A sign that Trump is flailing with his war with Iran can be seen in his wildly shifting positions in order to avoid conceding that things are not going well. After declaring that the US had won the war within the first few hours, and then claiming that it would last at most a month or five weeks or six weeks (it kept changing), he now says that we should compare it with the Vietnam war that lasted for years so that critics were too quick in suggesting that the US was again stuck in an unwinnable war. The idea that a suitable measure should be in years rather than weeks was hardly comforting, So he occasionally reprises the idea that the war is in fact over or that it is not a war at all.

Then there are his abruptly shifting tactical moves. It is clear that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is a big problem, not just for him, but for the global economy and that Iran is calling the shots on it. So what does he do? He first declares that the Strait is in fact open, then he orders Iran to open it, then he declares that the US is blockading it, as if that makes things any better. Then just on Sunday, he grandly declared Project Freedom in which US warships would provide safe passage to ships to pass through the Strait and on Monday, he claimed success in that US warships had escorted two ships out. But according to the International Maritime Organization there are roughly 2,000 ships with about 20,000 crew that are stranded in the Persian Gulf as of April 21, and it was obvious to knowledgeable observers that there was no way that US warships could provide escorts for that many. So on Tuesday, Project Freedom was summarily ditched, with Trump going back to that old standby that has not worked before, of threatening indiscriminate bombing of Iran (obvious war crimes) unless they allow free passage.

Julian Borger sums up Trump’s wildly careening behavior.

Another day, another hairpin turn in the world of Donald Trump’s foreign policy.

The weekend was all about war, and Trump insisting Iran had not yet “paid a big enough price”. Tuesday was Project Freedom, styled as a grand “humanitarian gesture” to allow trapped ships and their crews to escape the Gulf, but also aimed at weakening Iran’s chokehold on the strait of Hormuz.

By the early hours of Wednesday we were back to peace. The president announced: “Great Progress has been made toward a Complete and Final Agreement” so Project Freedom would be paused to give negotiations a chance.

The three approaches on three consecutive days do have something in common. They are all attempts to wrestle with the same set of hard facts: the regime in Iran is unlikely to collapse or surrender the right to enrich uranium no matter how many bombs are dropped on it, Tehran has shown its capacity to close the strait of Hormuz, and a total blockade of the Gulf hurts the US economy as well as Iran.

Together these hard facts make up the sides of a steel box in which the Trump administration, largely through its own actions, finds itself trapped. The repeated policy changes in recent days show him flailing around inside this trap, pinging off the walls and looking for an exit other than humiliation or a forever war.

It remains too early to say whether Trump has now found a way out. His accompanying threat of bombardment “at a much higher level and intensity” if Iran does not accept the initial terms betrays his nervousness it will not work.

During the later stages of the Vietnam war, when it had become apparent that the US was stuck in an unwinnable war with no way of getting out that did not look like a defeat, the blame game for the fiasco began and popular targets were those critics at home in the media, political world, and the general public who were demanding an end to the conflict. They were accused of lowering US morale and thus ‘aiding the enemy’.

We seem to have reached that stage with the current war with Iran. The bellicose secretary of defense Pete Hegseth articulated this line during questioning in senate hearings

“The negative nature in which you characterized the incredible and historic effort in Iran is part of the reason, senator, why the American people view it the way they do. It’s why I looked at the press corps at the Pentagon and called them pharisees in the press. It’s because they look for every problem that exists,” Hegseth said, adding: “Its defeatist Democrats like you that cloud the minds of the American people and would otherwise fully support preventing Iran from having a nuclear weapon,” Hegseth said.

He then repeated his complaints.

Hegseth reprised criticisms he had made of Democrats and “some” Republicans at Wednesday’s hearing, when he had called critics of the war effort “reckless, feckless and defeatist”.

“As I said yesterday, and I’ll say it again today, the biggest adversary we face at this point are the reckless naysayers and defeatist words of congressional Democrats and some Republicans,” he said.

He dismissed critics as “defeatists from the cheap seats who two months in, seek to undermine the incredible efforts that have been undertaken and the historic nature of taking on a 47-year threat with the courage no other President has had, to great success and great opportunity for preventing Iran from having a nuclear weapon”.

So we seem to be approaching the final stage whenever the US launches a war of choice in a distant land, and that is laying the groundwork for the debate to come on “Who lost Iran?”