On April Fools’ Day, the American president addressed the nation and the world to send not one message about the war that the United States and Israel launched against Iran a month ago, but all possible messages at once.

The conflict is “nearing completion,” Donald Trump said, before repeating that the U.S. might also escalate by hitting Iran’s power plants if there’s “no deal.” The U.S. is “on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly, very shortly,” he asserted, before claiming that “we never said ‘regime change’” while simultaneously musing that the regime, which remains ensconced, sort of has changed, since American and Israeli forces have killed so many leaders.

Again he claimed that the U.S. “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear facilities last year, even though evidence is accumulating that the Iranians had safely moved their enriched uranium to other locations before those strikes. Trump knows this too, since he has been considering ordering ground troops to try to seize that fissile material, while fearing the quagmire such a mission could end in.

“We have all the cards, they have none,” the president boasted. And yet the Iranian regime keeps playing cards that seem to surprise the administration, most notably the closure of the Strait of Hormuz that has disrupted the global economy.

Trump’s address follows days of contradictory and increasingly confusing signals that suggest not victory but desperation. One minute he posts on social media that reopening the strait is a prerequisite for ending the war, the next he tells reporters or aides that Iran wouldn’t necessarily even have to do that for a deal. Here he is vilifying the regime in Tehran as evil terrorists, there he is praising its “New Regime President” — it’s not clear whom he meant — as “much less Radicalized and far more intelligent than his predecessors.”

He keeps saying that the Iranians are negotiating and that talks are making progress, while the regime keeps denying that talks are happening at all and rejects the White House’s 15-point peace plan.

What the president has intuited but can’t admit is that America, and by extension Trump, has suffered defeat. Not on the battlefield, where the U.S. and Israel dominate. But on the bigger map of strategy.

America’s allies in the Gulf, who wanted no part in this conflict, will never trust U.S. security guarantees again and are looking to China and other powers to diversify their relationships. Washington’s European allies, unwilling to join Trump in his war of choice, now fear that a sulking Trump will make good on his longstanding threat to quit NATO.

Russia, which NATO is supposed to deter, is benefiting from the spike in energy prices, and is better able to wage its war against Ukraine, which Trump once promised to end in a day. And both Russia and China, like North Korea and other American adversaries, are noticing that the U.S. in Trump’s second term keeps wasting its formerly prodigious resources, whether political, diplomatic or military.

Last year, Trump bombed the Houthis in Yemen for a while before noticing that the campaign yielded little and was ruinously expensive. He declared victory and moved on. In the current war, that is proving harder to do.

The “cost-exchange ratio” of destroying Iran’s navy, air defenses and other military facilities is so bad, according to Britain’s Royal United Services Institute, that the U.S. military is a month or so away from running out of several types of missiles and interceptors. Just replenishing the Tomahawks that the U.S. has already fired will probably take five years, RUSI reckons. Worse, China controls many of the minerals, from gallium to germanium, needed to replace the weapons.

With this missile math, RUSI concludes, America has compromised its ability to deter adversaries such as China in the Taiwan Strait or North Korea on its peninsula. Only a few months ago, the Trump administration published a National Security Strategy that promised to shrink America’s involvement in the Middle East in order to conserve resources for the few, big fights that directly threaten America’s interests. Trump hasn’t just ignored that strategy; he’s inverted it.

Such is the cognitive dissonance on display in Trump’s address. Just after he launched the war, he posted that his objective was “PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!” One month on, the Middle East is in flames, and the adversary is battered but still in the fight.

Thousands of additional Marines and other troops are arriving in the region, where America now has more than 50,000 in total. Is this what a mission “nearing completion” looks like?

This ill-considered war must end, even if it dents America’s might and standing. But although Trump seems ready to call it quits, the adversary may not let him just yet. And the president trying so hard to declare another victory seems to know it.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering U.S. diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.

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