#superlatives — Public Fediverse posts

Is the Iran War the Greatest Strategic Defeat in American History?

There’s a new poll out today showing that “Trump’s war in Iran” — and it is his war, let’s make no mistake about that — “is as unpopular among Americans as the Iraq War during the year of peak violence in 2006 and the Vietnam War in the early 1970s.”

I am not much of a poll tracker. But the Washington Post story about this new polling caught my eye, not only because I’ve been watching Emile de Antonio’s excellent 1968 Vietnam War film In the Year of the Pig on the Criterion Channel, but also because I keep running into statements like this one, from Paul Krugman’s Substack (30 April 2026):

Trump’s ego is so fragile that he can never admit losing. He cannot bear to face up to the reality that he, more or less single-handedly, led America to the greatest strategic defeat in its history. So he desperately wants to extract concessions from Iran that would lend him a fig leaf and allow him to claim victory.

Krugman is right about Trump’s “fragile ego,” but surely he needs to be more measured when it comes to what counts as the greatest strategic defeat in American history. He’s not alone. Mitchell Plitnick dedicated a whole podcast to the idea in early April. And this isn’t just a slip of Krugman’s pen. A few paragraphs later, he doubles down: “America,” he writes, “will have suffered its worst strategic defeat in history as a result of a completely gratuitous misadventure to please Trump’s ego.”

The American war in Iran might count as the quickest strategic defeat in our history, and I’m not going to deny that it’s already having and will continue to have serious geopolitical consequences. (I found the HC Commodities podcast interview with Doomberg clarifying on this point). But I have a hard time seeing how this war should count as a greater or worse and more humiliating strategic defeat or a more costly blunder (strictly in terms of blood and treasure) than Vietnam.

At the end of his podcast, Plitnick hedges on this point:

It is about as great a strategic disaster as you can imagine. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, I mean they all pale before how stupid this was, despite the fact that they went on for years and years and year, and cost more in terms of lives and more in terms of money, because they went on so long. And that should not be minimized and in no way am I trying to minimize that. But when we talk about a strategic loss, about a strategic disaster, this is the biggest one in US history, and it was all for nothing, all for nothing.

What I take from this is that the war in Iran should count as the biggest or the greatest strategic defeat in American history because it may turn out to be the stupidest strategic defeat in American history.

There is no getting around the stupidity and recklessness and pointlessness of it all.

But I still balk at this application of the superlative to Trump’s Iran disaster. Is Krugman really asking us to start from the founding and work our way forward, ranking strategic defeats*? No, he appears just to be riffing. He never bothers to argue the historical point, never even mentions Vietnam or other examples.

Superlatives may make good clickbait, but they can also be very slippery: in just the two examples I’ve cited here, greatest can mean quickest or it can mean stupidest or maybe it can even mean most consequential. That’s unclear. Superlatives tend to muddle thinking about history, where clarity counts.

Talking about Iran as the greatest or the biggest strategic defeat in American history may score some political points, or drive some online traffic. But in this case hyperbole carries a cost. It distorts both past and present, and it can dampen political will (signaling that there is no recovering from this greatest of all defeats) or exacerbate the historical amnesia from which too many Americans already seem to suffer.

And it’s still early days, too early to judge. Trump’s war in Iran is only two months old, and the American public already appears to be decisively against it. It wasn’t until after the Tet Offensive in 1968, a full four years after the Gulf of Tonkin debacle, that public disapproval of the Vietnam War began to reach these levels, as this chart (made from the same Gallup data used by the Washington Post) shows:

That comparison all by itself is a pretty damning indictment of Trump’s war. And maybe that means a good number of Americans — not all of us, but some of us — have learned a little something from history after all.

N.B. 2 May 2026: In a conversation with Greg Sargent on The Daily Blast podcast (and published on Krugman’s Substack blog today), Krugman backs away from the superlative:

The celebration of a guy who is an absolute disaster at presidenting—he has led, more or less single-handedly, on his own decisions, his own faith, his own judgment, he has led America into one of our worst strategic defeats in our history. He took on this relatively small military power in Iran, figuring that he could destroy the regime and install his people in a few days, and he lost the war.

*PS 10 May 2026: Robert Kagan comes close to doing just that in the opening paragraphs of his new piece in The Atlantic. Though he never reaches for the hyperbole, he argues that the defeat in Iran is in a class all by itself and of tremendous historical import, a signal event in the unraveling of the American-led postwar order.

Defeat in the present confrontation with Iran will be of an entirely different character [than in every other American war Kagan lists]. It can neither be repaired nor ignored. There will be no return to the status quo ante, no ultimate American triumph that will undo or overcome the harm done….the conflict has revealed an America that is unreliable and incapable of finishing what it started. That is going to set off a chain reaction around the world as friends and foes adjust to America’s failure.

#ConvictedFelon #DonaldTrump's Constant Use of #Superlatives Is #Typical of #Autocrats and #Dictators.

His #reliance on #superlatives not only helps to #groom the #dictators’ #followers by creating a narrative of each little #cult member being unique in world #history – but also contributes to the eventual #disintegration of the #dictators’ own #mind. Seems fitting.

https://politizoom.com/la-times-trumps-constant-use-of-superlatives-is-typical-of-autocrats-and-dictators/