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I really don't like making grand pronouncements (I think it's a bit narcissistic) but since I seem to have a reputation on The Motte I think it's only fair to take my licks:
Blah blah blah, words words words, excuses excuses, feel free to get your licks in now.
Good on you, brother. I broadly agree with a lot of your points here.
Accepting that you aren't crazy and that it was the right thing to do and is a military success, how do you feel about the procedural aspects of how the war was started? The war effort lacked a congressional declaration or any kind of approval, but even writing that off because we don't declare anything anymore, it lacked a significant public effort to sell the war to the public in advance. Maybe I'm an optimist about the voting public's sophistication, but I think that some of the disapproval of the war stems from the failure to seek even a fig leaf of any kind of democratic legitimacy and approval. Which raises my question to you, as an intelligent pro-war interlocutor: if a successful morally correct war is launched in a way that is illegitimate, what is the correct punishment to inflict on those who started it? If it's "Nothing, it worked out" then the idea of democratic legitimacy is a dead letter and the president has plenary power to declare war, that seems untenable.
I don't think people think through those procedural questions, but I do think the way the war was started and executed ("We won!" "we're about to make a deal" "We're about to end Iranian civilization forever") left a lot of people confused and maybe a little miffed, and dragged down the approval rating. You appear to be correct at this point that the strait of Hormuz is mostly useable for commercial traffic, with a mildly increased risk tolerance. But the repeated announcements have ruined presidential credibility.
A good guide here is the trajectory of GWOT-PATRIOT Act-Neocon consensus between 2006-2008. Everyone said that the voters rejected Dubya and the wars, but Obama kept most of it in place, and it became part of core American governance. Elections have consequences. A lot of MAGA is going to absorbed into the core American synthesis, for both parties. MAGA might die, the same way "Hipsters" aren't around anymore. But MAGA stuff is everywhere, like how I can go to a local microbrewery on my way home and pick up beer.
Voters feel betrayed. I don't know that there is any procedural difference that would have mattered. I don't know that a different explanation would have solved what is perhaps an emotional problem. Perhaps more salesmanship on the war would have been more offensive, felt like an even bigger betrayal.
I think there is something deeper afoot than a communications problem.
It is my observation that leaders in a Democracy have a ten-year lifespan. I mean this in the sense that your dog lives a dozen years, a man has a natural lifespan of something like eighty years. A natural lifespan can be extended but it's more often a ceiling. Most leaders don't even last ten years. Those who do are epoch-defining. Thatcher was kicked out after ten years by her own party, not even for good reasons, almost like an impulse. French presidents get two terms of five years in a system designed to make the presidency akin to a monarchy. Merkel lasted longer than ten, and her tenure defined an entire era of European politics. Trump, likewise, enters this pantheon by virtue of Biden's term, and yet having been a leader for the Republicans the entire time. Ten years or thereabouts seems to me like something of a rule and not a coincidence and I think it merits explaining.
(It's different in monarchical and dictatorial systems but I think a similar constraint is at play. Generally ministers change over more frequently than every ten years. Bismarck, who lasted as Chancellor for about twenty years, formed a cabinet that basically totally changed over ten years in. The Chinese were operating on ten-year leadership cycles until Xi Jinping. Putin has had to shuffle around his government quite a few times now. And frequently those systems that don't make this kind of shuffle blow up in revolution, or completely stagnate.)
My theory is that ten years is roughly the amount of time it takes for people to totally change into a new phase of life. Kids become teenagers, teenagers become adults, adults reach middle-age, then age. Individuals pass through markers at different times but within a population changes averages out to about ten years.
One of the key markers of Trump's success has been his total dominance of media. He essentially invented twitter for politics. His mastery of the rally as a genre gave him a direct connection to his base, which always gave him better instincts than even his smartest advisers. He fundamentally re-ordered the news cycle as such, entire media ecosystems emerged downstream of the changes he wrought in how people consume news.
It's been ten years now since Trump worked through the system and people do consume news differently now. The Democrats are not the same shrill resistance libs they used to be. Trump's rally base isn't a wire directly to the American psyche anymore, the people who still go are a particular kind of people. Media patterns are different. This is why I'm hesitant to say Trump just needed to sell the war better: Trump did give speeches justifying the war, nobody watched them. I don't think it's simple Trump fatigue either (although that's what everybody will say). I think it's more a fundamental shift in how people live, which implies a fundamental shift in how they think of Trump, which, honestly, at this point, is not much at all.
Yes, this is essentially my thesis. This is what happened with, e.g., pardon the grandiosity, Napoleon and Alexander. I suspect that part of MAGA is going to be absorbed into the system and assimilated in ways that would be even surprising to MAGA itself, let alone Democrats. There is another part of MAGA that will refuse to assimilate and possibly fuse with the Groypers, or be scapegoated for Trump's sins, or whatever. I use the comparison to Napoleon especially because it's possible that this all goes "South" and Trump and MAGA suffer bigger losses than anyone can even imagine right now. At what point would you have abandoned Napoleon? And yet, essentially, Napoleon won in a much bigger sense because the political order that defeated him had to accommodate itself to him after all. This is one extremely plausible theory for what happens next (although not the only one -- Republicans could just win in 2028 and then we go back to the seesaw).
Yeah, personally when I hear people say he should have tried to sell the war to the American people, I'm just reminded that GWB burned that card with Iraq.
People forgave the Venezuela raid because it was over quickly, so if it had to be done Trump's best bet was to make Iran topple quickly, and once that failed the best alternative was to make it barely a war by turning it into a blocade, but it's the awkward period in between before they settled on the blocade that made him and his supporters who were confident they had voted for the "no foreign wars" candidate look foolish.
I assume the plan was to repeat the Venezuela gambit: a sudden decapitation strike, then a negotiated agreement with the remaining leadership for political realignment. When that failed, they iterated it a few times on new leadership and infrastructure threats, before pivoting to the blockade.
If it'd have worked, I think we'd be talking about it very differently. But it didn't, presumably because at least many of the Iranian political caste are earnest in their philosophy regardless of risk to life.
I really think the issue is the middle iterative part, it left time for it to cement as "a war" in most people's minds. If they had gone straight from initial strikes, to the blockade, then there would have been little impression that this was a war.
It's like if I jumped on someone, punched them and then started choking them out, am in "a fight" or beating someone up? If in between the first punch and the choking I wrestle and exchange blows with the other, then yeah, I'm in a fight.
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