Iran War exposes Trump to his own quagmire doctrine as exit strategy remains elusive

2026-03-23 - 16:11

Three weeks into a war he launched against Iran, Donald Trump stood before cameras this week and declared the campaign was, in effect, already over. The United States and Israel had been so successful, he said, that the conflict was “largely done in the first two or three days.” Yet at the very moment he spoke, Iranian strikes were reverberating across the Gulf, a critical global energy chokepoint remained effectively sealed, and his own Pentagon was asking Congress for an additional $200bn to sustain the fight. The contradiction at the heart of America’s Iran war — between the triumphalist rhetoric from the White House and the grinding, costly reality on the ground — has revived an uncomfortable parallel that haunts Washington’s foreign policy establishment: the spectre of Iraq and Afghanistan. For a president who built two electoral victories partly on the resentment those conflicts generated, and who in 2019 called the invasion of the Middle East “the worst mistake the United States has ever made,” the question posed increasingly by analysts and former officials on both sides of the aisle is stark: has Trump, the self-styled champion of “America First,” engineered a quagmire of his own making? That question — and the absence of a clear answer — defines the most consequential foreign policy moment of Trump’s second term. It is, as Ilan Goldenberg, a former Middle East adviser to the administrations of Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, put it bluntly: “a recipe for a quagmire.” Shifting Goalposts and a $200bn Price Tag The scale of America’s military commitment has expanded at a pace that critics say echoes the mission creep that defined