On Sunday, it was announced that the United States and Iran had finally struck a peace deal to end the war President Donald Trump started nearly four months ago. Analysis of the outcome is still pouring in, but according to Republican strategist Steve Schmidt, two things are immediately clear: not only did Trump lose, but America’s opponents around the world gained “alarming lessons” that have diminished the US presence on the world stage.
According to Schmidt, “History will ask a simple question: what was achieved? The answer is devastating.” After entering the war with uncertain objectives but many soaring promises, he leaves it with “a ceasefire, an unsigned framework, unanswered questions about Iran’s nuclear program, and an Iranian regime that remains standing, defiant, more radicalized, wealthier and powerful than before.”
As Schmidt elaborates, theoretically, the central motive for the war — Iran’s nuclear capabilities — has been much discussed by the Trump administration, but “the uranium stockpile wasn’t paraded before the cameras. It wasn’t seized. It wasn’t verified as destroyed. It remains the subject of uncertainty, intelligence assessments, negotiations and speculation. News coverage continues to note unresolved questions about the fate of highly enriched uranium, and whether Iran retained material that could someday be used in a weapons program.”
So what was won?
“The answer is nothing that can withstand scrutiny,” writes Schmidt. “The regime remains in power. The ayatollahs remain in power. The Revolutionary Guard remains in power. The nuclear question remains unresolved. The missile question remains unresolved. The proxy-war question remains unresolved. The terrorism question remains unresolved.”
A more certain result, he asserts, is in the form of what US opponents around the world have learned from the conflict.
“The only thing that has been conclusively demonstrated is that the United States spent enormous amounts of money, depleted critical stockpiles, exposed vulnerabilities and arrived back where it started — except weaker,” says Schmidt. “Much weaker. One of the most alarming lessons of this conflict concerns the future of warfare itself. Cheap, mass-produced and disposable drones. The war revealed something that military planners around the world already understood, but that many Americans preferred not to contemplate. Billion-dollar weapons systems can be challenged by technology that costs a tiny fraction of their price. The monopoly on advanced warfare has ended.”
But while the Trump administration seems not to have learned this lesson, choosing instead to prioritize so-called “Trump-class” battleships that military experts have decried as an outdated concept, Schmidt asserts that US adversaries have learned much that will buoy their attacks in wars to come.
“Every adversary of the United States was watching,” explains Schmidt. “Every dictator. Every terrorist organization. Every hostile intelligence service. Every military planner in Beijing, Moscow and Tehran. They were watching and learning. Wars are laboratories. The lessons learned in one become the foundation of the next.”
And now, asserts Schmidt, with a peace plan that ultimately resolves few of the core questions of the conflict, “This isn’t peace. This is an intermission. This isn’t resolution. This is postponement.” Another war, he says, is almost certain to come, and when it does, American adversaries will be equipped with vital lessons they learned during this one.
“That’s why failed wars are so dangerous,” Schmidt concludes. “They plant the seeds of larger wars to come.”