A longtime conservative writer is not quite ready to give up on President Donald Trump’s war in Iran — but even he admits that the Republican is acting like “a lame duck and getting lamer.”
In a Tuesday editorial that labeled America’s 45th and 47th president as a “wild card,” Wall Street Journal columnist Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. argued that Trump is a “lame duck and getting lamer” who, as a result, is “betting on luck” to get him a series of major policy achievements.
“His war aims run athwart the Napoleonic dictum: If you set out to take Vienna, take Vienna,” Jenkins explained. “Disapprove of George W. Bush but he took steps and mobilized the resources to make sure he met his stated goals in Iraq. And luck cuts both ways. Like history’s most notorious foreign-policy gamblers, Mr. Trump is unlikely to quit while ahead.”
When Trump’s anti-war supporters express bafflement at his sudden warmongering, Jenkins observed that Trump was never actually an isolationist, but rather exults in the opportunity to show off American military might. In this same vein, he cares primarily as president in “showing a bigger propensity to bet on his commander-in-chief discretion without caring about democratic buy-in.” Hence how his lame duck status is “a key factor in his calculations.”
This does not mean that Jenkins is entirely giving up on Trump’s Iran operation. He does, however, believe that it needs to be contextualized as part of Trump’s implicit understanding that his administration is on the wane.
“If Iran becomes Mr. Trump’s self-willed domestic Waterloo, well, American mistakes usually end up looking like very clumsy, needlessly expensive, often misguided ways of ultimately prevailing,” Jenkins opined. He concluded that even if Trump fails in Iran, “little has been damaged that really matters: Foremost is survival of a citizenry imbued with freedom, enterprise and a sense of personal possibility. The U.S. seems on track to remain the world’s premier engine of innovation and material progress despite a succession of presidents each of whom was regrettable in his own way.”
Earlier in March, Jenkins compared Trump’s 2026 war in Iran to President Richard Nixon’s Middle Eastern policies in 1973.
“Circumstances were different but the last time an ideologically motivated aspiring hegemon threatened the world’s oil supply was 1973, when the Soviet Union was observed making preparations to intervene in the Arab-Israeli war,” Jenkins wrote, adding Nixon even “resorted to an unvarnished nuclear threat,” the last president to do so. Subsequently that “nuclear bluster permanently vanished from the U.S. presidential vocabulary, experts in diplomacy tell us, for reasons that boil down to a loss of credibility once Moscow could match the U.S. in nuclear firepower. Oddly, though, this now-standard narrative hasn’t been updated for Donald Trump’s first term, much less his second.”
Speaking with this journalist for Salon Magazine in 2017, former Nixon adviser David Gergen had a less-than-glowing interpretation for Nixon’s use of the nuclear threat.
“If you go back to the Nixon era, right toward the end during the Watergate period, when Nixon was drinking heavily and had become erratic, the secretary of defense at that time was Jim Schlesinger, an extraordinarily bright man and very principled,” Gergen told Salon in 2017. “And he told the joint chiefs, if you get an order from the president to fire a nuclear missile, you do not do that. Don’t take an order from the commander in chief until you call me and I give you personal approval, or you get the personal approval of the secretary of state.”