One Simple Trick to Try to End the Iran War

Donald Trump needs a way out of this war, and he is nearly out of lies.

The markets bought his headfake on Monday morning. But Iran didn’t. That regime rebuked his claim that negotiations are ongoing. It kept sending waves of missiles into Israel. The Strait of Hormuz is closed and will remain so until insurance companies, who can’t afford to faceplant the way stock traders do, say it’s safe for tankers to pass. Oil slid but will likely spike again. And Trump is standing in front of reporters explaining that nobody anticipated Iran would attack its neighbors, which is his way of saying he didn’t anticipate it, which is his way of saying he didn’t know what he was starting.

There is one way a man like Trump exits a disaster: quietly and with an excuse. So here’s one for him: someone else started it.

Pete started it!

This is not spin. Trump said it himself on Monday. Went out of his way to say it.

It was obvious from the beginning that there was some truth to this. While Trump’s other mannequins, JD Vance and Marco Rubio, never seemed too into this war, Hegseth made clear it was very personal to him. Look at what Hegseth said on Day 10 of Operation Epic Fury, standing at the Pentagon podium, invoking Psalm 144: “The Iranians have targeted and killed thousands of my American brothers.” Not American policy. My brothers.

Hegseth came up in politics as an Iraq Surge guy. He ran Vets for Freedom from 2007 to 2010 — the advocacy group that lobbied Congress to support the troop increase in Iraq. The Surge was the move meant to redeem the Iraq War, which didn’t need redemption. It needed to end. He has said publicly that he later became a “recovering neocon” who came to question the whole enterprise. But, questioning the strategy as he might, his Pentagon briefings reveal the personal logic underneath the policy: Iran is where the weapons came from. Iran is where the brothers died. Operation Epic Fury is the war he always believed should have been fought.

Donald Trump got played by a lot of fiends to get us to this point because a con man is just a dupe with an anger problem. Bibi Netanyahu, Lindsey Graham, and the worst man of the century, Rupert Murdoch. But all of them have actual power on their own. Their motivations don’t trace back to a war both parties spent a generation running against, and none of them work for Trump.

The Noem model

I didn’t think Trump would pull back from Minneapolis. He hasn’t, fully — it’s worse than before he arrived. But he pulled back enough to need a face to blame, and that face was Kristi Noem’s.

Someone got Trump’s ear, allegedly his wife, and explained that he was eating shit in the Midwest with Stephen Miller’s siege of the Twin Cities. That put Kristi Noem on the radar, and all Trump needed was one embarrassment, implicating him in a social media campaign that cost more than pretty much all other social media campaigns in history combined, and she was gone. Retreat complete.

Hegseth can absorb the blame for a war he pushed into being with someone else’s children. Trump does not fire people because they were wrong. He fires people because they have become a problem for his ego.

The war Hegseth wanted is about to cost Trump the thing Trump actually cares about: the market, the approval number, the feeling of winning.

Ending this war is almost impossible

The problem is Netanyahu, who needs this war to continue for reasons that have nothing to do with Iran’s nuclear program. Netanyahu has faced an ICC arrest warrant and a domestic corruption trial before this started. As Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator, argued today, Israel is running a “use it or lose it” strategy — pulling the U.S. into a war it couldn’t win alone, to degrade Iranian power before American support erodes further. He needs the war more than Trump does.

MBS is a similar problem. Trump wined and dined him at the White House in November, signed $270 billion in agreements, and called him a very good friend. MBS does not want this war to end on Iran’s terms either — a weakened Iran serves Saudi regional ambitions. Neither fiend works for Trump. Neither can be fired.

No Hegseth sacrifice changes that calculus. But it cracks the internal logic of the American commitment. It introduces a wedge between Trump and the war’s premise.

What disciplines Trump, per Matt Duss at the Center for International Policy, is the market. Not principles. Not strategy. Not casualties. When the stock ticker goes the wrong direction while he’s watching Fox News, he might pivot, if he—and the devils on his shoulders—can hold the thought in his head long enough.

He’s a master market manipulator to the point of treason, as we learned during Covid, when he would hold press conferences to talk the Dow back up, to varying degrees of success, each afternoon with big lies. He did it with the tariffs, pretending to back off, and then slowly boiling the world with them anyway. And he did it Monday morning.

Let Him Take the Way Out

Trump appointed Hegseth for two reasons: he looks like a TV movie Reagan, and he’s willing to kill civilians. He is useful to a regime that needs someone to execute decisions that the experts and lawyers would slow down. He is also perfectly positioned to absorb the blame when those decisions detonate.

To be clear: this is Trump’s catastrophe. He wanted the win. He didn’t want the war. Hegseth did. That distinction will not save a single person in the path of this.

But it might save us from more of them.

The war ends when Trump decides he has won. The fastest path to that decision is making clear — loudly, repeatedly, in terms Trump understands — that Hegseth’s revenge mission is the reason winning keeps getting further away.

Let Hegseth be the excuse and have him do something he never wanted to do: save a lot of civilian lives.

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