-
Click here to listen to this article - Share via
See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search. Set us as preferred
The war with Iran that never really ended is back on. Like everybody else, including the Trump administration and the Iranian regime, I have no idea how it will end. But it eventually will, and how it will be remembered will matter enormously.
Politics is about many things, but whether you call it “spin,” “framing” or “narrative competition,” storytelling is never far from the heart of it. As the philosopher Richard Rorty observed, “Competition for political leadership is in part a competition between differing stories about a nation’s self-identity, and between differing symbols of its greatness.”
Sometimes the story itself is the point, like the recent clashes over the American founding — 1619 vs. 1776 — and sometimes the story is a means to some other political end, like winning an election or passing controversial legislation. If people believe the spin that elections are routinely stolen thanks to votes by illegal immigrants, then passing the SAVE Act makes sense. If they don’t believe that story — perhaps because it’s not true — but do believe that the bill is another chapter in the story of President Trump’s goal of undermining confidence in elections, then passing it doesn’t make sense.
Very often the story is more lastingly important than the facts.
Take the New Deal. Save for the Founding and the Civil War, I’m hard-pressed to think of a story that shaped American politics more. The modern Democratic Party was defined by it. And in many ways, so was the GOP.
For decades, the reigning view was that President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was a huge success. To deny this was — and often still is — dismissed as nuttery. According to legend, the New Deal unified the country, defeated the Great Depression and proved that politicians and experts could plan the economy for the benefit of all Americans. Hence the unceasing progressive quest for a “new New Deal.”
This story has facts in its favor. It also has facts heavily weighted against it. The economy didn’t really recover until well after the New Deal was over. The 1930s was no period of “we’re all in together” unity. Instead it was a time of significant domestic upheaval: the Harlem Riots and labor unrest — “the Uprising of 1934” alone was one the largest industrial strikes in American history — and hundreds of unemployment protests.
Nor was the New Deal a coherent, uniformly successful plan. FDR made stuff up as he went.
“To look upon these programs as the result of a unified plan,” wrote Raymond Moley, FDR’s right-hand man during much of the New Deal, “was to believe that the accumulation of stuffed snakes, baseball pictures, school flags, old tennis shoes, carpenter’s tools, geometry books, and chemistry sets in a boy’s bedroom could have been put there by an interior decorator.”
In 1940, when Alvin Hansen, an economic advisor to FDR, was asked if the principle of the New Deal was “economically sound,” Hansen replied, “I really do not know what the basic principle of the New Deal is.”
My aim isn’t to relitigate a very lost cause, but simply to note that the triumphant narrative of the New Deal swamped all others, and shaped domestic politics and policy for generations.
Which brings me, finally, to the war. I think it’s obvious that once Trump realized his little war in Iran wasn’t going to repeat the “success” of his little war in Venezuela, he had no idea or plan for what to do next. He’s been improvising ever since. His strategy looks more like the boy’s messy bedroom Moley described than a successful work of interior design.
But what if the war ends successfully? A lot of the president’s critics assume that’s impossible. They shouldn’t. It’s true that Trump misread the Iranians, but that doesn’t mean the Iranians aren’t misreading Trump. Indeed, hostilities resumed last week precisely because the Iranians got greedy, launching fresh attacks in the Strait of Hormuz.
The Iranian regime could still fall. Europe, fed up with the chaos and disruption, could get over its well-earned frustration with Trump and join the fray, helping to secure the strait. I’m not saying this is likely, just that it is quite possible.
What then? You can be sure people will have very different stories to tell about this war. Many opponents of “forever wars,” on the left and right, will still pronounce it a failure no matter what. Some supporters will argue that Trump merely lucked out. Many others will claim this was the “chess master’s” plan all along.
Some story will prevail, and that story — accurate or not — will shape American foreign policy for years to come.
Insights
L.A. Times Insights delivers AI-generated analysis on Voices content to offer all points of view. Insights does not appear on any news articles.
Viewpoint
Perspectives
The following AI-generated content is powered by Perplexity. The Los Angeles Times editorial staff does not create or edit the content.
Ideas expressed in the piece
- The article argues that politics is fundamentally a struggle over stories, contending that competing narratives about national identity and greatness often matter more than empirical facts in shaping public life and policy.
- It uses the New Deal as a central example, suggesting that the dominant story of Franklin Roosevelt’s programs as a unified, heroic rescue of the country long overshadowed evidence of economic underperformance, social unrest, and policy incoherence, thereby defining both Democratic and Republican politics for generations.
- The column contends that the war with Iran has been managed in a similarly improvised fashion, portraying Trump’s approach as ad hoc and chaotic, more akin to a boy’s disordered bedroom than to a coherent grand strategy.
- At the same time, the piece suggests that even a war launched in confusion could be remembered as a success if events break favorably—for instance, if Iranian miscalculations, regime weakness, or European intervention lead to a relatively stable outcome in the Strait of Hormuz and the wider region.
- The article argues that once the shooting stops, diverse narratives will compete: opponents of “forever wars” will likely insist the conflict was a failure, some supporters will claim Trump stumbled into victory, and others will retroactively credit a masterful design—yet whichever story prevails will heavily influence American foreign policy for years.
Different views on the topic
- In contrast to the article’s openness to the idea of a “successful” ending, some foreign-policy analyses already characterize the conflict as a strategic and humanitarian failure, pointing to thousands of deaths, strikes on civilian infrastructure, and a global energy shock sparked by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz[1][2][5].
- While the column portrays Trump as improvising, other reporting describes the opening phase as part of a deliberate, highly planned campaign—Operation Epic Fury—designed to decapitate Iran’s leadership, cripple its missile and nuclear capabilities, and ensure it cannot obtain nuclear weapons, suggesting a more structured strategy than the article allows[4].
- Meanwhile, timelines and explainers from major outlets emphasize how the war has reshaped the Middle East and sent shockwaves through the global economy, framing the conflict primarily in terms of its material consequences and implying that those structural changes, rather than postwar storytelling, will drive future U.S. policy[1][3].
- At the same time, some political analysis underscores that Trump now faces a narrow set of bad choices, arguing that the military campaign has yielded limited durable gains and has repeatedly forced Washington into reactive moves, reinforcing a view of the war as futile rather than as a potential chapter in a triumphant narrative[6].
- Humanitarian and investigative reporting highlights contested incidents such as the strike on a girls’ school in southern Iran that killed large numbers of children, fueling legal and ethical debates about the conduct of the war and complicating efforts to craft a celebratory story about American power and precision[5].
- In addition, diplomatic coverage stresses the role of negotiated agreements and formal memoranda of understanding—especially steps to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and codify an end to hostilities—as the key forces that will shape long-term policy, suggesting that institutional commitments and international constraints may ultimately matter more than whichever political narrative emerges victorious[1][3][4].
More From the Los Angeles Times
Podcasts
Senator Allen has put his money on fire mitigation and bringing stakeholders together in communities up and down the state to reduce their risk and stay insured. In this episode, Host Kate Cagle speaks with Allen about his plans.
The Hillside Strangler murders terrorized Los Angeles in the late 1970s. The killers were a pair of sadistic cousins. One confessed. The other was set to stand trial—until L.A. prosecutors flinched.
Modern LA earned its first smoggy nickname 450 years ago, as the “bay of smokes.” At the La Brea tar pits, we take a short walk through a long history with curator Regan Dunn, who explains how and why the first Angelenos would have set fires that filled the broad bowl of LA and foretold the curse of smog.
