Iran is “Trump’s Vietnam” — and it’s going to get a lot worse

Leon Panetta has been in politics as long as any of us can remember. He started out as a Republican, working in the office of Sen. Thomas Kuchel, R-Calif., in the late 1960s. (Kuchel belonged to the now-vanished species of moderate Republican and actually supported both the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act.) He moved up quickly to become director of the Office of Civil Rights under Richard Nixon.

In 1971, Panetta quit the Nixon administration in protest over its racist policies, switched parties and went to work for New York mayor John Lindsay, another Republican-turned-Democrat. In 1976 he was elected to Congress, where he served until 1993. He then became director of the Office of Management and Budget and White House chief of staff under Bill Clinton, and for his final chapter in government served as Barack Obama‘s CIA director in the first term and defense secretary in the second. To say he’s got extensive experience would an understatement.

Panetta has always been a centrist, and I’ve been critical of his “maverick” track record over the years — he’s had a tendency to burnish his own reputation to the detriment of those he works for. But at age 87, from his perch as the head of the Panetta Institute for Public Policy, it’s hard to imagine he now thinks he has anything left to prove. So when Panetta appeared on CNN to talk about the Iran war, a subject he is well qualified to discuss, and says that it’s shaping up to be “Trump’s Vietnam,” you can’t help but be a bit startled. If anyone still in public life knows how much freight that phrase carries, it would be him.

That comparison might sound hyperbolic since Vietnam was a 20-year meat-grinder of a war that cost the lives of more than 50,000 Americans and something like 3.5 million Vietnamese, both troops and civilians. But Panetta drew the comparison based on the argument that Donald Trump‘s war was an equally terrible miscalculation of the adversary’s resilience and commitment, where we’re dealing with misinformation and propaganda coming from the U.S. administration and an untrustworthy negotiating partner on the other side.

In other words, Americans have once again overestimated their own prowess and underestimated their enemy; our own government is constantly lying about the war, and the Iranians are unlikely to stick to any deal without solid verification, which is going to be difficult to manage at best. To state the obvious, the U.S. under Trump is equally untrustworthy, having torn up the hard-fought nuclear agreement negotiated under Obama, which by all accounts the Iranians had been honoring.

We can add another dimension to this misadventure that makes it much more complicated than Vietnam. That war had a dreadful human cost but it did not threaten the entire world economy the way this one does. The protracted and unresolved dispute over the Strait of Hormuz and the enormous amounts of crude oil that travel through it is pretty dire, and not likely to get better anytime soon.

Fuel prices have spiked around the world since the war started, for obvious reasons. But in fact, they haven’t gone up quite as precipitously as we might have expected, considering that about 25% of the world’s oil supply has been bottled up in the Strait of Hormuz for the past few months. That respite is about to end. Last week, Chevron CEO Mike Wirth said that the “buffers and the shock absorbers” in the global petroleum market “are being steadily drawn down, and the ability for the market to absorb this imbalance is drastically diminished today versus where we started.” In other words, the reserves his company and others have been tapping — including the U.S. strategic petroleum reserve, which is supposed to be used only for global emergencies —  are about to run out.

According to Politico, industry executives have been privately warning the White House that prices are about to surge dramatically over the next month. but Trump officials claim they haven’t heard a thing about it. In fact, they insist there’s no supply problem and that as soon as the strait is open, fuel prices will go back down to where they were in February and everything will be hunky-dory. Anyone who buys that line is going to be very disappointed. One expert told Politico, “I’ve never seen inventory numbers fall so much so quickly. It is stunning.”

There are other reasons why the prices haven’t risen more sharply, one of which is arguably a huge positive for the long term. As Ryan Cooper writes in The American Prospect, one surprising factor that’s keeping the supply somewhat steady is been green energy. Since much of fossil fuel energy can be replaced by solar power, wind power and battery-powered electric vehicles, Cooper reports, “Chinese exports of solar and EVs are soaring, and even very poor countries are buying in bulk.”

In countries like Egypt, where sunlight is ample and the price of oil has created a massive burden on consumers, renewable energy is an absolute necessity. It’s a godsend that many of these new technologies are available off the shelf right now, and this crisis will likely speed up the energy transition all over the world. Sadly, the U.S. is likely to be left behind, both in consumption and in manufacturing, since our government has perversely placed all its chips on fossil fuels. This week, Trump pledged $700 billion to reinvigorate the dirty, failing coal industry and he’s been halting renewable energy projects left and right, even spending billions to pay companies to ditch already-approved plans. To quote our illustrious president, “We aren’t allowing any windmills to go up, and we don’t want the solar panels. Fossil fuel is the thing that works.” So the U.S. is already well behind the curve, and that’ll get worse if the Iran war turns into the Vietnam-style quagmire that Panetta predicts.

Politically, Trump’s impulsive warmongering is fracturing the Republican Party in ways we could hardly have imagined even a year ago. As I’ve written previously, Trump’s antiwar stance was always a joke. But a lot of his followers believed it, and along with the economic stress it’s causing, this “excursion” — in his infelicitous phrase — is creating a new set of calculations for Republicans.

The House of Representatives managed to pass a resolution to restrain Trump’s war powers after four Republicans voted for it, a surprising turn of events which sent the president into a tailspin, complaining that they were ruining his negotiations with the Iranians. If that same resolution passes the Senate, which it might, Trump will have to gain congressional approval or withdraw the troops from the Iran theater. It’s a far cry from the veto-proof bipartisan majorities that passed a war-powers resolution against Nixon in 1973, after revelations that he had conducted a secret bombing campaign in Cambodia. But it’s a start.

Start your day with essential news from Salon.Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

It’s hard to imagine that this GOP will muster the courage to confront Trump directly, but then this war has been massively unpopular from the get-go as well as extremely costly. Everyone who’s been paying attention knows it was a huge mistake made by a president who refused listen to those around him who knew this would probably happen and tried to warn him off, even if many of those people won’t admit it now. We’ve been here before: That sounds an awful lot like Vietnam, which was an epic disaster that the country has never really gotten over.

Let’s hope it doesn’t take 20 years to end this war, but there are no signs that it’s going to be over anytime soon, whether Trump declares victory or not. Panetta says he thinks America will be back fighting Iran again in a few years, no matter what happens now. Donald Trump has started another forever war, which was exactly the thing he promised he would never do.