Foreign Policy Magazine: The US Should Lose to Iran

Orange man is sooooo bad that Foreign Policy Magazine’s columnist and (of course) Columbia University Professor Howard French argues that America should lose the war to Iran. 

No, I am not kidding. 

At this point I’m convinced they’d root for Hitler over him.

— Mr Le’Meme (@MrLeMemeLeGreat) March 24, 2026

It’s not that French is arguing that Iran is the good guy. He concedes that they are not. It’s just that America under Trump is so, so horribly bad that his winning the war is unthinkable. 

Better that a regime that murders its citizens by the gross, rapes and mutilates young women for not wearing a hijab, and that executes people for being gay survive than have Donald Trump be the author of its demise. 

The current situation in the United States, like that of the United States in the world, is by no means normal. This should summon the American public and world opinion to take what may seem to be an unusual, even uncomfortable, position: Under the disturbing present circumstances, one should simply not wish for a U.S. victory in the country’s 3-week-old war against Iran.

French insists, as one must do in a respectable magazine, that he doesn’t want US soldiers to lose their lives or anything like that. But, if it means that Trump loses the war, so be it, because Trump must be stopped at all costs, because he is Orange Man. 

The far bigger problem that underpins all of these realities is that the United States is governed by a malignant narcissist whose megalomaniacal tendencies have bloomed alarmingly before the world’s eyes during his second term in office. Scarcely a day goes by without more stark evidence of this fact, from his vulgar and grandiose remaking of the White House (including a new ballroom) to designs to place his likeness on U.S. currency to his power-drunken statements about “taking Cuba” and being able to do whatever he wants with a sovereign country—all while still obviously unchastened by his government’s deepening imbroglio in Iran.

It is precisely because the U.S. body politic has found no way of reining in Trump and imposing reasonable limits on his power that we must hope that the current conflict with Iran can finally do so. In eras past, when dangerously toxic characters have imposed their grip on the country’s governance, Congress, the courts, and U.S. civil society have generated a kind of immune response, restoring the nation to a semblance of health. Think of President Richard Nixon and Watergate. Think of the moment when, in 1954, Joseph N. Welch, the chief counsel for the U.S. Army, upbraided fascism-inclined Sen. Joseph McCarthy, famously challenging his reckless red-baiting during a hearing, saying: “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

The BALLROOM! We must lose to Iran because Trump is grandiose! He actually brought up the ballroom to explain why the largest state sponsor of terrorism should win this war. 

It is precisely because the U.S. body politic has found no way of reining in Trump that we must hope that the current conflict with Iran can finally do so, argues columnist @hofrench. https://t.co/S0bKXbP2aJ

— Foreign Policy (@ForeignPolicy) March 24, 2026

Sure, Iran may have been pursuing nuclear weapons and was building thousands of missiles that could hit any country within several thousand miles, and of course, just murdered tens of thousands of its own citizens, but Trump is a narcissist who is building a BALLROOM! 

Don’t you SEE?! A BALLROOM!

Mr. Columbia Professor here has a solution to everything: wish for peace! If only we had kept funding Iran with pallets of cash they would have played nice, because that is what The Narrative™ says!

The way to end this war is not with bombs but with an easing of tensions and eventual guarantees of security for all in the Middle East. That includes Iran. The world was closer to such an outcome under the arrangements negotiated by the Obama administration to subject Iran’s nuclear program to strict controls. Trump started a war even though some of his own intelligence reports acknowledged there was no imminent threat. Finding a way back to dialogue and mutual reassurances will be incredibly difficult, but that is the only way forward.38

Can you imagine what this idiot would have been writing about Churchill in 1939? He would be sitting across from Tucker Carlson, explaining how Hitler wasn’t really that bad, and that the British should have appeased Hitler again with Poland. Hitler and Stalin will reestablish peace, right?

Trump is the organizing principle around whom everything the left says and thinks is based. Trump is evil, so everything and everyone he opposes is the good guy. 

It’s a variation on the “Israel’s fault” explanations we get from the pro-Islamists (also Tucker Carlson!). Israel killed Charlie Kirk! Israel sends saboteurs to the UAE! Israel runs the world! Jewish space lasers!

I suppose you should expect a Columbia professor to believe this stuff—he just wrote a book about pan-Africanism and “global blackness,” whatever that is, celebrating the poorest and most backward continent on Earth, and the home of so many genocides that one loses count (notice how few people even take notice anymore, they are so common?), but Foreign Policy has been the Voice of the Establishment for over 50 years. 

This is where the Establishment is now.

THE BALLROOM! America must lose because of the BALLROOM!

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