(Bloomberg Opinion) -- It was reported last week that the Iranian missile inventory has been depleted from about 5,000 to a thousand or so, and that the US and its allies are now firing one or two Patriots at each incoming airborne threat, in place of the clusters unleashed at the start. In other words, both sides are experiencing munitions shortages.
But my longer-term concern is the depletion — indeed, exhaustion — of another American weapon, which I think is more important than mere hardware: belief in the truth of what the leader of the US tells the world about the war, peace and everything else.
Matters have come to a head when President Donald Trump asserts that his government is conducting promising talks with the Iranians, while the Iranians deny this, and there is worldwide uncertainty about whether to accept his version or the one put out by Tehran’s fanatics. Likewise, when he says the war “is almost won,” nobody knows whether this is a prelude to a fresh US bombardment, a ground invasion or a ceasefire.
Throughout history governments have sometimes lied, especially during wars. There was a catchphrase among Napoleon’s soldiers, when they began to lose battles: “To lie like a bulletin.” They lost faith in official handouts from Paris.
As far back as two centuries ago, visitors to Russia complained about its people’s chronic mendacity, undiminished among its leadership today. In the first years of World War II, the British government found it ever harder to bluster away its armies’ humiliating defeats.
Yet none of this meant then, or means now, that it does not matter for a great nation to lose its reputation for trustworthiness, as the US has done under Trump. It is impossible in the midst of a war to tell the whole truth. But it is worth a lot that “our side” — whatever that may be — should be more credible than the enemy. Almost no European ally believes the president’s assertion, the lynchpin of his justification for starting the war, that Iranian nuclear ambitions posed an imminent threat to either Israel or the West.
I have just reread a little handbook that was issued to every US soldier landing in Britain during World War II, published by the War Department. Among other wisdom, it told GIs: “We can defeat Hitler’s propaganda with a weapon of our own: plain, common horse sense; understanding of evident truths.” Likewise Winston Churchill and his ministers realized that one of their most formidable tools was that famous truth-teller the British Broadcasting Corporation.
Contrary to the illusion held by many Americans, the BBC is not a government-run body, it is an independent corporation administered by trustees and funded by public subscription. Throughout World War II, millions of people in occupied Europe risked their freedom to hear its news. The penalty for those caught listening by German detector vans was deportation to a concentration camp.
The magic words with which its impeccably modulated announcers began their reports — “this is London” — resounded across the globe. After 1945, the BBC habit persisted. Tens of millions of people — especially in Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia — even now prefer the Beeb’s foreign language news to the local variety, rigorously censored by their own governments. Voice of America has never achieved quite the same authority or reputation for impartiality, but it has been nonetheless useful and influential.
The British and American governments have often been fiercely critical of the output of both the BBC and VOA. Churchill sometimes ranted against the former’s alleged disloyalty. Margaret Thatcher deplored its allegedly excessive impartiality, as she saw it, especially during the 1982 Falklands war. On the British side of the Pond, however, no government has dared to do worse things to the BBC than moan about it. Politicians, including Churchill, understood the priceless value of its perceived integrity.
The Nazis adopted a contrary approach to propaganda by employing a US-Irish renegade named William Joyce to harangue the British people. Throughout the conflict he broadcast from Berlin a daily stream of falsehoods, chortling as he delivered them in a voice that caused him to become known to Churchill’s nation as Lord Haw-Haw.
A Berlin bulletin might include this sort of mockery rooted in fake news: “You should ask your prime minister to tell you where is the aircraft-carrier Illustrious… I will tell you where Illustrious is — at the bottom of the sea, where its crew are feeding the fishes, along with so many other British ships and their crews. Gairman [his pronunciation] torpedoes are sending them all to feed the fishes!” The gloating tones were not unlike those of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth describing the fate of Iranians under American bombardment.
It is doubtful, however, whether dancing on the graves of your enemies, and wildly exaggerating your own successes, impresses anybody. The British learned to enjoy listening to Lord Haw-Haw’s fantasizing, which gave them a much-needed laugh, though that did not stop them hanging Joyce in 1946.
Today Trump is assaulting the organs of truth, while peddling obvious lies, for instance his claim that a Tomahawk missile that apparently hit a Tehran school was Iranian. He is seeking to shut down VOA, and suing the BBC for billions of dollars in a Florida court. Worse, the head of the Federal Communications Commission, a Trump lackey, is threatening to withdraw the licenses of US outlets that fail to broadcast the administration’s fictional narrative of the war.
Trump’s assault on reality puts me in mind of a 1917 Punch magazine cartoon of Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II raging at a British newspaper front page and saying, “I have never seen a more abominable tissue of deliberate truths!”
The White House’s standard-bearers would say — privately at least — that we now live in a post-truth world; that their MAGA people neither expect to be told what is real by their leaders, nor mind that they are lied to. A defiant Florida woman told a British reporter last month: “Who cares if what Trump says is true?” She loved him anyway.
Such people are oblivious to how low America’s standing has fallen. Yet this matters very much, not just for now or even for the balance of Trump’s term, but for the future of the US. If it chooses to speak and behave in a way that is morally indistinguishable from that of its rival superpowers, why should other nations not choose China or Russia as partners, rather than America?
“Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,” wrote the New England poet James Russell Lowell almost two centuries ago. “In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side.” It is extraordinarily dangerous for any country, however rich and dominant, to base its entire polity on a belief that it will forever enjoy military and economic superiority; that might alone can sustain its hegemony.
America is no longer seen, especially in Europe, as worthy of trust. To quote again that 1942 US serviceman’s handbook: “It is militarily stupid to criticize your allies.” Even superpowers need friends yet America has few left who, after enduring so many insults from Washington, sincerely respect those in charge there, or believe what they say.
Truth is not merely a virtue. It is a weapon, which this administration has wantonly broken with its own hands, even as it wages a shooting war in which scarcely anybody save the Israelis sees merit or reason.
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.
Max Hastings is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. His histories include 'Inferno: The World At War, 1939–1945,' 'Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy 1945–1975' and 'Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962.'
