Trump and the threshold of pain

It would be so easy for Donald Trump to escape from the trap he has built for himself in the Persian Gulf. Just declare a victory and leave.

So what if the Iranians also declare a victory (with a lot more accuracy)? The “nuclear weapons” that gave Trump (and Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu) a pretext for attacking Iran never really existed. This would be as close to cost-free for the United States as a lost war ever gets — only a dozen American dead.

The only audience that really matters for Trump is the MAGA supporters back home, and they would be so glad to see him drop this nonsense that they wouldn’t say a word against him. The oil price would drop and Republicans might even manage to hold onto both houses of Congress in the November mid-term elections.

But Trump just can’t accept defeat, either in politics or in war. That’s why he’s still re-litigating the presidential election he lost in 2020, long after everybody else has moved on. It’s why he is escalating a lost war in the Persian Gulf, even though the consequences may be catastrophic for the region.

He may not recognize the phrase “threshold of pain,” as bone spurs on his heels spared him from having to take a close, personal interest in the Vietnam War. However, when that war was getting problematic for Americans in the mid-1960s, this was the catch-phrase that the pro-war advocates used to promise victory in an increasingly unpopular war.

American troops were winning the battles against local guerrillas and North Vietnamese troops in South Vietnam, but Communist-ruled North Vietnam just wouldn’t give up. So the Pentagon sold Defence Secretary Robert McNamara a new strategy.

It was called Operation Rolling Thunder, and it really lived up to its name — between 1965 and 1968 the U.S. Air Force and Navy dropped as many bombs on North Vietnam as they did everywhere in the entire Second World War.

The idea behind it was that the U.S. should bomb North Vietnam in order to force it to the negotiating table. You just keep raising the dosage (of bombs) until eventually you reach the enemy’s “pain threshold” — whereupon they will come to the table and make a deal just to make the pain stop.

It was bad psychology and a brazen misuse of medical terminology, and probably not even the strategy’s proponents really believed it would work. They just didn’t have any better ideas, and they needed something to say. And it did fail, of course. In fact, it had already failed several times.

It didn’t work on the British in the 1940 Blitz, and it didn’t work on the Germans in the mass bombing of 1943-45. It did work on the Japanese after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but those were nuclear weapons. It didn’t work in Korea in the early 1950s, it certainly didn’t work in Vietnam, and it almost certainly won’t work on Iran now.

The people under U.S. bombs in Iran are in their homes, near their family and friends, and well within reach of the regime that controls their fate. Even if they dislike the government, what are they going to do about it in the middle of a war? Commit treason? Safer to suffer in silence.

Meanwhile, the relentless logic of escalation is already driving Trump to approve attacks on Iranian civilian infrastructure (bridges and power plants). In practice, that affects water as well, since the deep groundwater wells much of the country relies on get their power from the national grid. Iran’s desalination plants are also vulnerable to power cuts.

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the smaller, richer countries on the southern side of the Gulf from Kuwait to Oman, are even more vulnerable. Their population has grown from nine million to 60 million in the last 60 years, and almost all of that extra population depends entirely on desalinated water supplied by 56 giant plants.

Iran has said it will strike those plants if the United States hits its own water supplies, and the threat is quite credible. Emergency water storage in GCC countries ranges from a few days to a few weeks, and nobody could ship water into the Gulf in the necessary volumes even if the Strait of Hormuz was open. This is a calamity waiting to happen.

It is a safe bet that Donald Trump does not understand the stakes in the game he is playing. Maybe some of the people who are around him do, but it’s more than their jobs are worth to tell him the truth. The senior members of the Iranian regime obviously know, but are enjoying Trump’s desperation far too much to spoil the show.

They should all be spanked and sent to bed without supper.

Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers.