‘Small Potatoes’ Or War?: Downplaying The War In Iran Won’t Make It Any Smaller

‘I call it a military conflict because it’s small potatoes for us. It’s not a big thing,’ said President Trump earlier this month. This follows Vice President JD Vance’s statements that he ‘wouldn’t call it a war’ and ‘would say it’s intermittent.’ Yet, in April the Trump administration described this same war very differently, with Trump announcing ‘Never in the history of warfare has an enemy suffered such clear and devastating large-scale losses in a matter of weeks.’ He declared ‘swift, decisive, overwhelming victories.’ 

So which is it? Small potatoes or devastating large-scale loss? How big is this war really, and why does the Trump administration keep changing its tune? 

Gulliver’s Troubles: the U.S. is in too deep.

It has now been over six months since the U.S. went to war with Iran. Trump’s most recent statements that minimize the scale of this war to the point of not even calling it a war, instead opting for ‘military conflict’ and ‘small potatoes,’ are reminiscent of how former Reagan administration official Ken Adelman famously predicted how the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq would be a ‘cakewalk.’ Food metaphors seem to be popular among U.S. presidents. 

But whilst food has an expiry date, the war in Iran does not seem to. The problem here is not only that the Trump administration has repeatedly missed its own deadlines for ending the war, (such as the initial four to five week projection in March and the eventual 60-day cease-fire and failed subsequent deal to end the war in August.) Rather, as the war resists political closure, rhetoric is stretched in an attempt to perform what military might alone cannot. The war has been continuously rescaled, inflated to project supremacy and decisiveness, deflated into ‘small potatoes’ and ‘minor operations,’ and stretched temporally from weeks into an increasingly open-ended conflict that has spread far beyond Iran’s borders and across the region. 

What this elasticity of scale actually reveals is a strain on American hegemony. Each rescaling exposes the insufficiency of military power to produce political outcomes. Besides, a war stretched wide enough to show power and shrunk small enough to escape accountability does not stay elastic forever. Eventually, it gives out. 

How to Measure a War and the Politics of Scale

The scale of a war determines what response the war demands and its stakes. A war presented as a limited conflict has different political implications from one called historic, even when the underlying violence is the same. But how do you measure a war? In death toll, military expenditure, gasoline prices, or duration? While there is no single metric to measure a conflict, analysing how the Trump administration pulls this war across multiple scales offers a vantage point into the characteristic incoherency and implications of this war. 

The elasticity metaphor can be broken down into four interlocking scales: material, domestic, geopolitical, and temporal. Taken together, they reveal how and why the administration can make a singular conflict appear simultaneously decisive and intermittent, war and not war, historic and small. 

Material: By any material measure, this is not a small war. Within six months, it has cost U.S. taxpayers over $37.5 billion, the lives of 18 U.S. service members, and over seven thousand deaths in the Middle East, including more than a thousand civilian deaths. Though Trump attempts to trivialize these losses by comparing it to the lives lost in past conflicts, the numbers suggest a large material scale. In March, the International Energy Agency (IEA) declared the war had triggered the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. The Trump administration has since asked Congress for an unprecedented $1.5 trillion in defence spending for the next fiscal year, hardly the move of a country getting out of a war soon. 

Domestic: Trump’s justification for the war was to defend the American people from a nuclear-armed Iran and ensure ‘the United States will be safer, stronger, more prosperous and greater than it has ever been before.’ Yet, the war has increasingly accumulated domestic consequences of its own, such as American casualties, rising fuel prices, and unfavourable public sentiment. Where is Trump’s ‘America First’ promise when his overseas exploits are substantially impoverishing his people? This month, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates for the first time in over 3 years because inflation levels are so sustainedly high. What began as a foreign justification for domestic security has been stretched to become a domestic problem in its own right. As the domestic scale of war has expanded from within the country at an unfavourable time in the midterm election cycle, the administration has tried to contract it rhetorically as limited and small.

Geopolitical: On a geopolitical scale, the Trump administration has inflated the war to project American dominance, defence of all America’s allies and the world from nuclear weapons, securitising global energy security, and the international order itself. However, the war has instead exposed the limits of U.S. dominance. What was supposed to be a geopolitical projection of strength has become an arena of overextension as conflict has spread beyond Iran into the Gulf and Red Sea, while disruptions to the Strait of Hormuz (and now potentially the Bab al-Mandab Strait) have reverberated through global oil markets. Russia and China, meanwhile, have reportedly supplied Iran with satellite imagery to track American forces, an outcome that a war framed around containing rival powers was supposed to prevent. With the Houthi insurgency on the Red Sea Coast, it is believed that Iran controls an estimated 35% of global oil flow–some would argue that this leverage is almost equivalent to possession of a nuclear weapon–and Trump dropped it in their laps.

Temporal: Time is where these three scales converge. In March, Trump estimated the war would end within ‘maybe two weeks, maybe three.’ Yet, just days ago, Trump predicted ‘the war’s going to end immediately after the [midterm] election’ in early November. Alarm bells of ‘The war will be over by Christmas 1914’ should be ringing! Iran is successfully dragging out the bottleneck of Hormuz and prolonging the fiscal pain it causes the West. Meanwhile, China continues to be the main importer of Iranian oil, while Russia, with its own reserves, is less exposed to energy pressures that face NATO countries. The longer the war drags on, the more its costs accumulate asymmetrically between the West and its comparatively insulated major competitors. As Middle East analyst Amr Hamzawy puts it, citing lessons from Vietnam and Iraq, ‘time itself can be transformed into a weapon in the hands of the weaker party.’ Six months in and two broken ceasefires suggest Iran has learned this lesson before the Trump administration has. 

Taken together, these four scales move in opposite directions. As the war’s material, domestic, and geopolitical consequences expand, the administration contracts its rhetorical scale and kicks its endpoint further away. This produces a cycle of political rescaling in which the administration stretches one scale to preserve a faltering appearance of control. 

A Rubber Band, Not a Resolution

To better understand how repeated rescaling is symptomatic of structural weakness, we can turn to the metaphor of a rubber band. Imagine you have a bag of, say, potato chips, and are using a rubber band to tie it closed. Every time you reopen it, you stretch and pull in different directions. Over time it becomes less supple, its elastic return is weaker until, eventually, it snaps. Maybe, you tie the ends together and use it again. Every stretch and re-knot leads to an elastic fatigue, and the integrity of the rubber band is far from what it was before. 

The U.S. has operated on this same logic. It repeatedly stretches the scale of conflict to demonstrate its omnipotence, but when compliance does not follow, they snap back into low-profile framing to evade the appearance of defeat. Having reached its limit, the rubber band snaps, such as when Iranian interdiction in the Strait of Hormuz exposed a critical American weakness. Instead of retreating, the Trump administration ties the ends together with temporary ceasefires and executive workarounds. Each cycle of inflation and deflation across material, domestic, and geopolitical scales on a global stage leaves the band more brittle, and each re-knotted ceasefire a little less credible than the last.

While the rubber band still holds the bag closed despite this elastic fatigue, the potato chips inside have become stale. Every visible snap, stretch, and scrappy re-knot highlights a disparity between political language and tangible outcomes as the U.S. appears undecided and uses negotiation to conceal defeat. 

Trump has a particular penchant and preference for hit-and-run style military operations. Take ‘Operation Resolve’ on the 3rd January 2026 in Venezuela and the subsequent kidnapping of Maduro. It lasted mere hours and the U.S. Marines were out before the fallout even began. Or ‘Operation Rough Rider’ from March to May 2025, a 51-day Blitzkrieg of Houthi-occupied parts of Yemen in which Trump attempted to wipe the Iran-backed militia off the face of the Middle East. But his in-and-out operations do not always go to plan, and Trump is entirely out of his comfort zone when it comes to Iran. We can see this to be true in the magnitude of the Houthi attack on Saudi Arabia, Perim Island, Mokha Port, and the Red Sea Coast that is now underway. Iran is another example of a failed hit-and-run job and luck run-out. 

Small Potatoes but Big Consequences

Not even three weeks later after minor labelling of the war as ‘small potatoes,’ Trump most recently stated at the United Nations General Assembly that he has a ‘big decision to make’ on whether he should ‘annihilate’ Iran and ‘drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations’ if a deal is not made. With Trump strung between dismissal of his war of choice and bold, puffed-chest threats, he has shown, once again, how stale American dominance has become and how he must resize a conflict that has become too politically consequential to fit a narrative of effortless American control. 

Trump is stuck, and his embroilment in the Middle East is far from the victory he rashly and erratically assumed it would be. Across material, domestic, geopolitical, and temporal scales, the consequences of this war continue to accumulate without resolution. With the pathological overestimation of American invincibility and underestimation of others, the U.S. can reliably produce violence but not an ending. 

Other Zoom Out Articles:

Great Powers Are Rotting From Within

The Chip Monopoly Is At The Centre Of The New Cold War

Is It Wrong To Celebrate The Death Of Your Oppressor?

About The Author:

Julianne Tai is recent graduate of the Erasmus Mundus Joint-Master’s Degree in Global Studies from Ghent University and the University of Vienna, where she specialised her studies in global politics, governance, and globalization. She also holds additional degrees in anthropology and piano performance from the United States. Drawing on these interdisciplinary perspectives, her writing examines culture, politics, and everyday life through an intimate and grounded lens.
Julianne has published two articles in the Santa Barbara Independent:
Why Are Americans So Loud?
My Train Hit Someone. The Café Car Announced Happy Hour

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