AMERICA’S “Blue Tsunami” is seismic. But the American electorate has a habit of switch-ing parties at every election. After the Republicans won the White House and both chambers of Congress in 2016, a moderate Blue Wave in the 2018 midterms was followed by Ameri-cans voting for Joe Biden in record numbers in 2020 and giving his party control of Con-gress. In 2022, the Democrats again did well as an anticipated red wave (“red blaze” sounds better) failed to happen. But 2024 won the Republicans another federal trifecta as Trump returned to office. If we assume this November’s midterms presage the 2028 election just as 2018 did for 2020, then the next President of the United States will be a Democrat.
That President will not find it easy to reverse the incredible disruptions Trump wrought in his second term, none of which is bigger than the war with Iran. People are suggesting his midterm disaster will encourage Trump to end the war or the new Democrat-controlled Congress will make him or the next President will do so if nothing else. But the Iran War is too important an international event to be decided by US domestic politics. US-Israel ties transcend party lines. And the path to war began on October 7, 2023 during Biden’s term. So further chapters of the Iran War will come which will surely influence America’s internal affairs more than the reverse.
In fact, Republicans evidently lost the midterms because voters blamed Trump’s war, along with his tariff policies, for the high cost of living, making for a rare foreign policy election. It shows how much the world is changing.
Donald Trump was re-elected President on the promise, among others, of no more wars. Starting one with a country like Iran clearly looks like a complete betrayal of his promise. But maybe that’s not entirely true literally. To understand how, consider a historical parallel.
World War 1 began when Woodrow Wilson was US President. His country faced intense pressure to get involved, particularly when Lusitania was sunk with 128 Americans on board, but remained firmly neutral. When Wilson successfully ran for re-election in 1916, his supporters campaigned on the slogan “He kept us out of war”, implying continued neutrality in his second term.
But a few months after being sworn back in, Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany and its allies. That slogan, therefore, sounds dishonest, but “He kept us out of war” was actually an ambiguous statement, as it referred to both WW1 and the Mexican Civil War raging then, meaning Wilson’s slogan could be interpreted as “He kept America from being engulfed by war”.
Mexico’s Civil War began in 1910 and threatened to spill over into the US, especially when Pancho Villa’s rebels launched a cross-border raid, killing 18 Americans and President Wil-son responded with a military expedition deep into Mexico. But both nations ultimately avoided open confrontation. And if Wilson’s campaign promise was to shield America from that violence, declaring war on Germany represented fulfillment of that promise. America’s last straw was Germany sending Mexico the Zimmerman telegraph, promising to help if Mexico invaded the United States to retake territory lost in the 1840s. When that telegraph was made public, popular support for America’s entry into WW1 soared.
The big takeaway is that war and peace is very complex and campaign slogans are not. A conflict can take countless forms and a nation or people can get involved in countless ways. Woodrow Wilson sent America into a likely unavoidable global war, but he also kept a re-gional war out of America. Is there a similar nuance to Donald Trump’s promise of no new forever wars?
To start with, when American voters heard that promise, Iraq and Afghanistan must have automatically come to mind. These involved prolonged, costly occupations and failed nation-building projects. But since Trump started attacking Iran, he hasn’t seized an inch of territory that needs securing and has simply engaged in a showdown of military might. Crucially, America has been able to pause fighting at will, so no quagmire is evident yet.
That is an encouraging sign that a further exit is possible now that voters have shown their opinions on the matter. On the other hand, Trump and Hegseth might do something desperate to win the war.
So the Iran War is fundamentally different from Iraq and Afghanistan or even Syria. But the Iraq War can be viewed as transitional between Afghanistan and Iran. Afghanistan was truly an unending occupation, but invading Iraq was entirely President Bush’s choice and President Obama quickly fulfilled his promise to exit Iraq. The same could happen more easily for Iran. The downside is that the new Mideast conflict is big enough to overcome that factor.
It is spreading across the region while Iran nears its breaking point. Trump or the next President can hold off American involvement, but they cannot stop the war itself from progressing. By sparking the war, President Trump may not have trapped America in a quagmire, but he has opened Pandora’s Box. Voters will probably feel that for a long time to come. But the precedent for America’s next wars has been set.
—The writer is a political commentator and global risk analyst who studies geopolitical and climate risks. ([email protected])
