Every war eventually sends its bill somewhere. Sometimes it arrives in the capitals of the defeated; sometimes it is posted quietly, months later, to the voters of the victor. In the United States this October, the bill for the war on Iran has landed on the kitchen table, in the price of a gallon of petrol, and the man whose name is on it is watching his numbers sink like stones.
Thirty-one percent
A Reuters/Ipsos poll published on Monday, as Al Jazeera reported, shows most Americans unhappy with Donald Trump’s performance — and, more ominously for his party, more of them saying they intend to vote for Democrats when the midterm elections are held on November 3. The scale of the fall is historic: Reuters reported that just 31 percent of Americans now approve of the president’s work, down a percentage point from two weeks earlier and the lowest reading of either of his terms in the four-day survey.
The causes are not mysterious. The war the United States and Israel launched against Iran in February has grown deeply unpopular at home, and the rising cost of living — above all the price of petrol, which Americans read at the pump the way other nations read barometers — has curdled the public mood. A ruler may bombard a distant country with impunity for a while; he cannot, it turns out, raise the price of the morning commute. In democracies the pump is a polling station that never closes.
Tehran reads the calendar too
Nor is the electorate the only audience watching the numbers. Reuters reported from Dubai that officials and analysts believe Iran is deliberately prolonging the stalemate in talks, calculating that each week of war and expensive petrol does more damage to Trump’s Republicans than any negotiator could. The Tehran analyst Saeed Leylaz put it with a mathematician’s coolness: by dragging out the talks, he said, “Iran is influencing the US election without taking any unlawful action.”
Sitting presidents, the textbooks remind us, usually slump before midterms; the party in the White House almost always loses seats. But Trump has fallen below even the low watermark of his own first term, and the war gives the slump its particular flavour. History offers an old lesson here: wars begun to display strength abroad have a way of revealing weakness at home. The commander-in-chief who ordered the strikes in February must now campaign — or watch his party campaign — against the price they exacted.
On November 3 the counting will begin. In Tehran they will follow it closely; so, one suspects, will the Republicans, studying the returns the way generals study casualty lists, wondering which losses the war can be made to answer for.