Not far from Martin Luther King’s grey stone memorial in Washington is a big golden cup honouring Donald Trump. The “Iran War Participation Trophy”, erected by anonymous satirists, suggests that on the battlefield it is not the winning that counts but the taking part. “While some concern themselves with…measurable outcomes, President Trump demonstrated the courage to participate,” reads the inscription.
Event Context
Far fewer Americans have died in Mr Trump’s war: 17 to date. But it has swiftly hit American pocketbooks in a way that is easy for voters to understand. Before Mr Trump attacked Iran, the Strait of Hormuz was open. Now it is not. After strenuous efforts to break Iran’s chokehold, Mr Trump claimed that “oil is flowing like never before, thanks to the awesome Power of the United States Military.” The pedants who measure such things beg to differ. The price of Brent crude has swung up and down, but its recent climb should worry Republicans, with Brent rising from $72 to $88 a barrel since early July. Petrol now costs nearly $4 a gallon in America, up from $3 before the war.
Democratic politicians are on the attack. At confirmation hearings on July 14th for Mr Trump’s nominee to oversee the Pentagon’s budget, Jules Hurst, Democratic senators accused the administration of lowballing the war’s cost. The Pentagon cites a figure of around $30bn—largely the expense of spent munitions and fuel. By adding the costs of repairs to American bases and harm to American consumers, Elissa Slotkin, a senator from Michigan, offered a back of the envelope estimate of more than six times that. She criticised, too, Pentagon dealings with firms in which Mr Trump’s sons have interests.
Match Outlook
To Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia, the remarkable thing is not just the depth of the war’s disfavour but how quickly it set in. “The war with Iran is the most unpopular conflict among Americans since polls have been taken. That has been true since the war’s first day,” he says. The longer it goes on, he adds, “the more costs will mount, and one of those costs will be support for Trump and the GOP in the midterm elections.”
Mike Lawler, a vulnerable Republican congressman from a swing district in New York state, says that some of his Democratic colleagues are talking “drivel” about the war. Mr Trump has taken the “difficult but necessary” decision to try to eliminate the threat of Iran’s nuclear programme and sponsorship of terrorism. “I don’t know how long it’s going to take,” he adds. “But as we’ve seen for 47 years, [the Iranian regime is] not trustworthy, and so the only thing they will understand is military action.” The Democrat trying to unseat Mr Lawler in November, a military veteran called Cait Conley, is scathing. Mr Trump, she posted, has got America “into a conflict without clear military objectives or an exit strategy”.
The Economist’s midterms model gives Mr Lawler a 68% chance of losing his seat in November. It gives Democrats an 82% chance of taking the House, and a 45% chance of flipping the Senate. Aaron David Miller of the Carnegie Endowment, a think-tank, says Mr Trump’s problems extricating himself from Iran remind him of what Lyndon Johnson said about Vietnam: “I feel like a hitchhiker caught in a hailstorm on a Texas highway. I can’t run. I can’t hide. I can’t make it stop.”
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American voters seem to agree. As the ceasefire unravels, four-fifths think the war will last for “an extended period”, finds a Reuters/Ipsos poll. Nearly half think it will grind on for a year or more, according to our own Economist/YouGov polling. Few find the prospect appealing. Net approval for Mr Trump’s decision to attack Iran now stands at -30% among Americans. The war in Vietnam took six years to become as reviled as the Iran war has become in six months.
Public support for wars of choice often starts high but gradually falls. When America first attacked the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001, for example, nearly 90% of Americans were in favour. President George W. Bush had articulated a clear justification—the Taliban were sheltering the terrorists who had flown planes full of civilians into New York skyscrapers on September 11th of that year. According to Gallup, it took 13 years for support for the invasion to dip below 50%, by which time more than 2,000 Americans had been killed and 20,000 had been wounded.
The Vietnam war, which involved huge numbers of American ground troops, quickly became what voters saw as “the most important problem” facing America, according to Gallup. They do not say that about the Iran war. But they do tell pollsters that the issues they care most about include the “high cost of living” and “poor leadership”. So the Iran war could prove a big electoral problem for Republicans despite the relatively modest cost in American blood.
Among Democratic voters, net approval of the war is -84%. Among independents, net approval is subterranean, too, at -52%. Indeed the only large group that still backs it is MAGA Republicans, with a 72% net approval, and even this Trump-loving group is wavering. A Washington Post/Ipsos poll finds that, for the first time, significantly more than half of Trump supporters approve only “somewhat” of the way he is handling his job, rather than “strongly”. Republicans who call themselves “non-MAGA” have soured dramatically on the war, with net approval falling from +26% in April to -25% now.
