Two weeks before launching Operation Epic Fury, President Trump stood before Congress and boasted that gasoline was “below US$2.30 a gallon in most states.”
It was his closing argument for the midterms, the thing voters could feel before they needed to understand. The national average is now $3.70 and climbing. Oil closed above $100 a barrel this week. Sen. Rand Paul put it plainly: at these energy prices, “you’re going to see a disastrous election.”
In this context, Trump called British Prime Minister Keir Starmer “not Winston Churchill” for declining to commit British forces to the war effort. Trump meant it as contempt. What he produced instead was an argument — because Churchill’s career, examined without the mythology, is the most precise warning available against exactly the war Trump is now fighting.
Not one warning. Two. And they run in opposite directions. In February 1915, Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty. He believed that the Ottoman Empire, if struck hard enough at the right point, would collapse. The Dardanelles Strait was that point. The plan was that breaking through it would allow Britain to resupply Russia, relieve the Western Front and potentially shorten the war by years.
The naval assault began in March. Mines destroyed ship after ship. When the navy failed, troops landed at Gallipoli — on beaches different from those planned, and behind schedule. Eight months later, the survivors were evacuated. Tens of thousands were dead. Churchill was removed from his position and banished to the back benches.
It was not the plan’s ambition that killed it. The campaign assumed that Ottoman resistance, once engaged, would crumble quickly enough for British logistics and political will to outlast it. When that assumption failed on the first day, there was nothing underneath it. The entire campaign rested on the adversary behaving as predicted.
Three weeks into Operation Epic Fury, the same load-bearing assumption is cracking. The White House declared Iran’s ballistic missile capacity “functionally destroyed.”
Last Sunday, Iran’s foreign minister said his government has “never asked for a ceasefire, and never asked even for negotiation” — a flat contradiction of Trump’s claim that Tehran is ready to deal. It was then reported that the Trump administration has been sending private messages seeking to resume talks, and that Iran has not responded.
A government that has survived four decades of sanctions, two rounds of US-Israeli strikes and the assassination of its own Supreme Leader is not a government on the verge of collapse. The Strait of Hormuz is closed. Decapitation strikes have produced none of the fracturing the campaign requires.
If that fracturing does not come — and nothing in three weeks suggests it will — the options narrow to three: widen the war, absorb an open-ended cost or exit on terms that signal to every government watching that sustained resistance beats American military power.
Churchill won. That is the part the current invocation ignores. He won completely, and it destroyed him anyway.
In July 1945, three months after Germany’s surrender, the British electorate voted Churchill out of office. He was in Potsdam when the results came in. Labour took 393 seats. The Conservatives took 213. The man credited with saving Western civilization could not win his own general election.
The explanation is not complicated, though it is usually sentimentalized as ingratitude. British voters in 1945 were not ungrateful but practical. Six years of war had consumed everything: money, materials, patience, the assumption that normal life would resume soon.
Churchill could not offer what came next because he was not that kind of leader. He was built for emergency, for defiance, for the moment when all conventional thinking has failed. Clement Attlee was built for coalitions and for getting large, complicated things done through institutions. The voters understood the difference.
Just 29% of Americans support the Iran strikes, including barely half of Republicans. Gas prices have risen by $1.40 per gallon in three weeks. The Strait of Hormuz has no reopening date.
Trump built his midterm campaign on the promise of cheap energy. Now it is $1.40 underwater. The electorate’s verdict in 1945 came the moment people understood that the qualities that had won the war were not the qualities the next problem required.
What makes Churchill singular is that his career contains both catastrophes — the military miscalculation and the post-victory rejection — in sequence, in the same political life, 30 years apart.
He is not a cautionary tale; he is a case study. And the lesson his record offers is harder than the lesson his myth does: you can be right about the enemy and still lose the war. You can win the war and still lose the peace.
The question absent from every press conference since February 28 is the one Churchill’s career makes impossible to avoid: What happens when this is over? Not if the campaign succeeds — what happens then? Not if it fails — what happens then? There is no clear answer to either version.
Churchill understood that wars end and governments fall, and that what comes after both is the harder problem. He had no plan for that either at Gallipoli. The difference is that he spent the years afterward understanding why.
The architects of the Iran campaign are somewhere in the Gallipoli chapter, and there is no public sign that they have noticed.
Eric Alter is a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East programs and a former UN civil servant.