American University of Beirut, Distinguished Public Policy Fellow and non-resident Senior Fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC.
This week, Iran’s response to the US-Israeli attacks led to one of the most dramatic political turnarounds in modern American history. Trump’s failed war on its own, however, is not why the Democrats pounded the Republicans and now control the Senate and House of Representatives for the next two years. Rather, it reflected and amplified many dynamics in American society that caused discontented, angry and fearful citizens to repudiate Trump’s Republicans and support Democrats.
The US president wrongly believed that his war on Iran would pummel the country into submission and turn it into a vassal state of the US and Israel. Iran survived, attacked the US, Israel and Arab lands, and brought the painful economic costs of war into every American home. It also humiliated Washington by revealing that America’s military prowess, like Trump’s behaviour and electoral promises, is erratic at best, and ineffective at worst.
The Iran war also sparked a cascade of consequences that hurt every American and, in some areas, exposed how national values such as democracy, equality and the rule of law, along with claims of global dominance, could prove illusory. Iran’s move with the greatest impact on ordinary Americans was restricting shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, driving up the prices Americans paid for groceries, gasoline, diesel, travel, most imports and other everyday necessities. Some 90 percent of voters said the cost of living was a major or crucial factor in how they would vote.
This was compounded by the inability of the US and Israel to force Iran to surrender, even after months of brutal attacks on political leaders, infrastructure, civilian and economic sites, and military installations. Instead, Iran’s counterattacks left US bases in the Arabian Peninsula and Jordan incapacitated or evacuated, and caused huge damage to Arab energy and transport systems, disrupting global energy flows and driving up prices. The balance of the war was clear after the first few weeks: the pain the US and Israel inflicted on Iran would be matched by pain in every household in the US and other countries that assisted in the attack on Iran.
Iran simultaneously exposed critical flaws in American militarism, leaving ordinary Americans confused, frustrated and often humiliated in different ways:
a) Trump ignored Americans’ repeatedly expressed opposition to attacking Iran, along with the constitutional requirement for congressional authorisation of war. CBS exit polls confirmed that voters opposed the war for both its useless militarism and its impact on the economy. The Trump administration’s disdain for both the law and ordinary Americans’ views angered many voters who took their constitutional rights more seriously than Trump did. Many voters rejected Republicans because Trump had insincerely promised in 2024 that he would end useless foreign wars.
b) More narrowly, Trump attacked Iran without clear, consistent or credible strategic goals; his main stated reason for attacking was to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, a prospect Israeli officials repeatedly told him was imminent, even though existing US and international inspections and intelligence assessments had repeatedly found no evidence of this.
c) When it dawned on Americans that Trump went to war mainly because Israel pushed him to do so, they reacted negatively in two ways. They felt humiliated that their country’s immense military power was unable to achieve its stated goals; they also felt angry and demeaned that a small, dependent, foreign country like Israel, with its extensive and sophisticated lobbying power in the US, could initiate this calamity that hurt American households and damaged US standing and credibility abroad.
Behind the anger, vulnerability and helplessness of most Americans who voted Democratic this week were deeper grievances that predated the Iran war. These included citizens’ fury at outrageous corruption in Washington; the privileged oligarchs, political donors, bankers and corporations that saw the US as their personal profit centre more than anything else; military and high-tech sectors that were out of control and threatened innocent lives; over-aggressive anti-immigration policing; and corporate media that seemed more interested in serving all of the above, and Israel, than in conveying truth and facts to the American people.
The election brought together voters’ household economic concerns with questions of national morality and foreign policy. Equally noteworthy, the day after the vote, Vice President JD Vance wrote on social media: “The reason we lost is the war.” He identified four demands among voters who had turned away from the Republicans: “End the war”, “Focus on the cost of living and inflation”, “Put America First” and “Change our relationship to Israel”.
An unprecedented aspect of this election and Iran’s policies has been the centrality of the US-Israeli genocide in Palestine to many progressive Democrats’ campaigns and to Iran’s approach to war and peace. Vance’s explicit mention of Israel was startling enough in a political system that, for nearly a century, has largely shaped its West Asia policies according to Israeli demands. Equally striking was President Trump’s last-minute promise, on election day, to end the nearly $4bn in US military aid to Israel. It was another insincere Trump con job meant to deceive voters, because the money would not stop flowing but would simply be channelled differently. It also emphasised the huge impact that conditions in Israel-Palestine and US complicity in the genocide had on voters.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
