Iran, Florsheims, and the art of war

We've talked before about the difficulty illustrious dear leader figure Donald Trump has put himself in, when it comes to finding a way to extract himself and this nation from his Stupidest War Ever. Trump began his bombing-and-assassinations campaign against Iran with demands for the country's "unconditional surrender"; not only did that not happen, but Iran instead chose the most often-predicted and often-threatened response: launching missiles and drones to attack U.S. bases in the region and the nations that host them, followed by just enough drone strikes against international shipping in the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz to prove it had the capability to do so.

That quickly brought Gulf shipping to a near-complete halt, because maritime insurance companies are not flush enough to survive much of that—not only shutting off about 20% of world oil shipments but also threatening supply chains for fertilizer, pharmaceuticals, and other products.

Iran's strategies are quite simple. To Iranian leaders past, present, and future, the U.S. and Israel have now repeatedly demonstrated that there is no agreement Iran can make, short of giving up its own sovereignty, that will prevent those nations from continuing to strike Iran indefinitely, whenever the mood strikes them.

So Iran is instead looking to create as much economic pain as possible, both to the U.S. and increasingly weary U.S. allies, as means of pressuring Trump into chickening out, or goading U.S. allies in the region into rethinking their ties to the U.S., and/or demonstrating to the entire world that blowing up various parts of their country is no longer going to be the consequence-free funtime that hard-right U.S. and Israel leaders have continually treated it as.

And if the resulting economic chaos spurs panic inside the U.S. administration, convincing the Trumpites to throw American ships and troops into the close-in danger zones in which Iran's military has the best opportunities to inflict mass casualties, so much the better.

That's the state of the war that isn't a war, then. Trump has created conditions that make it impossible for him to "win" without truly horrific escalations. Iran, however, needs only a small supply of cheap drones to prolong the quagmire indefinitely. Welcome to the world of asymmetric warfare, Donald, you probably should have cracked a book at some point in your sorry preening life.

But that's not what I want to talk about. That's not what's keeping me up at night.

No. What's driving me mad is this damn shoe thing.

By now we all know the story. Donald Trump, a man who has been finding the actual duties of the presidency to be more and more intolerable and who instead is devolving back into his preferred hobbies of slapping gold on things, slapping his name on things, and creating monuments to himself, has developed a weird shoe fetish. He's been interrupting Oval Office meetings to complain about the shoes his aides and cabinet members are wearing, telling them they need new shoes, and then whipping out a shoe catalog and ordering them multiple pairs of new shoes on the spot.

The resulting shoe-gifts are reliably several sizes too large, and whether it's because masculinity-threatened aides are lying about their shoe size, or Donald is guessing their shoe size, or aides are telling the truth about their shoe size and Donald is ignoring them like your grandma once did, telling them that oh you've got to get them a bit big, you've got some serious growing left to do—the exact truth of all of that is still a bit ambiguous.

However it's happening, the result is a White House full of people clomping around in comically large shoe-canoes because Dear Leader bought them new shoes and they're all terrified of what might happen if they were caught without them.

According to sources inside the White House, meetings will often devolve into discussions about footwear, with Trump guessing people’s shoe sizes out loud and his consiglieri even trying shoes on inside the Oval Office. As one female White House official has reported: “All the boys have them.”

“It’s hysterical because everybody’s afraid not to wear them,” said another.

Outstanding. Absolutely outstanding stuff. You couldn't come up with a more on-the-toes metaphor for the death of an empire.

So, here's the thing. Here's why I cannot get this story out of my head, even after the rest of you have moved on to some more worthy existential horror.

As anyone with any life experience at all can tell you, the problem of "an important person in my life gave me shoes that do not fit" is a profoundly solvable one. It takes no great tactician to remedy the situation; nobody needs to crack open their copy of Sun Tzu and flip through it looking for the feet section. This is easy.

If your terrifying, brooks-no-defiance boss gifts you moderately expensive shoes that he expects to see you wear, and when they arrive they don't fit because your terrifying brooks-no-defiance boss is un irredeemable lunkhead who has no interest in how numbers work, you:

1. Look at the tag.
2. Go online and buy that exact same shoe, but in the right size.
3. Wear the right-fitting shoes.
4. Hide the old pair on a high-up closet shelf because you don't want anyone to find the evidence, and for reasons you can't fully explain it feels even more risky to throw them out. So there they sit. For a long time. And the longer they sit up there, the more you worry about it, and I believe that was the original inspiration for Poe's Tell-Tale Heart.

It's probably a bit more awkward to do when it's your half-insane ketchup-tossing boss who's done the gifting, rather than your only quarter-insane third favorite aunt, but the principles are the same. You just buy a new pair of identical-looking shoes, you dorks, and pass them off as the original gift. You've got money, assholes. These are allegedly $150 shoes, you're not wearing two Rolexes on your feet.

I mean, come on.

Now, you're going to ask me what Shoegate has to do with Donald Trump's Iran War, and I want to emphasize that I think it has everything to do with the Iran War.

And I mean that. Because the Iranian military, as ravaged as it may be by U.S. airstrikes, is presumably not made up of complete imbeciles. And as it turns out, the path to a passable Iranian victory is very easy, while the path to a U.S. victory is, strategically speaking, very hard.

And the two sides are made up, at present, of a group of professional military leaders fighting for their personal survival one on hand, and on the other by a group of always-quivering fail-upwards miserable sycophants who have been so beaten down, in their conversations with Dear Leader, that they no longer even object to walking around in oversized clown shoes as they clomp-clomp-clomp onto each internationally photographed stage.

That's how the relationship between Trump and his very topmost administration advisers are going. This is not a group of people who is willing to tell Donald Trump no. These are not people willing to push back, when the interior decorator-turned-commander in chief comes up with his latest stupidest and most nation-damaging idea ever.

We've gone so far past that point it's not even visible anymore. The people surrounding Donald Trump haven't just abandoned all pretenses of reining in his worst impulses, they don't even have enough self-respect left to sneakily order themselves shoes that fit.

They have been beaten into total, humiliating submission. They won't even push back on their own damn shoe size.

If you were to ask me, then, what the odds are that the United States can come out of this new impulse-driven war with anything resembling a victory, and what the corresponding odds are that even the most bombed-out version of Iran can sneak out of this with the U.S., not Iran, being the more damaged and humiliated party, then that is the sort of thing I think any past professional Kremlinologist would seize on, and document, and go off on weird tangents about when at the bar with his Kremlinologist friends.

On one hand we've got a group of theocratic hardliners fighting for their personal survival. On the other we have a would-be strongman who has completely detached himself from the thoughts and expertise of his military advisers, his domestic advisers, and even his gaggle of pathetic shock-jocks and influencers—a man whose aides will not even push back when he arbitrarily assigns them new shoe sizes.

They don't even try to fix it. They just paddle around the building in their new black leather kayaks, doing the whole Emperor's New Clothes bit but for real, rather than try to fight it.

Do we think anyone in the Shoe Brigade even cares if Iran becomes an economy-collapsing national quagmire, when they're in their big important cabinet meetings competing to see who can polish Dear Leader's necrotic ego into a passable shine? They don't even care if they slip and fall down the damn stairs, they couldn't possibly care less what happens to you or me or the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit.

So that is why I think we are boned, as Donald Trump ponders how he can best extricate himself from his latest and potentially most destructive gut-driven failure yet. This isn't a man who's going to be getting good military advice from anyone.

And history, as it turns out, is stuffed with examples of how that particular pathology most often plays out.