Tom Nichols

The other is this looks a lot like Ukraine.

It was exactly the same imbalance of interests.

Putin went in, thought he was going to just knock the Ukrainian regime over in a day or three days or four days.

But also, when that didn't happen, Putin didn't have a clear set of goals.

It was just throw more guys and more bodies and blow up more buildings.

And just like the Iranians, the Ukrainians had a strategic goal, survive and control the territory and the government of Ukraine.

And they did.

They have so far.

There's a couple of things to think about and reasons that Democrats would be hesitant to declare a war as well.

Wartime conditions vastly empower a president.

What they want, what I think people like Tim Kaine and others among the Democrats wanted was a war powers resolution to be able to rein in Trump by law and by budgetary authority from this conflict.

But now that it's over, and I think it is over for the foreseeable future, there's no point in it.

Republicans didn't want to do it because Trump kept sending them signals, stop saying war.

It's a military operation, which is part of the reason, I think, that the war was never popular.

I've never seen this happen before, where a president embarks on a major military operation and not only gets no bump out of it, but actually starts to bleed support over time.

I mean, even in the first stages of Vietnam, the American people rallied around Lyndon Johnson.

This is really unprecedented in modern times.

Because Trump's entire, you know, political body language for weeks now has been, get me out of this.

I think what we saw from, you know, Easter onward and leading up to the, you know, those really feverish statements was panic and flailing.

He lost control of the situation within the first week when the things he wanted to happen didn't happen.