In a nationwide address on Wednesday night, President Trump declared that the United States has achieved “swift, decisive, overwhelming victories” over Iran in a span of merely four weeks.

The President announced that Iran’s navy has been dismantled, its air force left in tatters, its missile and drone arsenals obliterated, and its ability to rebuild its weaponry has been crushed. Furthermore, he stated that the leadership of the regime has been effectively neutralized.

Emphasizing America’s triumphs, Trump reiterated, “Our enemies are losing and America is winning.”

He assured the public that within just 32 days, the U.S. had established “total military dominance,” and the operation was “nearing completion.” He mentioned that Iran’s enriched uranium, crucial for nuclear bomb production, is now buried under rubble. The President projected that a few more weeks of airstrikes would suffice to revert Iran’s capabilities to “the stone ages.”

However, recent developments show a different reality. Iran targeted a desalination plant in Kuwait, which is critical for 90% of the country’s water supply. Additionally, an Iranian attack caused the shutdown of Abu Dhabi’s largest natural gas processing facility. Iranian cluster munitions also hit Haifa, Israel’s key seaport.

Tehran has tightened its control over the Strait of Hormuz. The ongoing conflict has triggered a global shock in oil and gas markets, already impacting much of Asia with soaring energy prices and shortages. These disruptions are now rapidly affecting Europe, leading to widespread economic difficulties and challenges.

If this is Trump’s idea of victory, it would be interesting to learn what he would regard as a defeat. Moreover it’s a strange form of victory in which, so far, all the winners are the bad guys – while the losers are mainly America’s erstwhile allies.

If, before April is out, he declares victory and walks away with anything like the current state of play prevailing, then Trump’s War on Iran will prove to be catastrophic – above all for those who have hitherto regarded themselves as America’s friends.

If this is Trump’s idea of victory, it would be interesting to learn what he would regard as a defeat, writes Andrew Neil

A Norwegian oil tanker attacked in the Strait of Hormuz in 2019, said to have been attacked in the waters of the Gulf of Oman

Mohammad Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s parliament, who now wants to impose tolls on ships using the waterway

The list of winners, to date, is small and tight: the Iranian regime and its major allies in the axis of autocracy, Russia and China. The list of losers is long and growing: the global economy; the Gulf States; energy-importing democracies from the Far East to Europe, including Britain; and that bulwark of democracy, the Atlantic Alliance.

For all his bluster and bravado, Trump is already in retreat. When the first attacks on Iran were launched on February 28, the White House explicitly listed regime change as one of the war aims. No longer. All the signs coming out of Washington indicate that Trump is prepared to end hostilities with the regime in Tehran still intact.

It doesn’t seem to have dawned on the White House that, no matter how bruised, bloodied and battered, just to have survived is effectively a victory for the tyrants of Tehran. They live to fight another day – and with a lethal weapon they didn’t have when the war started: the Strait of Hormuz.

This gives them a grip on the world’s most important energy choke point. They’ve already closed it to all but Iran’s closest allies (such as China), although a French container ship was allowed to pass through yesterday, some say because of President Macron’s criticism of Trump.

Whatever the case, that’s far from the end of the matter. The Iranian parliament, led by Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, is currently passing legislation to allow Iran to charge tolls for all ships using the Strait, much as Egypt charges for ships passing through the Suez Canal.

Of course there’s no legal basis for doing this. Unlike the Suez Canal, which runs through Egypt’s sovereign territory, the Strait is an international waterway between two sovereign territories (Iran and Oman). But Tehran is not minded to adhere to the finer points of international law, as touted by the likes of Keir Starmer and his attorney general, Richard Hermer.

Iran will have its tolls – and it will be much more than a fresh source of revenue to finance post-war rearmament. It will use its grip on the Strait to bar ships of countries the regime regards as ‘unfriendly’. It will bargain with Europe for access to the Gulf in return for Europe dropping economic sanctions against it.

It will wield its control of what is an essential economic lifeline for the Gulf States, through which most of their exports flow (not just oil and gas but petrochemicals and fertilisers), to give it leverage over these states to do Tehran’s bidding.

This has all the makings of a geopolitical disaster. Yet Trump is washing his hands of the matter. It is thanks to Trump’s War that Iran has seized the Strait. But he says it’s up to others to take it back. It is almost as though he regards it as just punishment for those US allies in Europe and Asia who refused to join him in attacking Iran.

It is dawning on the Iranian regime that control of the Strait is an even more powerful global weapon than its ability to develop nuclear weapons. Yet even here Trump is in retreat. Denying Iran the Bomb was also one of his original war aims. That’s being junked, too. Trump now claims the enriched uranium Iran needs to make nuclear bombs remains buried deep under rubble from America’s bombing of its nuclear facilities last June. He says US satellites are all over it and at the first sign of Iran trying to retrieve it, US missiles will be on their way.

Now if this were true it rather undermines the case for going to war in the first place. After all, Trump claimed that it was the imminent prospect of an Iranian ‘nuke’ that made air strikes imperative. But if America already had a watchful, lethal eye on Iran’s nuclear resources, then why bother to attack?

Of course, it’s unlikely to be true – and even if it were it is hardly a foolproof scheme to deny Iran the Bomb. Over the years Tehran has been tenacious and inventive in keeping its nuclear ambitions alive, as it has in rebuilding its missile and drone inventories after they’ve supposedly been ‘obliterated’.

We now face the prospect of Iran emerging from Trump’s War with its power enhanced, an unthinkable outcome at the start of this benighted escapade only five weeks ago. Not just with its nuclear ambitions still alive but with an economic weapon of global reach in the shape of the Strait of Hormuz. I doubt Israel saw this as the ending when it eagerly joined in the American onslaught.

You can see why the Gulf States, the global economy and the democracies of Europe and Asia all look like being the losers in Trump’s War. But the list of victims doesn’t stop there: Nato might be the biggest loser of all.

Trump has never had much time for Nato. Now he’s so angry the Nato allies wouldn’t join him in his Iran venture – even though they never wanted it, were never consulted in advance and weren’t asked to participate anyway – that he threatened this week to pull America out of Nato, which would be devastating for the Atlantic Alliance.

The President, of course, doesn’t have the power to do that on his own. It would take a Senate vote, which Trump would almost certainly lose, even with its Republican majority. But he can act and deploy US forces in multiple ways that effectively remove America from Nato operations. It would be a calumny of the foulest order. But with Trump you can’t rule it out.

Now you will understand why there are wry smiles emanating from Moscow and Beijing. Not only have they watched their Iranian allies survive all America and Israel have had to throw at them, they can enjoy the spectacle of Trump ripping apart the greatest alliance for democracy the world has ever seen. Christmas really has come very early this year for our totalitarian adversaries.

Of course, as is always the case with Trump, we don’t know what he’ll do in the few weeks he says are left of the war. But a source very close to him told me this week that the truth is ‘he doesn’t know what to do’ – that neither slinking away under cover of claiming bogus victory nor doubling down with land incursions (‘boots on the ground’) were appealing.

A blaze in Haifa after Israel’s Fire and Rescue Service said that an industrial building and a fuel tanker at Israel’s Oil Refineries were hit by debris from an intercepted Iranian missile

The pretence of retreat-after-winning would quickly unravel when people saw the Iranian regime bloodied but unbowed, said my source, flexing its muscles against US allies. But the deployment of ground troops to take Iran’s Kharg Island oil port or to seize Iran’s enriched uranium risked being blunders for the ages, given how fraught with danger they’d be. Both could haunt him all the way to November’s mid-term US elections.

Truth to tell, nobody knows what Trump will do next. Not even Trump, probably. But rather than fruitless second guessing, the Nato allies need to concentrate on the formidable task of defending our democracies in a brave new world without America at our back.

Some European countries already get this – Germany, Poland, the Baltic States, the Scandinavians. They are rearming at pace. But not socialist Spain – and not Keir Starmer’s Britain.

The failure of our Labour Government to take rearmament seriously is becoming the national scandal of our time. Almost a year after it was handed a sensible strategic defence review, which it accepted in its entirety, it still hasn’t come up with a blueprint to finance it.

Instead the Government struggles to hit a woefully inadequate 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence, with ministers forced to fiddle the figures to reach even that, while so many of our European allies leave us in the dust. For decades after the Second World War, we spent more on defence as a share of GDP than any other Nato ally bar America. It meant we still mattered in the world.

But in recent years we’ve slumped from second to 12th, with every prospect of slipping further. No wonder our allies now regard us as a laughing stock when it comes to military might.

Yes, Labour inherited a terrible Tory record on defence spending. But, as former Labour defence secretary John Hutton told me this week, all the more reason to be making up for lost ground now, rather than using it as an excuse for inaction.

It is instructive to remind ourselves that, in shameful contradistinction to Starmer’s failure to raise defence spending, even prime minister Neville Chamberlain, as he tried and failed to appease Nazi Germany in the late 1930s, saw the need to ramp up rearmament.

Chamberlain has gone down in history as the architect of appeasement. But he grew defence spending from roughly 3 per cent of GDP in the mid-1930s to over 7 per cent by 1938, a year from war, even as he tried to negotiate with Adolf Hitler. Contrast that with Starmer’s pathetic attempts to reach 2.5 per cent as the world becomes more dangerous by the week.

We’ve had enough grandstanding on the global stage from our Prime Minister. He needs to concentrate on putting our own backyard in order, as circumstances dramatically change. We have no sway over Trump – the King’s state visit notwithstanding – and should stop pretending we have.

Trump will do whatever best suits his own narrow self-interest and we will have to deal with the consequences of Trump’s War.

No doubt the American people will have their revenge come the November elections. But that will be scant consolation for those of us in the rest of the world having to live with the fallout from his folly.

We would be best served by getting ourselves into shape for the rocky road ahead. If only we had a Government in any way commensurate to that immense task.