It is easier to begin a war than to end one. Few would have expected that a “twice‑obliterated” Iran could still strike back. War, once set in motion, acquires a momentum that resists both prediction and control. It unleashes forces we barely account for—suffering, memory, pride—those non‑quantifiable elements that outlast matériel.
Unlike wars driven by territory or ideology—or even by the pathologies of individual leaders—the present conflict has taken on a distinctly transactional character under Donald Trump: war as the deal. Many have compared him to Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, who crashes his car and dies so his son Biff can receive $20,000 in insurance.
The premise is simple. Apply sufficient pressure and alignment will follow; once alignment is secured, outcomes can be managed. It is, in effect, bombing conducted as part of a corporate deal.
Trump’s has been consistent in one respect: he treats geopolitics as extended real estate. It is in this light that he imagines Gaza—not as a political tragedy, but as a site for reconstruction, a Mediterranean Riviera. He has found a natural ally in Israel, to which Yahweh apparently promised the Greater Israel project. The language of policy elides into the language of property. And god wields a bulldozer the size of Earth.
In this framework, policies are measured in terms of cost and return. Conflicts become arenas in which advantage can be extracted. The size of the deal justifies everything. The method reflects a worldview articulated in Trump’s autobiography, The Art of the Deal: “I like thinking big. If you’re going to be thinking anything, you might as well think big.” In business, scale can be an asset. In war, it can become a liability. Total war is total destruction.
The stated objectives of the war were clear enough: to roll back Iran’s strategic capabilities, to stabilise the region and, more vaguely, to induce political change within Iran. Yet, outcomes have diverged sharply from these aims. Iran has not collapsed. It continues to act—launching missiles and sustaining pressure across multiple fronts. The region is not stabilised; it is more volatile. The prospect of regime change remains distant. And the Strait of Hormuz is closed to the US.
Trump also wagered that decisive action would consolidate a coalition. Instead, the opposite has occurred. European allies have kept their distance. Major powers such as China have declined direct intervention. India has maintained strategic neutrality. This is not alignment. It is drift.
The expectation that shared interests in the deal would translate into coordinated action has not been borne out either. It turns out there are no shared interests. States have behaved not as firms responding to the deal, but as political entities balancing domestic pressures, reputational risks and long‑term calculations. The result is a thinning of support rather than its consolidation.
“In war,” Napoleon said, “the moral is to the physical as three is to one.” By physical he meant the measurable elements of power—troops, weapons, matériel. By moral he referred to the less tangible forces—morale, legitimacy, belief, cohesion and the willingness to endure. Napoleon would know. His march on distant Russia in 1812 was a disaster; he began the campaign with some 600,000 soldiers and, after his defeat, came back with 20,000. The “moral” had won.
We may think wars are willed by great men; in reality, they emerge from countless decisions and forces beyond any single actor’s command, as Leo Tolstoy suggests in War and Peace, a novel on the subject of Napoleon’s march on Moscow. The belief that a conflict can be shaped and concluded according to intention is, for Tolstoy, an illusion.
History moves through turns, twists and accumulations, not commands independent of individual will. War introduces variables that cannot be priced: public opinion, historical memory, ideological commitment. These forces do not align neatly with material interests.
The war has also imposed reputational costs. Across large parts of the world, the US is no longer seen as the leader of the free world—if it ever was.
This war, like most wars, has profited the military–industrial complex—and, more interestingly, individuals as well. Figures such as Trump’s son‑in‑law Jared Kushner—whose firm reportedly secured a $2-billion investment from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund—illustrate how relationships cultivated in power can extend into the realm of capital and profiteering. In a system that treats geopolitics transactionally, the boundary between public policy and private advantage begins to blur.
Wars are not the absence of reason. They are often the product of a narrowed reason—one that privileges immediate leverage over long‑term consequence. A transactional approach assumes that what can be negotiated can also be controlled. Experience suggests otherwise: once set in motion, war escapes the designs of those who initiate it.
This is what great failure looks like in contemporary geopolitics. Not defeat in the conventional sense, but drift. Not the collapse of the enemy, but the erosion of clarity about who the enemy is. Not victory, but the inability to convert power into a stable order.
Under Trump, foreign policy assumes that pressure will produce alignment, and that alignment will produce resolution. War has tested that assumption—and found it wanting. The deal is no deal. And so, Willy Loman must die again.
C P Surendran | Author whose latest volume of poetry is Window with a Train Attached
(Views are personal)
(cpsurendran@gmail.com)