Trump's war against Iran has been nearly over for a long time

9 March 2026 Trump says "the war is very complete," and he's considering taking over Strait of Hormuz (CBS)

11 March 2026 Trump tells Axios war in Iran will end soon, 'practically nothing left' to target (Reuters)

15 March 2026 Energy Secretary Chris Wright says Iran war will likely end in weeks (Politico)

27 March 2026 Rubio says US expects to finish Iran war 'in next couple of weeks' (BBC)

28 March 2026 VP JD Vance says US will get out of Iran 'soon' and fuel prices will come down (WION)

31 March 2026 Trump says U.S. could end Iran war in two to three weeks (Reuters)

31 March 2026 Pete Hegseth says "upcoming days will be decisive" in war against Iran (CBS)

2 April 2026 Trump says Iran war objectives 'nearing completion' in address to nation (BBC)

5 April 2026 Trump says deal with Iran possible by Monday, Fox News reports (Reuters)

15 April 2026 Iran war 'very close to over,' Trump says — and the stock market 'is going to boom' (CNBC)

16 April 2026 Trump says war in Iran is going 'swimmingly' and 'should be ending pretty soon' (CNBC)

17 April 2026 Trump says Iranians have "agreed to everything," including removal of enriched uranium (CBS)

24 April 2026 Trump claims US has total control over strait of Hormuz after Iran seizes two container ships (Guardian)

4 May 2026 US Secretary of State Marco Rubio says offensive stage of Iran war is ‘over' (BBC)

6 May 2026 Trump says war will be ‘over quickly’ as Iran reviews US peace proposal (Al Jazeera)

6 May 2026 Rubio says Iran offensive ‘has concluded,’ insists US accomplished its operational aims (Times of Israel)

7 May 2026 Trump says war on Iran will be 'over quickly’ (Middle East Eye)

20 May 2026 Trump says Iran war will end 'very quickly' (Independent)

23 May 2026 Trump says Iran deal 'largely negotiated' including reopening Strait of Hormuz (BBC)

How is this going to end?

I don't know how this is going to end. I am writing this to think through possible scenarios and the possible outcomes that might result from them.

Scenario 1: Ukraine collapses

While Putin's invasion of Ukraine has been an embarrassing shambles, Russia has vast reserves of men and stuff to throw into the war. They retain considerable advantages in air power and missiles. If they stick to the brutal tactics they used in Chechnya and Syria (bomb and shell enemy cities until nothing but rubble remains) then there is a good chance that the outnumbered Ukrainian forces will eventually crack. Then Kyiv will fall and Russian forces will overrun the country. In the chaos Zelensky and other Ukrainian leaders might find themselves captured or even killed by Russian death squads.

But I don't think this ends it. While Ukraine remains under occupation the West is not going to lift sanctions on Russia, so the atmosphere of tension will remain. And the level of resistance the Ukrainians have shown to the invaders suggests that they will not meekly accept the occupation of their country. Any quisling regime the Russians put in place will rule only so long as the occupiers' guns are pointing at the populace.

And the Russians may even find themselves faced with an ongoing partisan war. If the West supports a resistance movement then Putin may be tempted to strike across the border into Poland or Romania (or wherever material aid to the rebels is being routed from). They are both NATO countries, so that would mean a wider war, one which could easily escalate into a nuclear exchange.

Even if there is no significant armed resistance to the occupation, Putin's situation remains very problematic. Western sanctions strangle Russia's economy, degrading his ability to keep his armed forces functional and also driving unrest against his regime. Might he be tempted towards some kind of nuclear display in an attempt to cajole the West into a return to normal trading?

Scenario 2: Russia collapses

By any objective measure Russia's invasion of Ukraine has gone very badly. Many expected a swift victory but instead Russian forces have struggled to make gains and suffered heavy casualties. Meanwhile the Ukrainians have performed far better than many expected. And now arms from the West (anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles in particular) are flowing into the country. What if the military balance were to decisively shift in the Ukrainians favour? Then they might counterattack against the invaders, pushing the Russians back towards their borders. Rather than throw their lives away for nothing, Russian troops then start to flee, with a general rout ensuing. The scale of the military disaster cannot be hidden from a Russian people already reeling from the sanctions-induced economic collapse. Putin faces an eruption of unrest and increasingly finds himself under siege from his own people.

This in many ways is the most appealing scenario, but it is not without its dangers. Russia is after all a nuclear power. Generally people assume that nuclear weapons will only be used when the countries possessing them face an existential threat (e.g. invasion or nuclear attack). Defeat in Ukraine would not threaten the future existence of Russia, but it would I think be an existential threat to Putin himself, who could realistically fear that failure in Ukraine would lead to his overthrow and possibly his delivery to an international tribunal by a new Russian regime anxious to see an end to the West's sanctions. So might he be tempted to order a nuclear strike to either stave off defeat in Ukraine or trigger a Götterdämmerung that brings everyone else down with him.

If Putin were to order a nuclear attack, would his orders be obeyed? Maybe that would be the moment the spell snaps and he finds himself hustled into early retirement. Or perhaps a mushroom cloud rises over Kyiv while the West struggles with a response even as Sergei Lavrov denies that the nuclear explosion had anything to do with Russia.

Scenario 3: On and on and on

But what if no one wins the war and it just keeps going on? Russia maybe captures some more cities after flattening them but the Ukrainians keep fighting back against them. Death and destruction continue to rage across the country as Russian conscripts, Ukrainian soldiers and innocent civilians see no end to their suffering. But while all this is happening the economic war continues, with the Russian economy collapsing in the face of the West's sanctions. The West suffers too as energy prices rocket but with more diverse economies they have more capacity to endure.

This could go on for a while (years even). It might turn into scenario 2 eventually, as economic crisis makes it harder for Putin to keep his army going in Ukraine while continuing casualties and sanctions make the Russian home front increasingly restive. Or perhaps support from China allows Putin to keep his army in the field, effectively transforming Russia into a giant North Korea.

What do you think?

Which of these scenarios seems the most credible? And do you seem them developing in the same way I do?

images:

Russian tanks (U.S. Mission to the OSCE: "The Situation in and around Ukraine, including the Recent Non-Compliance with OSCE Commitments")

A burning vehicle and a sad Putin (Metro: "Putin 'sacks eight generals' in anger at slow progress in Ukraine invasion")

Civilians fleeing (BBC: "Images of people fleeing the town of Irpin, close to Kyiv")

Map (BBC: "Battle for Mykolaiv: 'We are winning this fight, but not this war' ")

The Fall of Dien Bien Phu

60 years ago today the last French defenders of Dien Bien Phu were overrun by Vietnamese rebels. This was in the first Indochina War, when Vietnamese communists were fighting to free their country from colonial rule. The fall of Dien Bien Phu hastened the departure of French forces from Vietnam and the establishment of a communist regime in the north of the country.

Dien Bien Phu was an odd location for the decisive battle that would end a war. It was located far from major population centres in the north west of Vietnam, near the border with Laos. It only became the site of a major battle because the French chose to send a large force there. By 1953 their position in Indochina was deteriorating. The French commander, General Henri Navarre, decided to establish a fortified base in Dien Bien Phu for two reasons. Firstly, the hope was that a strong force there would be able to block the supply of arms from China through Vietnam to communist rebels in Laos. The more ambitious hope, though, was that the Vietnamese rebels would choose to deploy a large force to attack Dien Bien Phu, a force that could then be destroyed by the better armed and trained French forces.

Dien Bien Phu was so remote that it could only be supplied from the air, but this was not seen as a problem. There was an old airstrip there from the Second World War that the French would be able to use to fly in supplies and evacuate the wounded. French paratroopers secured the runway on the 20th November 1953 and then more troops and heavy equipment were flown in, including a number of light tanks. A series of forts were established in the surrounding area. The French commander at Dien Bien Phu was Colonel de Castries, a French cavalry commander who looked forward to the showdown with the Vietnamese rebels. All told he had some 16,000 men under him.

The political leader of the rebels was the famous Ho Chi Minh, but the military commander was Vo Nguyen Giap. Giap decided to accept the challenge posed by Dien Bien Phu and moved a 50,000 strong force to invest the defenders. By the end of January the first clashes between the two armies had occurred, but it was only on the 13th of March that the battle erupted in earnest. The rebels had dug in artillery in bunkers overlooking one of the French forts. After a devastating bombardment the Vietnamese stormed the fort with a mass infantry assault. The French artillery commander was so shocked by his inability to counter the Vietnamese guns that he blew himself up with a hand grenade.

On the next day the rebels overran another fort in the same manner as the first Now they could pore artillery fire down on the airstrip, rendering it useless for the French defenders. The French could still haphazardly receive supplies dropped by parachute, but there was no way out for their wounded. The garrison was now trapped.

Thereafter the battle progressed more like something from the First World War than the kind of mobile fighting the French had hoped for. Shelling and infantry assaults gradually forced the French back into an ever smaller area. The fighting was not all one-sided - in bold counter-attacks the defenders sometimes recovered lost positions. The suffering on both sides was horrendous. But without use of the runway for the French there could only be one eventual outcome.

As the situation became more desperate, the United States stepped up its material aid for the French in Indochina, but avoided overt direct involvement. There were some in leadership positions who wanted to commit significant American forces to help the French; there are even suggestions that the Americans proposed to use nuclear weapons to break the siege or to give them to the French for this, but this has never been definitively established. In the end those who favoured non-intervention won out, and the Americans left Dien Bien Phu to its fate.

The end came on the 7th of May. By then the French defenders were shattered and isolated. Giap ordered an all-out attack to bring the battle to an end. In his last radio broadcast to his commander, de Castries recounted the desperate situation in which the garrison found itself and was ordered to fight on till the very end. By nightfall the battle was over, with all the French positions overrun. The surviving defenders were led off into captivity.
As well as the captured male soldiers, the French prisoners included one French woman, the nurse Geneviève de Galard, who had been trapped when the runway became unusable. Also captured were the Algerian and Vietnamese women who worked in the two bordels mobiles de campagne serving the garrison. Some 3,290 French troops were eventually repatriated, together with Ms de Galard. The Vietnamese sex workers were apparently sent off somewhere for re-education. The eventual fate of the Vietnamese loyalists who fought on the French side is mysterious.

For the Vietnamese the battle was a triumph, albeit one bought at terrible cost. The rebels had gone in a few short years from waging a guerrilla war to being able to take on a first world army in conventional battle. For France, Dien Bien Phu was a disaster. They had chosen the ground and invited the rebels to fight them and then had been comprehensively defeated. But the defeat did not end France's colonial pretensions. While the French were soon after to quit Indochina, the debacle hardened the resolve of the military to fight on against the nationalist rebels in Algeria, in the hope that some kind of victory there would restore their honour.

By coincidence, a conference to end the Indochina War opened in Geneva the day after the fall of Dien Bien Phu. The conference saw Vietnam partitioned into a northern zone under Ho Chi Minh and southern Republic of Vietnam supported by France (and subsequently the USA). Elections in 1956 were meant to reunite the two parts of the country, though events unfolded otherwise.

More:

The Battle of Dien Bien Phu (Wikipedia)

Dien Bien Phu: Did the US offer France an A-bomb? (BBC News)

The Siege of Dien Bien Phu (BBC Radio 4 documentary)

"The Battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939" by Antony Beevor

I have been reading this chunky book on and off for an age, and now I am finished. This book is a completely rewritten version of a book Beevor wrote on the Spanish Civil War ages ago, with the opening of the Soviet-era archives being what most justified a new take on the war. People who are interested in publication histories and versions of books may be interested to learn that this new book was originally published in Spain, and that it has been somewhat truncated for the Anglophone world.

So yeah, the Spanish Civil War. It's a depressing business, really. The bad guys win. The good guys never look they ever have a chance of winning. And the good guys aren't actually that good, being either total cockfarmers or total losers (or both). Just in case you have never heard of the Spanish Civil War, it began when some generals staged a coup against a leftist government. On one side we have the Nationalists – an alliance of right-wing generals, fascists, monarchists, Catholic traditionalists, and a bunch of weird monarchists called The Carlists; the Nationalists received considerable external support from Hitler and Mussolini. The other side, the Republicans, was a leftist hoe-down of liberal republicans, anarchists, socialists, and communists, together with some regional parties; the USSR gave the Republicans a degree of ambiguous support.

The Nationalists won for a couple of reasons. Firstly, they were far better at submerging their differences and uniting against the common enemy. Beevor shows well how the various Nationalist factions were willing to settle for an outcome that (for them) was often suboptimal, but which was better than letting the other side win. The Republicans remained internally divided, with the most bitter tensions being between the communists and their enemies and between centralisers and regionalists. The Nationalists also received much better support from their external allies, with the military assistance of Nazi Germany in particular playing a major part in their victory. The Republicans did receive support from the Soviet Union, and could not have continued the war without it, but nothing they received matched the power of the forces sent from Germany. The Soviets also tied their support to the advancement of their allies within Republican Spain while charging the Republicans exploitative rates for it. The third reason for the Nationalist victory was the grossly incompetent leadership of Republican forces, with battle after battle seeing the same failed offensive tactics being employed. The Nationalists did also make mistakes, but they seemed far more able to learn from them.

It strikes me that the two underlying narratives in this book are Franco's inexorable march to victory, and the extent to which the communists in Spain were total cockfarmers. You never really get any sense that Franco could have been stopped – he had so many cards in his favour that victory for the Nationalists seems almost pre-ordained. But the actions of the communists ultimately helped him on his way. While Soviet support played a key role in keeping the Republicans in the game, it came with an extra dollop of communist paranoia, Soviet advisors and secret police operatives bringing the show trial mindset to Spain. The Republican zone saw the emergence of a mini-police state, with the real or perceived enemies of the Spanish communists and the USSR suffering imprisonment or summary execution.

The effect of communist influence on the military field was perhaps more pernicious. Arms were often refused to units whose commanders refused to join the Spanish communists, and the Soviet advisors saw to it that the Republican war effort followed the stultifying line emanating from Moscow. This saw all efforts focussed on set-piece assaults by massed infantry, with the Republic staging a series of disastrous offensives that could have been lifted from the Western Front of the First World War. Communist paranoia meant that all failures were attributed not to bad military doctrine, unrealistic expectations, poor planning, or an unexpectedly vigorous response by the enemy, but to the influence of Trotskyist-Fascist fifth columnists, so military offensives were often followed by witch-hunts and purges in units that failed to meet their objectives.

But in this day and age, pointing out the failings of communists seems about as relevant as denouncing the double dealing of the Girondins. Does a study of the Spanish Civil War offer any useful insights into the conflicts of today? Eh, I'll have to come back to you on that one.

"The Battle of Algiers"

I saw well-known film The Battle of Algiers again recently. This is a piece of political cinema about the Algerian war against the French, focusing on events in Algiers. It is in two parts – firstly the FLN rebels begin their campaign, effectively taking over the old city of Algiers and striking outside it against French military, police, and civilian targets. The second part shows the French response – the Paratroopers are deployed to crush the rebellion with the most uncompromising of methods. It is often said of fictional things that the villains are more interesting than the heroes; that is certainly true of this one, as the commander of the paras is by far the most charismatic and fascinating character in the film, and probably the one who gets the most individual screen time. This is not to denigrate the FLN characters, but merely to emphasise how the colonel gets all the best lines.

People often talk about how there are parallels between the Algerian war's uncompromising savagery and current events in Palestine and Iraq. As a result this film has enjoyed a new lease of life, reputedly being watched by Pentagon officials and US military types as a counter-insurgency training film (presumably they forget that the French lost in Algeria). If you have ever been to Hebron or, particularly, Jerusalem, the film will have resonances for you, if only for the look of the streets and their almost chthonic feeling.

I wonder sometimes, though, whether people learn the wrong lessons from the film. I particular think this of the left, or of people broadly supportive of Palestinian militancy and the various insurgencies in Iraq. The Battle of Algiers is very sympathetic to the FLN's armed struggle, not merely when it is directed against the security apparatus of the French, but also when French civilians are being targeted. The film presents the blowing up of cafés, airline offices, and teen hangouts as unfortunate and distressing, but also necessary as a means to terrorise the French into granting independence to the Algerians. Yet, as someone on ILX points out, the FLN's violent campaign is revealed by the film to be a complete failure. It provokes a massive response by the authorities, who break the FLN as a military force, killing or arresting their activists. What finally breaks French will is not more terrorism, but an outbreak of mass agitation against colonial rule. I feel that this is something that people in Palestine could reflect on.

The discourse around the Palestinian struggle is often based on the idea that the imbalance of forces between Israel and Palestine is such that asymmetric war against Israeli civilians is the Palestinians' only option. This analysis never steps back to pondering whether killing Israeli civilians actually advances the cause of Palestinian freedom? I think not – if anything it retards it, providing a smoke screen for the Israelis to justify greater repression and land theft in the name of security. In any case, the Israelis, like the French, have succeeded in more or less totally defeating the Palestinian militants. The ability of Palestinians to strike at Israeli targets is now extremely limited, apart from those targets within rocket range of the Gaza strip. I cannot but think that like with Algeria, it is necessary for the Palestinians to try something else.

There is a poignant bit in the film where two FLN activists are talking. One says to the other "The real struggle begins when we achieve independence". Given Algeria's miserable post independence history, it is hard not to think "Jesus, you FLN guys really fucked that one up".

In war, there are no winners - only losers

However, according to something called the Human Security Report, there has been a marked decline in war over the last two decades, meaning there are a lot less losers out there. Apparently there are way fewer of both inter-state and civil wars than there used to be during the Cold War. The BBC have also ran an article about it.

[I wrote this over a year ago but saved it as a draft... maybe I had a reason for not publishing it then, but I will nevertheless make it available now]