Despite spending nearly $1 trillion on its military in 2025, the United States has failed to achieve its stated objectives in the war against Iran, which spent just $7.4 billion on defense last year – roughly 130 times less than Washington – and CNN host Fareed Zakaria offered a novel theory on Monday for why that may be the case.
“President Donald Trump decided to play a game of ‘chicken’ with Iran – think of two drivers racing straight at each other. In these situations, if the stakes for one side are existential and for the other much lower, the side with the higher stakes usually prevails,” Zakaria wrote in an op-ed published recently in The Washington Post.
“For the Iranian regime, if it loses, there is a good chance it ends up toppled and slaughtered. For Trump, it would be a bad weekend at Mar-a-Lago. It’s easy to see why the Iranians would be more willing to lock their steering wheel in that game of chicken.”
With Trump having lobbed genocidal threats against Iran, coupled with past examples of U.S. interventionism such as with Libya in 2011 – which ultimately led to the state’s total collapse, resulting in widespread killings, torture and detentions that persist today – the conflict has, indeed, been viewed as existential by Iranian leadership.
In the absence of having achieved its stated military objectives, the Trump administration has been aggressively pushing to secure a deal with Tehran to end the conflict. In doing so, however, Zakaria warned that Trump also risked handing Iran exactly what it’s been pursuing for nearly five decades.
“At this point, it is clear that Trump wants a deal,” Zakaria wrote. “But in making it, he might end up giving the Islamic Republic what it has been seeking for 47 years: unqualified acceptance even from the most hard-line elements of the U.S. For Tehran, that’s a prize worth many concessions.”
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