The ‘Don Tzu’ solution to ending the Iran war

Don Tzu, a portmanteau of Donald Trump and Sun Tzu, is a newish genre of internet memes that aptly summarizes the strategic position of the White House roughly a month after the American president launched his war against Iran. “If you don’t know what you’re doing, neither does your enemy,” says one aphorism. “You can’t lose if you don’t have a goal,” goes another.

The meme fits in part because it captures the nebulousness of the multiple and constantly shifting justifications for the war, and for the stated military objectives as it progresses. “I may have a plan or I may not,” the commander-in-chief has said, as though embracing Don Tzu as his alter ego.

The reality is that this war has slipped out of Trump’s control, if he ever had any to begin with. It will be neither quick and decisive, like his intervention in Venezuela, nor easy to walk away from by declaring victory where there objectively is none, as Trump did last year after the US bombed the Houthis in Yemen and some militias in Nigeria. Instead, the Iran war has caused a wider conflagration, exposing American allies in the Gulf, strengthening US adversaries such as Russia and disrupting energy markets and economics worldwide. It could yet mire America in another “forever war.”


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As Bloomberg’s Editorial Board has pointed out, the options in the White House situation room increasingly boil down to two. The president could double down and escalate. Or he could declare victory and try to move on. Neither choice seems appetizing; but one is less cataclysmic.

Escalation could take the form of bombing Iran’s civilian energy infrastructure, as Trump has threatened but so far shied away from. That would not only amount to a war crime in international law but also and counterproductively, as my colleague Marc Champion argues, make the Iranian regime fight even harder.

Doubling down can also mean deploying American ground troops, which are already on their way to take up positions in the region. If their mission is to take Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil-export hub, that would be fiendishly complex, as my colleague James Stavridis points out, and might still not suffice to end the war. If their mission is to extract or eliminate Iran’s remaining weapons-grade fissile materials (it is estimated to have retained some 400 kilograms of enriched uranium), the odds of success under fire, according to experts, are so bad that the quest seems delusional.

Beyond even worse economic and geopolitical fallout, the risks include significant numbers of Americans injured or killed, or taken hostage, which could be even worse.

Trump’s recent posts on Truth Social, in which he claims that the US and Iran have commenced “GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS,” suggest that he understands these risks, wants to avoid them and desires to be done with the war. The Iranians’ swift denials of such talks imply that they believe that they are now tactically in a stronger position and can even “set the terms for peace.”

In that context, the least bad outcome of negotiations is probably a frozen conflict that gives both sides enough propaganda fodder to claim triumph, however implausibly.

The Iranians could agree to limits on their missile production and their support for proxy militias, knowing that both have already been decimated anyway. Ditto for their nuclear program, which Trump claimed last year to have “obliterated.” They would also have to agree to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, but that was open until recently anyway. Trump, for his part, would have to concede Tehran’s main objective, which is the survival of the Islamic revolutionary regime as such.

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Such an outcome would be impossible to sell as a victory — for any other American president. If anybody can, though, it is Trump, who “is almost uniquely able to shape public perceptions of events,” as Richard Fontaine, a national-security veteran and think-tank leader, told me before the war.

The effort would involve a full-on, whole-of-government reality distortion campaign. The secretary of war and chairman of the joint chiefs would give long, colorful briefings in which they document all the damage done to Iranian assets and constantly repeat the words “victory” and “obliteration.” The administration’s bullhorns in the MAGA media would amplify the message relentlessly. To regain control of the news cycle, the White House might also stage distractions elsewhere, perhaps in Cuba.

The downsides of this option are obvious. It reinforces what has been called the “strike-as-strategy” paradox as the leitmotif of American foreign policy, according to which military lethality substitutes for geopolitical foresight.

The war’s tangible achievements would amount to the physical destruction of Iran’s navy, air defenses and other military infrastructure and the decimation of its leadership ranks. The net strategic effect, though, would be to restore roughly the status quo as of 2018, just before Trump unilaterally quit the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, a multilateral deal under which Iran agreed to freeze its atomic weapons program in return for some sanctions relief. As it happens, the US has already lifted some sanctions on Iranian oil. We could have got here more cheaply.

The real Sun Tzu said that “he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.” But the ancient sage had less advice for situations such as the current one, after defeat already seems inevitable but before an even worse catastrophe occurs. That might be a job for Don Tzu.