Donald Trump Has Won on Iran

The American eschatological impulse to war is to achieve a definite victorious outcome, even when the costly extra effort is not warranted by the political outcome. This is typified by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s demand for “unconditional surrender” of the Axis during the Second World War (even as his ignorant successor Harry Truman then abandoned the fruits of victory by surrendering Eastern Europe to the USSR). This is because Washington’s wars are preventive wars of choice, not preemption, and therefore its taxpayers need the theatre of moral justification.