The Trap Always Closes
Donald Trump, Lyndon Johnson, and wars we can’t win
History’s traps don’t care how world leaders walk into them. Once they’re inside, all that matters is how things rather predictably will go.
Donald Trump now finds himself in a trap that has ensnared other presidents, most similarly Lyndon Johnson. And recent events in the war in Iran, now in its third week, illuminate how steely that trap can be.
On Wednesday night, Israel struck the South Pars gas field—the world’s largest natural gas reserve, shared between Iran and Qatar. Experts have long warned a move such as this would trigger a predictable chain reaction: Iran retaliated with missile strikes on Qatar’s Ras Laffan LNG terminal, causing extensive damage, and is threatening further strikes across Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Global energy markets lurched. Oil spiked above $118 a barrel. Gulf allies that had quietly tolerated the war are now furious.
Trump took to Truth Social to insist the U.S. “knew nothing about this particular attack,” seemingly distancing himself from our erstwhile ally. He described Israel as having “violently lashed out” and attacked South Pars “out of anger.” But both U.S. and Israeli officials subsequently confirmed that Trump had known about and approved the strike.
That same day, a new front in the political war at home opened. Trump’s former counterterrorism chief, Joe Kent, sat down with fellow right-wing extremist Tucker Carlson for an interview. In it, Kent confirmed that Trump knew Iran posed no imminent threat, key advisers had been shut out, and Israel drove the decision to launch the war.
Three weeks into “Operation Epic Fury,” the war has already escaped Trump’s imagined boundaries. To understand how we got here—and why an easy exit looks increasingly unlikely— it helps to revisit the story of a Prussian general, Carl von Clausewitz, who warned about this two centuries ago. And then to go a step beyond him, into territory he couldn’t have anticipated.
Clausewitz and the Escalation Trap
I first studied Clausewitz in a college political science course entitled “The Role of the Military in Politics,” taught (somewhat ironically, in retrospect) by Condoleezza Rice, the former Secretary of State under George W. Bush. That’s where I first read Clausewitz’s seminal work, On War, which instructs that military force should never be an end in itself. War is the “continuation of politics by other means.” Military aggression, in Clausewitz’s view, must therefore always be in service of a political objective. Once a military campaign loses sight of that goal and focuses only on battlefield success, the real war is already lost.
Modern American military failure is largely a study in ignoring that warning. Both Johnson’s Vietnam War and Trump’s Iran War painfully illustrate this, not because the presidents were alike, but because their adversaries understood Clausewitz and they did not.
North Vietnam understood that it could never outright win a conventional war against the world’s most powerful military. Instead, even as Johnson escalated, it fought to win American public opinion. Its leaders calculated, correctly, that they needed only to outlast the patience of the American public while journalists like Walter Cronkite brought the Vietnam War into American living rooms. As University of Chicago Professor Robert Pape observed, the U.S. never lost a battle in Vietnam yet still lost the war. Operation Rolling Thunder in Vietnam was militarily successful, but politically counterproductive.
The Tet Offensive is instructive as a turning point in the war and an application of Clausewitzian principles. Militarily, it was a catastrophic defeat for North Vietnam. Tens of thousands of soldiers lost their lives. They didn’t hold on to a single city. But politically, it was devastating to Johnson. After years of official optimism, Americans saw that the enemy could still strike everywhere.
When Cronkite declared that the war was “mired in stalemate,” it crystallized what polls had been showing for months: that American public opinion had quietly turned against the war. Johnson understood too late which war mattered. It was always the political one.
Tehran has read the same playbook as Hanoi. Iran can no more defeat the U.S. military today than Vietnam could in the 1960s. But even while Trump ratchets up military pressure and orders constant missile and bombing campaigns across Iran, that regime firmly believes it can win the political war. It will do so by inflicting significant economic pain through surgical means: closing the Strait of Hormuz, expanding the war through its proxies, and striking Gulf energy infrastructure.
Like Rolling Thunder, Epic Fury is an overwhelming air campaign. The U.S. has quickly established air supremacy. It has destroyed much of the enemy’s navy. The previous ayatollah and many other top leaders have been killed in targeted strikes. And yet the regime has not collapsed, the Strait remains closed, oil sits well above $100 a barrel, and the administration cannot articulate a coherent definition of victory.
As CNN observed, Trump is now caught in the oldest trap of modern warfare: believing a swift, overwhelming military attack will yield enduring political results. This didn’t work in Vietnam, and it likely won’t work in Iran.
But there’s another problem: The White House still cannot explain the war’s purpose. Top aides have offered starkly different goals: to ward off an imminent Iranian threat, to destroy Iran’s missile capabilities, to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon, to secure Iran’s natural resources, and to achieve regime change.
These are not complementary objectives; they are different wars. If the White House cannot even define what winning looks like, then it logically cannot know when it has won, except for Trump to insist, “I will feel it in my bones.”
That is hardly reassuring. This is exactly how escalation traps are built and political wars are lost.
Beyond Clausewitz: The Ego Trap
Clausewitz was writing for a different world, one with wars between rival European states, each with professional armies and defined command structures, conducted across seasons rather than news cycles. In modern republics, the “political war” is fought simultaneously to the military one and in real time. It’s waged across social media, in congressional hearings, and on podcasts with millions of listeners.
Nor did Clausewitz anticipate the “ego problem”: leaders who understand the stakes yet remain paralyzed by the cost of admitting error, though he did warn about commanders being too obstinate to recognize their own failings.
Barbara Tuchman’s framing in The March of Folly picks up where Clausewitz left off. Her focus is not on the confusion between military tactics and political strategy. Rather, it’s on how war is often a series of miscalculations and leaders who persist in strategies against their own interests because reversing course requires owning their mistakes. Leaders, bureaucracies, and political coalitions develop their own momentum. Stopping it feels costlier than continuing.
Lyndon Johnson is a prime example of an ego trap. His private recordings reveal a president who confided, as early as 1964, that he didn’t think Vietnam was worth fighting for. He arrived at this conclusion before any major bombing campaigns had even begun. His failure was therefore both political and moral, driven by pride and fear. He didn’t want to be remembered as the president who lost Southeast Asia to communism. And he was convinced that his cherished “Great Society,” the most ambitious domestic program since the New Deal, would be undermined by a retreat in Vietnam seen as weakness.
Each escalation by Johnson produced the need for the next, even as the original rationale faded. By 1968, there were 500,000 American troops in South Vietnam and no end in sight. The trap had closed completely.
Trump’s ego trap runs through more twisted psychological circuitry but arrives at the same bad place. While Johnson escalated knowing the risks and privately agonizing over them, Trump escalated, per sources, simply because he wanted to: “He ended up saying, ‘I just want to do it.’ He grossly overestimated his ability to topple the regime short of sending in ground troops.”
Trump’s career was built by imposing his preferred narrative on events: his multiple bankruptcies, indictments and tariffs, to name a few. Now he’s attempting to apply the same operating assumptions to a war. But unlike tariffs, which can be swiftly imposed and rescinded, the war’s outcome is beyond his sole control. Iran, and apparently now Israel, also get a say.
Trump’s trap is actually far worse
The parallels between Vietnam and Iran are real and instructive. But the differences between the two render our current situation more concerning. In key respects, Trump’s trap is more severe.
Johnson’s political war came home to U.S. families through the draft. Every escalation had a direct, personal human cost, which meant the pressure to justify the war was constant, unavoidable and ultimately fatal to his presidency. Trump feels comparably less pressure, at least so far. The absence of a draft means the war remains abstract for most Americans. A siloed media ecosystem further deflects criticism in ways Cronkite’s era didn’t allow.
This doesn’t mean, however, that public support for the war, or the lack thereof, won’t impact where this is headed. Support for the Iran War already sits at just 27 percent. That’s a number that took Vietnam eight years and 58,000 American lives to reach. As Guillaume Long, senior fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, argued this week, Trump’s only visible exit strategy is to manufacture the appearance of victory. But oil testing $120 a barrel and a world economy staggering from a closed Strait of Hormuz are not narratives Trump can spin away.
That’s not for lack of trying. Weeks in, the White House media strategy is clear: video gamify the war, attack the media and promise or simply declare victory. Official White House accounts posted montages mixing Hollywood and video game footage with real strikes. One video ending with “Flawless Victory” from the game Mortal Kombat racked up 60 million views. A White House official defended the approach, explaining that “we’re just making banger memes—no one’s done it like this before.”
But memes aren’t going to open the Strait, no matter how “banger.”
The intra-party political front
There’s another parallel to Johnson, but with a Trumpian difference. Like Johnson in 1968, Trump in 2026 is losing the public and fighting a second war inside his own coalition.
Were Johnson here today, this might all sound very familiar. Anti-war Democrats fractured the party at the chaotic 1968 convention and helped hand Richard Nixon the presidency.
Trump faces a potentially worse fracturing today. The anti-war Democrats of 1968 at least had Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy to rally behind. The MAGA anti-war faction has no equivalent candidate because Trump will tolerate no rivals in the GOP. As a consequence, Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Joe Kent and their audiences have nowhere to channel their disillusionment, except into apathy and abstention. That’s a looming disaster for the GOP’s midterm prospects.
Carlson, once among Trump’s most influential allies who helped deliver his 2024 victory, has since become one of the war’s most vocal critics. Before the bombing, Carlson warned that “now is the worst possible time for the United States to participate in a military strike on Iran. We can’t afford it. Thousands of Americans would die. We’d lose the war that follows.” After the strikes began, the former Fox host declared: “This is Israel’s war. This is not the United States’ war.”
Carlson is not alone. As I noted in an earlier piece, the far right is increasingly unhappy with Trump. Greene reminded her followers, “We voted for America First and ZERO wars.” The Hodge twins, popular MAGA influencers, declared Trump had “completely lied to his voters.” Rep. Thomas Massie and Sen. Rand Paul publicly announced their opposition. Even pro-Trump podcaster Tim Pool called it a betrayal.
Now Joe Kent, a conspiracy theorist and antisemite whom Trump nevertheless decided should direct the National Counterterrorism Center, has entered the fray. Kent resigned this week in protest over the Iran War, claiming Trump had betrayed a core promise of the movement that made him president. He wrote directly to Trump in his resignation letter: “Until June of 2025, you understood that the wars in the Middle East were a trap that robbed America of the precious lives of our patriots and depleted the wealth and prosperity of our nation.”
Trump’s “Cronkite moment” may have arrived yesterday, too. Carlson interviewed Kent for over an hour and forty minutes. Kent confirmed that Iran posed no imminent threat and alleged that key decision makers had been deliberately excluded from the process. Most damaging, he told Carlson that “the Israelis drove the decision to take this action” — and that the U.S. could have refused to go along. “We could have simply said to the Israelis, ‘No, you will not, and if you do, we will take something away from you.’”
The Netanyahu Variable: A Trap Within the Trap
Kent’s claim highlights a structural element of Trump’s predicament that has no Vietnam analogue. And the South Pars attack demonstrates it perfectly.
Johnson’s escalation was more or less entirely within his own control. He could have stopped it at any point. By contrast, Trump cannot now stop the war unilaterally because Israel is deep in it with its own objectives, its own timeline, and its own prime minister. Netanyahu has repeatedly demonstrated an ability to drag the U.S. into escalations that Trump didn’t authorize and can’t easily contain.
Israel has been steadily widening the war by attacking energy infrastructure, by firing missiles across the border into Lebanon, and by seeking regime change by whatever means are available. Trump would prefer to declare victory and move on. But as the South Pars strike showed, Israel can escalate the war beyond his limits. It’s then up to Trump whether to own the consequence or disavow an ally in the middle of a war.
As The American Prospect noted, the man tasked with maneuvering this diplomatically is Steve Witkoff, a real estate developer with no diplomatic experience. Witkoff spent last night fielding furious calls from Qatari officials demanding to know whether America had prior knowledge of an attack on infrastructure their country shares with Iran. The answer, it turns out, was yes. The relationship with Qatar, which hosts the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East, is now under strain.
Johnson could have ended Vietnam on his own authority on any given day and taken the political hit. But Trump cannot end Iran the same way. The asymmetry between his freedom to start this war and his ability to end it may be his greatest miscalculation.
The Trump trap paradox
Johnson saw the “escalation trap” clearly, yet lacked the courage to overcome the “ego trap” and exit the war in Vietnam. His presidency was consumed by a war he privately believed was unwinnable, and he paid the ultimate political price by declining to seek re-election in 1968.
Trump is now caught in both an escalation and ego trap, with potentially further-reaching consequences. In his critique of Trump’s war, Long identified a bitter irony: the effort to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon may instead ensure it. A regime that survives such a devastating American assault will emerge with a powerful argument for nuclear deterrence.
Ukraine learned that lesson four years ago when Russia invaded, three decades after surrendering its nuclear weapons for empty security guarantees. As the Trump trap closes, his ill-fated war in Iran, whatever its tactical gains, could paradoxically strengthen the very outcome it was designed to destroy.
And if history is any guide, it will also bring down his presidency—unless he does what trapped leaders rarely do: stop.