"Trump’s 'Epic Fury' is already an 'Epic Fail'": a shocking assessment from within the US

[The Financial News] A pessimistic assessment has emerged inside the United States of America (US) that the large-scale military operation launched by the US and Israel against the Islamic Republic of Iran on the 28th of last month (local time) has effectively ended in defeat for the US.

Guillaume Long, a senior fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), contributed an article to the business magazine Fortune on the 18th (local time) titled, "The U.S. attacked Iran to show its power but the war is already lost. Epic Fury looks like an Epic Fail."
Long argued that the war the United States of America (US) and Israel are waging against the Islamic Republic of Iran is already turning against the US. Even if Iran were to suffer a military defeat, he wrote, Washington is unlikely to achieve its political objectives. In the end, he predicted, the US will emerge from this war even weaker.
He then went on to analyze the reasons for what he sees as a US defeat.
First, he pointed to Iran’s "resilience and capacity to recover," which he said had surpassed expectations. In reality, even as senior figures such as Ali Hosseini Khamenei, Iran's Supreme Leader, and Ali Larijani, secretary-general of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), were successively targeted and removed, the Iranian regime did not collapse.
Commenting on this, Long wrote, "This shows that Iran has meticulously developed extensive contingency plans that allow the state to keep functioning under sustained attack." He added, "Airstrikes on Iran’s leadership have been ineffective and may instead have radicalized the government’s base of support and triggered pre-set wartime protocols, producing the opposite of the intended effect."
He continued, "President Trump has fallen into a strategic trap." According to Long, Trump now faces a choice between two kinds of political damage: failing to achieve his stated goal of regime change in Iran, or breaking his promise not to start new wars.

Long also highlighted the fact that the United States of America (US) embarked on this war at Israel’s request.
He argued, "The Gulf countries, which understood very well that a large-scale confrontation with Iran would destabilize the entire region, opposed this war from the outset."
Just one day before the US and Israel launched airstrikes on the Islamic Republic of Iran, Oman announced a breakthrough: Tehran had agreed not to stockpile fissile material. This concession went far beyond what Iran had accepted under the previous nuclear agreement that President Trump had unilaterally abandoned.
However, that new understanding was dead on arrival when President Trump, in the middle of the nuclear talks, joined Israel in attacking the Islamic Republic of Iran.
As a result of this war, relations have become strained not only with the Gulf countries now facing Iranian retaliation, but also with US allies such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Australia, South Korea, and Japan, which are under pressure from the Trump administration to send warships to the Strait of Hormuz.
Long wrote, "The current situation is advancing a strategic objective that Iran has long pursued: weakening the US security footprint in the Gulf region." He added, "If trust between the US and its Gulf partner states erodes, and some of them lower the level of their security cooperation, that alone would amount to a 'strategic victory' for Iran."
He also pointed to one of the greatest ironies of this war: that it has effectively dismantled all of Iran’s most powerful deterrent capabilities, including its nuclear program.
Long warned, "If Iran survives the massive destruction caused by this war, its desire for nuclear deterrence could grow even stronger." He noted that the outcome of this conflict is likely to "accelerate the very threat it claimed it would prevent."
He further argued, "Operation Epic Fury is increasingly turning into an epic failure. The US launched the operation to demonstrate that its military power still occupies a central place in world affairs, but it is now being counted among the most serious strategic miscalculations of this century." He concluded that "we are witnessing a decisive moment in the gradual erosion of US hegemony."
y27k@fnnews.com Seo Yoon-kyung Reporter