Trump Sends Iran War Invoice to Allies, Backs Hegseth

The Iran war has cost $47.1bn as of mid-October, according to the US military, and that figure leaves out the repair bill for damaged US bases across the Middle East. The Congressional Budget Office estimated in September that every additional month of fighting adds $2bn to $3bn. Now, with Republicans bruised by sweeping midterm losses, Donald Trump wants somebody else to pay.

In an interview with CBS News correspondent Ross Douthat that aired Sunday, Trump said the US will seek compensation from countries it "protected" during the war. They would "pay us any and all costs we had for the war." His words: "We're going to get all that money back. They're going to do it, 100 percent. Because without us, they wouldn't exist."

The Protection Racket

For the first time, Trump explicitly named Israel as a possible payer. "We decapitated their [Iran's] nuclear arsenal," he said. "If I didn't do that, there would be no Israel right now. Israel would be gone." At a July press briefing he had already named Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait as countries that should pay for protection around the Strait of Hormuz.

Strip away the rhetoric and it's a shakedown with a flag on it. One state sells security to other states, then presents the tab after the bombs fall. Nobody who lived under the bombs was consulted on the pricing.

The analysts Al Jazeera spoke to aren't buying it as policy. Neil Quilliam, an associate fellow at Chatham House's Middle East and North Africa Programme, called the comments "best understood as political signalling rather than a serious policy proposal." Bader al-Saif, an assistant professor of history at Kuwait University, said they were "for domestic consumption." Stefan Lukas, an analyst specialising in Middle East and North Africa security and foreign policy, said Trump has been "looking for someone to blame ... and has been doing everything in his power to divert attention from the midterm election results."

Who Gets the Blame, Who Gets the Bill

Trump and Vice President JD Vance both blamed the Iran war for the Republican Party's sweeping midterm losses. Trump has conceded the defeat was partly due to public discontent over the war. Voters got one lever to pull. They pulled it. The war, described in the source as an unresolved eight-month conflict, hasn't ended because of it. Trump has declared it "effectively over" militarily while calling his decision to start it "a very good decision."

Lukas said it's unlikely Washington's Arab allies will face large compensation payments "or anything similar." Israel is a different matter. He suggested Trump could be more serious about extracting economic concessions there, particularly after announcing Israel would no longer receive US aid after the end of this year, partly because, from Trump's perspective, "Israel pushed him into a disastrous war with Iran." So the arms pipeline gets renegotiated as a billing dispute between patrons and clients, while the people living under the missiles stay outside the conversation.

The Apparatus Closes Ranks

On the domestic front, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth faces impeachment proceedings in the House of Representatives, spearheaded by Representative Thomas Massie. Trump threw his support behind Hegseth on Monday, saying he had done a "good job" and "won" wars in Venezuela and Iran. Asked what happens if Hegseth is impeached, Trump answered: "Yeah, I'll stand by him."

Hegseth framed his critics as political hacks. "There's a lot of politically motivated people who...may have substantial policy disagreements, but their disagreements are with success," he said.

Note what the impeachment fight is about, and what it isn't. It's a contest between officials over who answers for a war, with the $47.1bn already spent and the war's victims absent from the argument. Congress, the Pentagon and the White House trade blame inside the same machine. The invoice goes out to foreign capitals. The accountability goes, at best, to a committee room.