Trump Iran War Outlook Faces Pushback from His Own Generals

A rare leak of significant opposition among top U.S. military brass to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s intention to keep more than 50,000 American forces on alert in the Middle East reports a “more dire” outlook for the Iran conflict’s effect on U.S. military readiness globally. According to the Washington Post, a source familiar with the generals’ assessment reported that the brass viewed the six-month war as “too much for too long.” The leak was prompted by the Pentagon’s decision to keep some forces in the region into fiscal year 2027. U.S forces have been pulled from areas of the globe more strategic to U.S. interests than the Persian Gulf for a needless attack that turned into yet another American quagmire in the Greater Middle East, thus degrading worldwide training and readiness for more important missions. 

However, the American public has been way ahead of the generals in opposing the unprovoked attack on Iran in the first place, which was never justified to or approved in advance by Congress, the people’s representatives, as the U.S. Constitution requires. President Lyndon B. Johnson, although dishonest in his escalation of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, thought that President Harry Truman had erred by not getting some sort of advanced congressional approval for the Korean War of the early 1950s. When the tide turned and things began to go downhill in Korea, Truman had no way to spread the blame for what had become an unpopular war; the war’s fallout dissuaded Truman from seeking yet another term in office. Trump, who loves to flex his executive muscle, the Constitution be damned, repeated Truman’s mistake and is now suffering a similar fate of low polling numbers.

The generals’ objections to the Iran intervention are more informed than those of the public, but at the same time, more parochial; both groups realize the danger of a decision to keep wasting more lives and resources indefinitely by a president whose psyche demands that he can never admit failure, a loss, or even a mistake in any way. Trump lives in this self-created psychological bubble, which is reinforced by the White House staff’s fear of job loss by anyone piercing the bubble to tell him the truth about his war. 

Although military brass with lots of stars have historically had more protection against being fired, under Trump, top generals have been fired for very sketchy reasons, so things must be very bad if some of them are risking their jobs to oppose Trump’s doubling down on a seemingly doomed cause. Generals from services or areas of the world hardest hit by declines in military readiness are raising the loudest fuss. The top admiral in the Navy and generals commanding U.S. forces in Asia, Europe, and Latin America opposed the extension of military deployments in the Middle East. Although the top generals of the Army and Air Force, services that have been less stressed, went along with the extended deployments, they did warn of significant risks in continuing the conflict. 

One can argue against the need for the U.S. military to continue policing the world across all these regions simultaneously, but each is now more strategically important to the United States than the Middle East. The effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz for six months caused a rise in oil and fertilizer prices but did not result in the economic collapse of the West or the United States, especially with the fracking boom that restored America to be the number one oil-producing state. If Iran got a nuclear weapon, that would not be a good thing, but it may be inevitable now that Trump’s war on a whim was originally designed to depose the admittedly horrible Iranian government. The ruthless regime has now demonstrated that it will take extreme measures to survive, including likely racing to develop a nuclear weapon.

Trump, like any good investor, should at least admit his mistake to himself, cut his losses, and gracefully exit U.S. forces from the region, but that likely will not happen because of Trump’s psyche and because of inertia in the U.S. foreign policy elite about abandoning its outdated policy in the Middle East. So the generals have a right to be worried.