I first heard the acronym Taco – Trump always chickens out – a few weeks ago. Tragically it seems an apt description of his policy towards Iran and beyond. It looks likely to lead to a severe weakening of American power worldwide and a disaster for Israel.
Despite Trump’s assurances he will not do a bad deal it looks like being a capitulation to Iran on key points. The Islamic Republic will, for the time being, retain its stockpile of highly enriched uranium despite ending the regime’s nuclear capacity being one of America’s key goals. International access to the Strait of Hormuz has also become a question for negotiation despite it being uncontested before.
It is true that America’s war aims were never clear. Removing Iran’s nuclear capacity was certainly on the list. However, there was also talk of curbing its ballistic missile capacity and ending its support for regional proxies. The possibility of regime change, overthrowing the Iranian regime itself, was also raised at times.
However, it now looks likely that, despite all the cost and effort of war, Iran will be a stronger position than at the start. It is true that it has lost some key leaders and the attacks have degraded its infrastructure. Nevertheless Iran will not have handed over its nuclear material and the Strait of Hormuz, not an issue before, has become contested. There is even talk of Iran starting to charge fees for passage through the international waterway.
For Israel – although it was always the junior partner in the war against Iran – the outcome is even worse. It had hoped to destroy or at least severely weaken Iran’s ballistic missile capacity as it is a serious threat to Israel. In the event it looks like Iran will be able to rebuild its weaponry in this area. Israel also hoped that Iran would stop backing its regional allies such as Hizbullah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. But this looks like it is unlikely to happen.
Some might argue that the Trump administration had to back down because of domestic pressure. The war is not popular inside America. Although there is some truth in this claim it is far from the whole story.
For a start, if Trump truly believed the war was in America’s interests he should have tried to convince the public. In the event, as Phil Mullan has argued on spiked, Trump quickly flipped from an avowedly non-interventionist position to one of outright war against Iran. There is certainly a case for America refraining from foreign military intervention but Trump chose the worst route possible. Suddenly shifting from a non-interventionist position to full-blown war without public debate.
In any event what looks like Trump’s imminent capitulation to Iran is consistent with his earlier interventions in the region. He talks a tough game but backs down against those who are determined to fight. Trump has no clear view about what should motivate American actions in the region. In contrast, his Islamist opponents firmly believe they are fighting a civilisational war against western civilisation or that they would call Jahilliyah (pre-Islamic barbarism).
Islamists also see Israel as a Satanic force which must be destroyed if they are to achieve their ultimate goal of an international Islamic order. They are playing a long game, as they cannot achieve their aim in the short term, but they will not rest until they succeed.
Trump’s capitulation to Hamas was an important outcome but hardly noticed by the public. Rather than insist that it disarm as part of the ceasefire agreement he let matters remain ambiguous. Like other western powers the administration has treated it as a rational political actor rather than a terrorist group.
As the Gatestone Institute, a conservative think tank, has noted: "The terror group has simply exploited Trump's ceasefire plan to rearm, regroup and consolidate its civilian and military control in areas of the Gaza Strip in which Israeli forces are not present since the ceasefire agreement took effect. For Hamas, Trump's plan is just another temporary ceasefire that allows it to entrench its position and restock its military capabilities."
More junior powers, such as Britain and France, have gone along with this approach. They have endorsed Hamas’s right to retain at least its personal weapons.
There are also parallels with developments in Syria. The brutal Assad regime was overthrown in December 2024 by a coalition led by Islamist forces. Ahmed Al-Sharaa – formerly known as Abu Mohammed Al-Jolani during his many years as a Jihadi - became president. Until the collapse of the old regime there was a $10m (£7.4m) American bounty on his head as leader of a group with links to al-Qaeda. Yet, within a few months of taking over, he was meeting President Trump in the Oval Office.
And despite the rebranding of the Syrian regime as post-Islamist there are many indications it has not changed fundamentally. That includes genocidal rhetoric against Israel and massacres of non-Muslim groups including Christians and Druze.
The conflict between America and Middle Eastern Islamists is asymmetric in two important but contrasting respects.
America has a massive advantage when it comes to technological prowess. It can assassinate enemy leaders from a great distance while only suffering minimal casualties itself.
But the Islamists have the great advantage of believing they are fighting a civilisational war against what they regard as the evil West. There is none of the uncertainly about their overall goal that plagues the western forces.
A precondition for defeating Islamism as a political force is recognising that it has to be countered in a civilisational battle for freedom and democracy. That must involve fighting anti-Semitism including in its anti-Zionist form. Western leaders sometimes pay lip service to this reality but they seldom take it seriously. Yet the consequences of not doing so, as the recent Iran conflict shows, can be disastrous.
Tragically it looks highly likely that Iran will snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
PHOTO: "Chicken" by orangeaurochs is licensed under CC BY 2.0.