(Dobbs) Two Plus Two Can Add Up To Anything Trump Likes

We should have learned by now that Iran is not an easy pushover.

If this quote doesn’t pull the mask off Donald Trump’s shell game with this war, nothing does: “Even if Donald Trump claims to have ‘destroyed 100% of Iran’s military capabilities’… the remaining 0% is clearly disrupting the global economy by reducing its oil supply by 10% to 15%.”

Former New York Times and CBS News correspondent David Andelman saw it in The Economist and reported it in his own Substack column on Sunday. What it affirms is, like so much that Trump says, two plus two don’t have to add up to four anymore. Our bloviating president wrote Saturday on his website, “The United States has blown Iran off the map.” Yet rather than putting up a white flag of surrender, Iran keeps putting up more missiles and drones aimed at its enemies. So two plus two can add up to anything Trump likes.

It’s kind of like the way he branded the war two weeks ago as “a short-term excursion.” 40,000 to 50,000 military personnel, at least twenty warships and as many as 250 aircraft are deployed, with thousands more United States Marines, and more ships and planes, on their way from their stations in the Pacific. Some won’t even reach the war zone for another week. That’s quite some “short-term excursion.”

But it does make sense in Trump’s world if two plus two no longer have to add up to four.

Then there’s his decision last Friday to lift sanctions off oil from Iran. His treasury secretary Scott Bessent posted an order saying, “By temporarily unlocking this existing supply for the world, the United States will quickly bring approximately 140 million barrels of oil to global markets, expanding the amount of worldwide energy and helping to relieve the temporary pressures on supply caused by Iran.”

You don’t even have to read between the lines to see how stupid this is. We are at war with Iran. Putting more money in their pockets can only prolong it and draw out the damage they cause. They have offered no surrender in return for being unsanctioned. To the contrary, they’re still shooting at us and our allies and at the facilities of some of the world’s largest suppliers of petroleum.

On the heels of Trump’s decision a week and a half ago to lift sanctions off Russian oil allegedly for the same reasons— which must have led to a lot of corks popping off champagne bottles in Moscow— it affirms the astonished assertion Sunday on Meet the Press by Connecticut senator Chris Murphy: “We’re literally putting money into the pockets of the very nations that we are fighting right now.”

Nope, two plus two definitely don’t add up to four anymore.

Is there anything to read into any of this other than the acts of a desperate man who waged a war of choice and didn’t understand that his enemy would not easily be vanquished? A desperate man who all but assured his nation that Iran’s regime would fall and its nuclear program would be abolished and now, with neither goal achieved, with oil prices through the roof, and with his popularity continuing to sink, is in deep over his head?

No matter how outmanned and outgunned Iran is, no matter how many of its evil leaders are now six feet under, it still manages to use the Strait of Hormuz to unnerve its enemies and control the narrative.

If anything, the Islamic Republic’s leverage over oil— and the price of gas— might prove to be as strong or stronger than Donald Trump’s determination to crush it with military force. The conventional wisdom is that Iran is driven by the proposition that in that part of the world, you win simply by not losing, a credo I used to hear when I covered the Middle East. However damaged it is by the American and Israeli assassinations and bombardments, Iran still knows that two plus two equals four.

As guest columnist Phil Klay wrote over the weekend in The New York Times, “Power does not grow out of the barrel of a gun.”

Klay compared this war to past wars in the history of America. George Washington, he wrote, “didn’t simply want to dominate the British — he wanted to form a nation.” Abraham Lincoln wanted to preserve, then heal these United States. Woodrow Wilson got into World War I because “the world must be made safe for democracy.” Franklin Roosevelt entered World War II both because Japan launched its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, and because Germany was an existential threat to the free world.

Each of those wars, for all the loss, was a triumph.

But then, with an eye on Iran, Klay turned to wars in the lifetime of many Americans alive today: “Even in America’s failed wars launched with idealistic aims, like Vietnam and the Iraq war, our defeats were often related to a failure to fully comprehend that peoples in other countries have their own passions and ideals, that they might not simply be projections of our own desires, wanting what we want them to want, and loathing what we want them to loathe.”

Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan all fit the description. All were disasters.

Will Iran end up on that list? Trump keeps us wondering.

He issued an ultimatum Saturday night on his website: “If Iran doesn’t FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT, the Strait of Hormuz, within 48 HOURS from this exact point in time, the United States of America will hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST!”

Iran’s defiant response? The strait will be “completely closed” if the U.S. follows through. And critical infrastructure in the Gulf nations allied with the United States— energy and desalination plants— will be “irreversibly destroyed.”

Then yesterday morning, Trump appeared to put obliteration on pause until Friday: “THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND THE COUNTRY OF IRAN,” he wrote in all caps, “HAVE HAD, OVER THE LAST TWO DAYS, VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS REGARDING A COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION OF OUR HOSTILITIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST.”

Except Iran says they didn’t. Its foreign ministry denies it, and the speaker of its parliament says, “No talks with the U.S. have taken place. Reports claiming otherwise are fake news aimed at influencing financial and oil markets and distracting from the challenges facing the U.S. and Israel.” (You’ve got to love the irony, a government of religious radicals is throwing Trump’s own “fake news” indictment right back at him.)

Somebody is lying. Both sides would have their reasons. It could be either. Or, in the degraded government still functioning in Iran, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. Or, the United States is talking with people on the other side who don’t actually have the sway to speak for their country. Or, there are talks at some level but only through intermediaries.

Maybe we’ll find out. Or, the way Trump is running this war, maybe we won’t. The one thing he told us was, if the “productive conversations” he spoke about aren’t productive, “We’ll just keep bombing our little hearts out.”

If there really are credible negotiations underway, Iran has a strange way of showing it: its semi-official news agency reported last night, “Special plans are arranged tonight for Tel Aviv and some regional allies of the US and Israel, which will completely remove any hope of negotiation from the minds of the aggressors.” They have hit it before.

No matter how each of us feels about Iran as a threat— as a terrorist or nuclear threat to the world, as a brutal threat against its own people— we should have learned by now that it’s not an easy pushover. Just like Iraq, just like Afghanistan, just like Vietnam. Our president can say that two plus two don’t equal four, but facts, which have always challenged the man, prove otherwise.

Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 39-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame. He also has been a consultant for the Counterterrorism Education Learning Lab.

You can learn more at GregDobbs.net