreciate it. And I had a good time chatting with you. See you next time.
SCOTT HARRIS: All right. Thank you. Bye-bye. That’s David Faris, professor of political science at Roosevelt University and author of the book, It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. We were talking about his recent Nation magazine commentary titled, “The Framework for the Iran Peace Deal Means Total Humiliation for Trump.” This is Counterpoint. I’m Scott Harris, here Mondays 8 to 9:30 p.m. and we got lots more coming up on the program. Please do stay tuned onto another topic.

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