How Donald Trump's War In Iran Is Failing The Legitimacy Test In The Eyes Of US Voters

(MENAFN- The Conversation) Donald Trump now has a new proposed timetable for his war with Iran, albeit without a clear purpose. Heading to the Republicans' midterm convention in Texas this week, the US president told reporters the war would end“immediately after the election”. This is coming from a president seven months into a conflict that he predicted would last only weeks.

For all that time, the US has been jostling with Iran for military and strategic control over the Strait of Hormuz while seeking to further degrade the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' military capabilities. But without strategic direction, victory is impossible and Iran's leverage over the Strait allows it to keep defining the negotiating battlefield.

Capability without a definition of victory produces exactly what we have watched for weeks: tit-for-tat strikes that have failed to move the needle on the Strait, let alone Iran's nuclear program.

But behind the shortcomings of Trump's kinetic application of hard power lies a more profound failure. As much as wars depend on a coherent military strategy, they also need a strategic narrative – a story that provides and sustains the legitimacy of war. Trump's war has never had one.

With the mid-term elections looming in November, the political costs of that absence are only becoming more acute for Trump and the Republican party.

Consider the inventory of justifications offered since February. Before the war began, Trump promised anti-government protesters that“help is on its way”. But when the bombing started it was about destroying Tehran's nuclear and ballistic missile programmes. Then, within a day, it was also about forcing regime change.

Over several months, none of these ambitions were realised. In August, the vice-president, JD Vance, announced a new hierarchy of aims: keeping oil and gas cheap for Americans as“goal No. 1”, with Iran's nuclear question demoted to second place.

Last week Vance went further by insisting that there isn't a“war” at all, even though Iran had fired missiles at Kuwait in retaliation to US strikes on the cities of Bandar Abbas, Ahvaz, Aghajari, and Sirik. With each new justification and framing of this conflict, the original rationale for the war becomes harder to identify.

This matters because legitimacy is itself a source of state influence, especially in the context of wars of choice. It is what generates societal resolve at home, sustains the support of allies, and preserves the institutional prestige of the military asked to do the fighting. Strategic narratives are the vehicle through which such legitimacy is achieved; they can convert painful sacrifice into a cost that is worth sustaining.

And there is now a great deal of sacrifice that has yet to be given meaning. US Navy sailors enforcing the blockade have suffered from low morale – one crew member of the USS Abraham Lincoln went overboard in August due to mental health, after a record deployment without a port call.

American military fatalities resulting from Iranian retaliatory strikes on US bases in the region have been quietly reclassified by the Pentagon and moved out of the war's official death toll. There are mounting accusations of civilian casualties in Iran, where Iranian officials claim that a US strike targeted a wedding ceremony near the Hormuz coast last week that killed four.

Unconvincing narrative

These losses strain America's image among allies. However, the audience that most needs convincing is Trump's own. His Maga approach was built on the premise that:“Great nations do not fight endless wars” and his support base is clearly concerned about lengthy foreign entanglements. Yet these are the voters now being asked to absorb the war's costs without a compelling story that justifies them.

Come the mid-terms, they will inevitably vote with inflation and gas prices in mind when they reach the ballot box. Polling already shows an erosion in support for the war.

Wars of choice have failed this legitimacy test before – sometimes before a single shot was fired. In August 2013, the then UK prime minister David Cameron asked parliament to sanction airstrikes against Syria's Assad regime after chemical attacks and lost.

The government's case rested on a story of salvation, national standing and the moral duty to act. But that narrative could not compete with a rival story of loss, in which intervention meant repeating the errors of Iraq: mission creep, the futile sacrifice of soldiers' lives, and further damage to a reputation already bruised by two inconclusive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

There is an uncomfortable lesson for Washington here. The British case suggests that once a public comes to view a war of choice through the frame of loss – futile sacrifice, eroded prestige, no discernible end – no quantity of firepower can restore its legitimacy. The problem Trump has is that he initiated a shooting war with Iran first, leaving the narrative vacuum to be filled afterwards. Now it is filled with images of a bombed wedding, exhausted sailors and vessels sitting stranded in the Strait of Hormuz.

Stories which successfully sustain public consent for military force often share two main ingredients: an immediate threat to the homeland, and an opportunity for the initiator to assume the role of saviour. Twenty-five years ago, the September 11 attacks supplied both in their most visceral form. This is why the invasion of Afghanistan garnered public and allied support.

Trump currently has neither of these to fall back on. There is no communicated threat to Americans at home and no one is being rescued. There is only a rotating stock of rationales, none of which has held long enough to become convincing.

Until his administration can communicate a narrative that speaks to an existential Iranian threat at home and casts America as the saviour of something worth saving, Trump's story will be written for him.

He risks being remembered as just another gung-ho president who rushed into a Middle Eastern war he did not understand – the very legacy he promised voters he would never repeat.

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