When I read history, I often wonder what it must have felt like to live those events in real time, as I’m sure you do. Did it seem an ominous moment in June 1914 when Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz-Ferdinand? If I were a Briton in September 1938, would I have had an uneasy sense of foreboding watching the newsreel of Neville Chamberlain stepping off that plane from Munich?I think such thoughts this week because I have no doubt that future historians and readers of history will surely wonder what the ever-living fuck we were all thinking when Donald Trump both started and then lost his immoral and pointless war with Iran. What we have just witnessed is almost beyond belief, and would be beyond belief if we didn’t all know going in that Trump is such an aggressively and willfully stupid human being, utterly impervious to knowledge and facts, serenely cocooned in his carapace of ignorance, surrounded by flatterers who patronize him as one does a child and who scream at Americans about his nonexistent genius, courage, and virility. They exist in a fantasyland.But we live in the real world, and in the real world, this war was a disaster in every imaginable sense. Let’s tally up the damage:First of all, there was already a diplomatic agreement with Iran that was working; the International Atomic Energy Agency reported repeatedly that Iran was abiding by the Obama-era JCPOA deal. There was no need for Donald Trump to do anything.But of course, the deal was the handiwork of Barack Obama—the Kenyan Marxist who made a few jokes at Trump’s expense at a dinner one time; so Trump tore it to pieces.Almost instantly, Iran started enriching uranium at levels well above the 3.67 percent limit set by the JCPOA. And why not? Trump broke the agreement. Of course they started enriching uranium at high levels again. In other words: The fact that Iran once again became a nuclear threat is entirely Donald Trump’s fault.With respect to its capability to build a nuclear weapon, Iran’s “breakout time,” in the preferred parlance of diplomacy, went from 12 months to seven days. That is not a typo.So Trump discovers this one day. Maybe Benjamin Netanyahu explained it to him. We’ll learn that whole story at some future point. In any case, out of nowhere on the last day of February, with no warning, no prep, no nothing, Trump starts a war. Within hours, we bomb a school, killing around 120 children.From a purely military standpoint, the war goes fine. We suffer few casualties, although we do kill 3,500 or more civilians. But Iran counters by doing the thing that every expert in the world knew Iran would do if it was ever attacked: It asserts its control over the Strait of Hormuz. If you want to come through, you have to pay to play. Up go the gas prices.Now Trump is trapped. And he’s starting to get bored because the regime didn’t collapse in two weeks like he thought it would. He wants out. So he sends his corrupt son-in-law, in bed with the Saudis and in the middle of trying to humiliate Albania for no good reason, to sort things out. That brings us to this week: the outlines of a deal that looks for all the world like a complete surrender. The United States of America, for only the second time in its 237 years on this earth, has unambiguously lost a war.People can debate the above. I’m counting Vietnam, obviously; there’s no doubt about that one. I reckon the War of 1812 and the Korean War as stalemates. Under the Treaty of Ghent, the United States and Britain just agreed to go back to the way things were before the war, and with respect to Korea, the line was the 38th parallel pre-bellum and postbellum.Some will say Iraq was a loss, but I rate it, too, as kind of a draw. It sure wasn’t a win of the sort Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz told us to expect. It cost many trillions of dollars and killed hundreds of thousands. To a mixed result: Today, Iraq is a democracy, of a sort, but it’s a long way from being free. But I perhaps charitably call it a draw because the U.S. did achieve the core stated aim: It deposed Saddam Hussein.Here, though, we have not achieved any of Trump’s shifting stated claims. There’s no regime change—or, to the extent that Trump has managed to change the regime, it’s even more hard-line and more powerful in the region than it was before the war! And that’s before we and other nations fork over the infamous $300 billion, just a mind-boggling figure. Conservatives wanted Barack Obama impeached over the money he agreed to pay Iran (which was Iran’s money, frozen in U.S. banks), which was $1.7 billion. Trump is going to hand Iran 176 times that amount. And it’s going to end up being more, because the $300 billion is separate from whatever frozen assets Trump decides to unfreeze. Word around the campfire is that we are talking about another $25 billion or so. Some perspective on how much $325 billion is. The total U.S. foreign aid budget for 2025 was about $60 billion.