Historical turning points: recognizing them is tricky, Iran War version

Turning points in history are tricky to recognize. And also tricky for historians to describe even when they all assume they were historical turning points.

The current US-Israel War on Iran has certainly become Trump’s biggest headache of the moment – although there are millions of pages of Epstein files yet to be released.

In scale, of course, the current conflict does not match the Vietnam war, which went on for years, led to the deaths of 58,220 US soldiers, and is often perceived as the totemic and unmatchable example of US hubris. By comparison with the Vietnam odyssey, Iran feels more like a day trip.

But in terms of consequence, it is still possible that the “excursion” will prove to be the bigger geopolitical turning point for the unrivalled superpower, the moment when the US will have to concede it mishandled a war not just because it had no convincing battle plan, but also no grand strategy to match how the contemporary world works. In an interconnected world, Trump believes progress is achieved through conflict, not cooperation. [my emphasis] (1)

In the thirty years or so after 1989, when the Warsaw Pact began to break apart quicky, the US was the single “hyperpower” in the world. This is also called the “unipolar moment.” But sometime around the start of the Trump 1.0 government, China had become powerful enough economically and militarily strong enough that it was a real “peer competitor” to the US, now sharing that status with Purin’s Russia, which is economically weaker than China but still has a nuclear military force on a level with those of the US.

The NATO alliance had been the single largest geopolitical “power multiplier” of the United States. But in Trump 2.0, the US has been taking a Javier-Milei-style chainsaw to US alliances and devastated the State Department, leaving us now in a situation where the Iran War is seriously damaging the entire world economy and the US diplomacy around that war hardly even deserves to be called diplomacy.

I don’t quote Fareed Zakaria very frequently, because his commentary is too often vague and superficial. But in this recent commentary, he makes a decent observation about the contrast between the first Trump regime (2017-2021) and the current one:

[T]his time, [Trump] has surrounded himself with people whose chief qualification is fealty. The less distinguished the resume, the better. Such people owe everything to him. Process has given way to impulse, procedure to instinct, government to gut. But the starkest difference between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0 is not policy. It is enrichment [i.e., massive corruption], its scale, its brazenness, its open contempt for restraint. (2)

Elections matter in democracies. And a near-majority of voters in 2024 selected the guy who David Cay Johnston consistently calls “the third-generation head of a four-generation white-collar crime family” to serve as President again.

And this really has pushed both allies and adversaries to start readjusting urgently to a world in which the US cannot be counted on as a reliable partner on geopolitical commitments and has to a large extent abandoned what we normally describe as diplomacy in managing foreign affairs.

The various foreign policy establishments are trying hard to reorient themselves in the new environment, as Wintour observes:

For the US foreign policy establishment, exemplified by the Council on Foreign Relations, the missteps in Iran are the final confirmation that Trump’s highly personalised, instinctive system of predatory diplomacy creates only more disorder.

Last week, the CFR launched a fundamental review of US strategy post-Trump. Its convener, Rebecca Lissner, has already warned the war “has delivered a potentially fatal blow to a US-led international order that was already on life support”. Allies are hedging, middle powers are forming their own coalitions, and regions once firmly in Washington’s orbit are shifting toward new power centres, she said. The former state department official Mira Rapp-Hooper was more brutal at Chatham House, describing it as superpower suicide. [my emphasis]

Notes:

Wintour, Patrick (2026): Could Trump’s Iran ‘excursion’ be a bigger global turning point than Vietnam? Guardian 05/31/2026. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2026/may/31/donald-trump-iran-excursion-vietnam-war> (Accessed: 2026-31-05).

(2) Trump's Iran, China & US actions have set 3 new stages-Fareed's Take roundup. CNN YouTube channel 05/31/2026. <https://youtu.be/qLhJuLAnY4M?si=7J1j7rh0noez_MXE> (Accessed: 2026-31-05).