An all-powerful mentor sits in the back of his limousine with his ambitious apprentice. He has now decided to reveal to him the secret of success. “Never admit your defeat,” he tells him. “Insist that you won even when you have been crushed. The greater your crushing defeat, the more you will insist.”
The scene is from The Apprentice, the film in which Ali Abbasi follows Donald Trump in the New York of the 1970s. In the film we see Donald distorting reality in exactly this way—insisting that he won even when he has lost. We see him, of course, stepping over corpses—the last one being that of his mentor, who is almost dying on a straw mat. We see him after we have already seen him in real life. Trump had “won” when he lost the presidential election to Joe Biden. When he welcomed Putin in Alaska, and also when he withdrew the tariffs he had imposed. Will he “win” in the same way in Iran?
From the very beginning, this war had been identified with such an ending. The “spectacle” was exhausted with the strike that killed Khamenei and the rest of the regime figures who made the mistake of being in the same building with him. What followed was a war of attrition—or, in terms of spectacle, the same scene of the play: missiles costing millions of dollars are spent to intercept drones worth a few thousand. The asymmetry of the war is mainly economic, and money hurts the president, just as it hurt the real-estate developer of the 1970s.
From the start of this war it had also been said that the White House had no plan. Not that it needed one. Trump would “win” if the regime of the mullahs remained in place, just as he would “win” if it collapsed. Which of the two is more “convenient”?
Iran is not Gaza, where you can replace cannons fired at the righteous and the unrighteous with the “butter” of a Riviera. For someone who even stepped over the corpse of his mentor, it is better for the mullahs to remain in power than to stare at the “mess” of a civil war. Stronger inside the country, since the “heroic” Ayatollah sacrificed himself to confront the “Great and the Little Satan” together. And he “won.” At the same time, however, weakened in the region, without the defensive capacity of the past, deprived of the proxy fighters of Hezbollah and the Houthis, and with all the Arabs against them.
Between an authoritarian regime that will continue to sow the corpses of dissidents and a civil war in which Iranians, Kurds with their six parties, and Azeris would kill one another, the first is preferable. For the Donald of the 1980s, the author of The Art of the Deal, it is always better to “deal” with one dictator than with a dozen tribal leaders. Why not a “Xerxes Agreement” with the Iranians sometime in the future, just as the Abraham Accords were signed with the Arabs a few years ago?
In this choice lies the divergence of goals between Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. One wants to “be done with” the war; the other with the regime. Israel would not be threatened in the slightest by an Iranian civil war, but the United States sees nothing beneficial in assuming responsibility for yet another Iraq or Libya. “Whenever I decide the war should end, it will end.”
That is how you declare yourself the “winner.” And that is how you end the war. As you would close the zipper on your jacket at an unexpected moment of chill in Mar-a-Lago. No longer as an “apprentice” in 1970, but as president in 2025, with the weight of eight decades of life on your back.
