This post is a set of my observations on the current war in Iran and my thoughts on the broader strategic implications. I am not, of course, an expert on the region nor do I have access to any special information, so I am going to treat that all with a high degree of uncertainty. But I am a scholar of military history with a fair bit of training and experience in thinking about strategic problems, ancient and modern; it is this ‘guy that analyzes strategy’ focus that I want to bring to this.
I am doing this post outside of the normal Friday order because it is an unusual topic and I want to keep making it clear that even as world events continue to happen – as they must – I do not want this blog to turn into a politics newsletter. I simply haven’t had the time to polish and condense these thoughts for other publication – the hard work of much writing is turning 3,500 words (or 7,500, as it turns out) of thoughts into 1,500 words of a think piece – but I need to get them out of my head and on to the page before it burns out of the back of my head. That said, this post is going to be unavoidably ‘political,’ because as a citizen of the United States, commenting on the war means making a statement about the President who unilaterally and illegally launched it without much public debate and without consulting Congress.
And this war is dumb as hell.
I am going to spend the next however many words working through what I think are the strategic implications of where we are, but that is my broad thesis: for the United States this war was an unwise gamble on extremely long odds; the gamble (that the regime would collapse swiftly) has already failed and as a result locked in essentially nothing but negative outcomes. Even with the regime were to collapse in the coming weeks or suddenly sue for peace, every likely outcome leaves the United States in a meaningfully worse strategic position than when it started.
Now, before we go forward, I want to clarify a few things. First, none of this is a defense of the Iranian regime, which is odious. That said, there are many odious regimes in the world and we do not go to war with all of them. Second, this is a post fundamentally about American strategy or the lack thereof and thus not a post about Israeli strategy. For what it is worth, my view is that Benjamin Netanyahu has is playing an extremely short game because it benefits him politically and personally to do so and there is a significant (but by no means certain) chance that Israel will come to regret the decision to encourage this war. I’ll touch on some of that, but it isn’t my focus. Likewise, this is not a post about the strategy of the Gulf states, who – as is often the sad fate of small states – find their fate largely in the hands of larger powers. Finally, we should keep in mind that this isn’t an academic exercise: many, many people will suffer because of these decisions, both as victims of the violence in the region but also as a consequent of the economic ripples.
But that’s enough introduction. What I want to discuss here is first the extremely unwise gamble that the administration took and then the trap that it now finds itself in, from which there is no comfortable escape.
The Situation
We need to start by establishing some basic facts about Iran, as a country.
First, Iran is a large country. It has a population just over 90 million (somewhat more than Germany, about the same as Turkey), and a land area over more than 600,000 square miles (more than four times the size of Germany). Put another way Iran is more than twice as large as Texas, with roughly three times the population.
More relevantly for us, Iran is 3.5 times larger than Iraq and roughly twice the population. That’s a handy comparison because we know what it took to invade and then hold Iraq: coalition forces peaked at half a million deployed personnel during the invasion. Iran is bigger in every way and so would demand a larger army and thus an absolutely enormous investment of troops, money and fundamentally lives in order to subdue.
In practice, given that Iran did not and never has posed an existential threat to the United States (Iran aspires to be the kind of nuclear threat North Korea is and can only vaguely dream of being the kind of conventional threat that Russia is), that meant that a ground invasion of Iran was functionally impossible. While the United States had the raw resources to do it, the political will simply wasn’t there and was unlikely to ever be there.
Equally important, Iran was not a major strategic priority. This is something that in a lot of American policy discourse – especially but not exclusively on the right – gets lost because Iran is an ‘enemy’ (and to be clear, the Iranian regime is an enemy; they attack American interests and Americans regularly) and everyone likes to posture against the enemy. But the Middle East is a region composed primarily of poor, strategically unimportant countries. Please understand me: the people in these countries are not unimportant, but as a matter of national strategy, some places are more important than others. Chad is not an area of vital security interest to the United States, whereas Taiwan (which makes our semiconductors) is and we all know it.
Neither is the Middle East. The entire region has exactly two strategic concerns of note: the Suez Canal (and connected Red Sea shipping system) and the oil production in the Persian Gulf and the shipping system used to export it. So long as these two arteries remained open the region does not matter very much to the United States. None of the region’s powers are more than regional powers (and mostly unimpressive ones at that), none of them can project power out of the region and none of them are the sort of dynamic, growing economies likely to do so in the future. The rich oil monarchies are too small in terms of population and the populous countries too poor.
In short then, Iran is very big and not very important, which means it would both be very expensive to do anything truly permanent about the Iranian regime and at the same time it would be impossible to sell that expense to the American people as being required or justified or necessary. So successive American presidents responded accordingly: they tried to keep a ‘lid’ on Iran at the lowest possible cost. The eventual triumph of this approach was the flawed but useful JCPOA (the ‘Iran deal’) in which Iran in exchange for sanctions relief swore off the pursuit of nuclear weapons (with inspections to verify), nuclear proliferation representing the main serious threat Iran could pose. So long as Iran remained non-nuclear, it could be contained and the threat to American interests, while not zero, could be kept minimal.
That deal was not perfect, I must stress: it essentially gave Iran carte blanche to reinforce its network of proxies across the region, which was robustly bad for Israel and mildly bad for the United States, but since the alternative was – as we’ll see – global economic disruption and the prospect of a large-scale war which would always be far more expensive than the alternatives, it was perhaps the best deal that could have been had. For what it is worth, my own view is that the Obama administration ‘overpaid’ for the concessions of the Iran deal, but the payment having been made, they were worth keeping. Trump scrapped them in 2017 in exchange for exactly nothing, which put us on the course for this outcome (as more than a few people pointed out at the time).
But that was the situation: Iran was big and hostile, but relatively unimportant. The United States is much stronger than Iran, but relatively uninterested in the region apart from the uninterrupted flow of natural gas, oil and other products from the Gulf (note: the one thing this war compromised – the war with Iran has cut off the only thing in this region of strategic importance, compromised the only thing that mattered at the outset), whereas Iran was wholly interested in the region because it lives there. The whole thing was the kind of uncomfortable frontier arrangement powerful states have always had to make because they have many security concerns, whereas regional powers have fewer, more intense focuses.
Which leads us to
The Gamble
The current war is best understood as the product of a fairly extreme gamble, although it is unclear to me if the current administration understood they were throwing the dice in June of 2025 rather than this year. As we’re going to see, this was not a super-well-planned-out affair.
The gamble was this: that the Iranian regime was weak enough that a solid blow, delivered primarily from the air, picking off key leaders, could cause it to collapse. For the United States, the hope seems to have been that a transition could then be managed to leaders perhaps associated with the regime but who would be significantly more pliant, along the lines of the regime change operation performed in Venezuela that put Delcy Rodriguez in power. By contrast, Israel seems to have been content to simply collapse the Iranian regime and replace it with nothing. That outcome would be – as we’ll see – robustly bad for a huge range of regional and global actors, including the United States, and it is not at all clear to me that the current administration understood how deeply their interests and Israel’s diverged here.
In any case, this gamble was never very likely to pay off for reasons we have actually already discussed. The Islamic Republic of Iran is not a personalist regime where the death of a single leader or even a group of leaders is likely to cause collapse: it is an institutional regime where the core centers of power (like the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps or IRGC) are ‘bought in’ from the bottom to the top because the regime allows them access to disproportionate resources and power. Consequently if you blow up the leader, they will simply pick another one – in this case they picked the previous leader’s son, so the net effect of the regime change effort was to replace Supreme Leader Khamenei with Supreme Leader Khamenei…Jr.
But power in the Iranian regime isn’t wielded by the Supreme Leader alone either: the guardian council has power, the council of experts that select the Supreme Leader have power, the IRGC has power, the regular military has some power (but less than the IRGC), the elected government has some power (but less than the IRGC or the guardian council) and on and on. These sorts of governments can collapse, but not often. It certainly did not help that the United States had stood idle while the regime slaughtered tens of thousands of its opponents, before making the attempt, but I honestly do not think the attempt would have worked before.
The gamble here was that because the regime would simply collapse on cue, the United States could remove Iran’s regional threat without having to commit to a major military operation that might span weeks, disrupt global energy supplies, expand over the region, cost $200 billion dollars and potentially require ground operations. Because everyone knew that result was worse than the status quo and it would thus be really foolish to do that.
As you can tell, I think this was a bad gamble: it was very unlikely to succeed but instead always very likely to result in a significantly worse strategic situation for the United States, but only after it killed thousands of people unnecessarily. If you do a war where thousands of people die and billions of dollars are spent only to end up back where you started that is losing; if you end up worse than where you started, well, that is worse.
The problem is that once the gamble was made, once the dice were cast, the Trump administration would be effectively giving up control over much of what followed.
And if administration statements are to be believed, that decision was made, without knowing it, in June of last year. Administration officials, most notably Marco Rubio, have claimed that the decision was made to attempt this regime change gamble in part because they were aware that Israel was about to launch a series of decapitation strikes and they assessed – correctly, I suspect – that the ‘blowback’ would hit American assets (and energy production) in the region even if the United States did nothing. Essentially, Iran would assume that the United States was ‘in’ on the attack.
That is notable because Iran did not assume that immediately during the Twelve-Day War in 2025. Indeed, Iran did not treat the United States as a real co-belligerent even as American aircraft were actively intercepting Iranian missiles aimed at Israel. And then the United States executed a ‘bolt from the blue’ surprise attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities on June 22, 2025, catching Iran (which had been attempting to negotiate with the United States) by surprise.
The problem with that strike is that attacking in that way, at that time, meant that Iran would have to read any future attacks by Israel as likely also involving attacks by the United States. Remember, the fellow getting bombed does not get to carefully inspect the flag painted on the bomber: stuff blows up and to some degree the party being attacked has to rapidly guess who is attacking them. We’ve seen this play out repeatedly over the last several weeks where things explode in Iran and there is initially confusion over if the United States or Israel bombed them. But in the confusion of an initial air attack, Iran’s own retaliatory capability could not sit idle, waiting to be destroyed by overwhelming US airpower: it is a ‘wasting’ use-it-or-lose-it asset.
So Iran would now have to assume that an Israeli air attack was also likely an American air attack. It was hardly an insane assumption – evidently according to the Secretary of State, American intelligence made the exact same assessment.
But the result was that by bombing the Iranian nuclear facilities in June of 2025, the Trump administration created a situation where merely by launching a renewed air campaign on Iran, Israel could force the United States into a war with Iran at any time.
It should go without saying that creating the conditions where the sometimes unpredictable junior partner in a security relationship can unilaterally bring the senior partner into a major conflict is an enormous strategic error, precisely because it means you end up in a war when it is in the junior partner’s interests to do so even if it is not in the senior partner’s interests to do so.
Which is the case here. Because…
The Trap
Once started, a major regional war with Iran was always likely to be something of a ‘trap,’ – not in the sense of an ambush laid by Iran – but in the sense of a situation that, once entered, cannot be easily left or reversed.
The trap, of course, is the Strait of Hormuz and the broader Persian Gulf. The issue is that an enormous proportion of the world’s shipping, particularly energy (oil, liquid natural gas) and fertilizer components (urea) passes through this body of water. The Gulf is narrow along its whole length, extremely narrow in the Strait and bordered by Iran on its northern shore along its entire length. Iran can thus threaten the whole thing and can do so with cheap, easy to conceal, easy to manufacture systems.
And the scale here is significant. 25% of the world’s oil (refined and crude), 20% of its liquid natural gas and around 20% of the world’s fertilizer passes through the Strait of Hormuz which links the Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean. Any of those figures would be enough for a major disruption to trigger huge economic ripples. And even worse there are only very limited, very insufficient alternative transport options. Some Saudi oil (about half) can move via pipeline to the Red Sea and some Emirati oil can move via pipeline to Fujairah outside of the Strait, but well over half of the oil and effectively all of the natural gas and fertilizer ingredients are trapped if ships cannot navigate the strait safely.
And here we come back to what Clausewitz calls the political object (drink!). Even something like a 50% reduction in shipping in the Gulf, were it to persist long term, would create strong global economic headwinds which would in turn arrive in the United States in the form of high energy prices and a general ‘supply shock’ that has, historically at least, not been politically survivable for the party in power.
And so that is the trap. While the United States can exchange tit-for-tat strikes with Iran without triggering an escalation spiral, once you try to collapse the regime, the members of the regime (who are making the decisions, not, alas, the Iranian people) have no reason to back down and indeed must try to reestablish deterrence. These are men who are almost certainly dead or poor-in-exile if the regime collapses. Moreover the entire raison d’être of this regime is resistance to Israel and the United States: passively accepting a massive decapitation attack and not responding would fatally undermine the regime’s legitimacy with its own supporters, leading right back to the ‘dead-or-poor-and-exiled’ problem.
Iran would have to respond and thus would have to try to find a way to inflict ‘pain’ on the United States to force the United States to back off. But whereas Israel is in reach of some Iranian weapons, the United States is not. Iran would thus need a ‘lever’ closer to home which could inflict costs on the United States. For – and I must stress this – for forty years everyone has known this was the strait. This is not a new discovery, we did this before in the 1980s. “If the regime is threatened, Iran will try to close the strait to exert pressure” is perhaps one of the most established strategic considerations in the region. We all knew this.
But the trap here is two sided: once the strait was effectively closed, the United States could not back off out of the war without suffering its own costs. Doing so, for one, would be an admission of defeat, politically damaging at home. Strategically, it would affirm Iran’s control over the strait, which would be a significantly worse outcome than not having done the war in the first place. And simply backing off might not fully return shipping flows: why should Iran care if the Gulf states can export their oil? An Iran that fully controls the strait, that had demonstrated it could exclude the United States might intentionally throttle everyone else’s oil – even just a bit – to get higher prices for its own or to exert leverage.
So once the strait was closed, the United States could not leave until it was reopened, or at least there was some prospect of doing so.
The result is a fairly classic escalation trap: once the conflict starts, it is extremely costly for either side to ever back down, which ensures that the conflict continues long past it being in the interests of either party. Every day this war goes on make both the United States and Iran weaker, poorer and less secure but it is very hard for either side to back down because there are huge costs connected to being the party that backs down. So both sides ‘escalate to de-escalate’ (this phrase is generally as foolish as it sounds), intensifying the conflict in an effort to hit hard enough to force the other guy to blink first. But since neither party can back down unilaterally and survive politically, there’s practically no amount of pain that can force them to do so.
Under these conditions, both sides might seek a purely military solution: remove the ability of your opponent to do harm in order to create the space to declare victory and deescalate. Such solutions are elusive. Iran simply has no real way of meaningfully diminishing American offensive power: they cannot strike the airfields, sink the carriers or reliably shoot down the planes (they have, as of this writing, managed to damage just one aircraft).
For the United States, a purely military solution is notionally possible: you could invade. But as noted, Iran is very, very big and has a large population, so a full-scale invasion would be an enormous undertaking, larger than any US military operation since the Second World War. Needless to say, the political will for this does not exist. But a ‘targeted’ ground operation against Iran’s ability to interdict the strait is also hard to concieve. Since Iran could launch underwater drones or one-way aerial attack drones from anywhere along the northern shore the United States would have to occupy many thousands of square miles to prevent this and of course then the ground troops doing that occupying would simply become the target for drones, mortars, artillery, IEDs and so on instead.
One can never know how well prepared an enemy is for something, but assuming the Iranians are even a little bit prepared for ground operations, any American force deployed on Iranian soil would end up eating Shahed and FPV drones – the sort we’ve seen in Ukraine – all day, every day.
Meanwhile escort operations in the strait itself are also deeply unpromising. For one, it would require many more ships, because the normal traffic through the strait is so large and because escorts would be required throughout the entire Gulf (unlike the Red Sea crisis, where the ‘zone’ of Houthi attacks was contained to only the southern part of the Red Sea). But the other problem is that Iran possesses modern anti-ship missiles (AShMs) in significant quantity and American escort ships (almost certainly Arleigh Burke-class destroyers) would be vulnerable escorting slow tankers in the constrained waters of the strait.
It isn’t even hard to imagine what the attack would look like: essentially a larger, more complex version of the attack that sunk the Moskva, to account for the Arleigh Burke’s better air defense. Iran would pick their moment (probably not the first transit) and try to distract the Burke, perhaps with a volley of cheap Shahed-type drones against a natural gas tanker, before attempting to ambush the Burke with a volley of AShMs, probably from the opposite direction. The aim would be to create just enough confusion that one AShM slipped through, which is all it might take to leave a $2.2bn destroyer with three hundred American service members on board disabled and vulnerable in the strait. Throw in speed-boats, underwater drones, naval mines, fishing boats pretending to be threats and so on to maximize confusion and the odds that one of perhaps half a dozen AShMs slips through.
And if I can reason this out, Iran – which has been planning for this exact thing for forty years certainly can. Which is why the navy is not eager to run escort.
But without escorts or an end to the conflict, shipping in the Gulf is not going to return to normal. Container ships are big and hard to sink but easy to damage. But while crude oil tankers are hard to set fire to, tankers carrying refined petroleum products are quite easy to set fire to, as we’ve seen, while tankers of liquid natural gas (LNG carriers) are essentially floating bombs.
The result is that right now it seems that the only ships moving through the strait are those Iran permits and they appear to have a checkpoint system, turning away ships they do not approve of. A military solution this problem is concievable, but extremely difficult to implement practically, requiring either a massive invasion of Iran’s coastline or an enormous sea escort operation. It seems more likely in both cases that the stoppage will continue until Iran decides it should stop. The good news on that front is that Iran benefits from the export of oil from the Gulf too, but the bad news is that while they are permitting some traffic, precisely because high energy prices are their only lever to make the United States and Israel stop killing them, they are unlikely to approve the transit of the kinds of numbers of ships which would allow energy markets to stabilize.
Just as a measure here, as I write this apparently over the last three days or so Iran has let some twenty ships through their checkpoint, charging fees apparently to do so. That may sound like a lot, but it is a quantity that, compared to the normal operation of the strait, is indistinguishable from zero. The Strait of Hormuz normally sees around 120 transits per day (including both directions). That scale should both explain why five or six ships a day paying Iran to transit is not going to really impact this equation – that’s still something like a 95% reduction in traffic (and all of the Iran-approved transits are outbound, I think) – but also why a solution like ‘just do escorts’ is so hard. Whatever navies attempted an escort solution would need to escort a hundred ships a day, with every ship being vulnerable at every moment from when it entered the Strait to when it docked for loading or offloading to its entire departure route. All along the entire Gulf coastline. All the time.
Likewise, even extremely punishing bombings of Iranian land-based facilities are unlikely to wholly remove their ability to throw enough threat into the Strait that traffic remains massively reduced. Sure some ship owners will pay Iran and others will take the risk, but if traffic remains down 90% or just 50% that is still a massive, global energy disruption. And we’ve seen with the campaign against the Houthis just how hard it is with airstrikes to compromise these capabilities: the United States spent more than a year hammering the Houthis and was never able to fully remove their attack capabilities. Cargo ships are too vulnerable and the weapons with which to attack them too cheap and too easy to hide.
There is a very real risk that this conflict will end with Iran as the de facto master of the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf, having demonstrated that no one can stop them from determining by force which ships pass and which ships cannot. That would, in fact, be a significant strategic victory for Iran and an enormous strategic defeat for the United States.
Peace Negotiations?
Which brings us to the question of strategic outcomes. As the above has made clear, I think the Trump administration erred spectacularly in starting this war. It appears as though, in part pressured by Israel, but mostly based on their own decisions (motivated, it sure seems, by the ease of the Venezuela regime-change) they decided to go ahead on the hopeful assumption the regime would collapse and as a result did not plan for the most likely outcome (large war, strait closure), despite this being the scenario that political leadership (Trump, Hegseth, Rubio) were warned was most likely.
The administration now appears to be trying to extricate itself from the problem has created, but as I write this, is currently still stuck in the ‘trap’ above. Now this is a fast moving topic, so by the time you actually read this the war well could have ended in a ceasefire (permanent or temporary) or intensified and expanded. Who knows! As I am writing the Trump administration claims that they are very near a negotiated ceasefire, while the Iranian regime claims they have rejected both of the United States’ interlocutors as unsuitable (‘backstabbing’ negotiators), while reporting suggests Israel may feel it in their interests to blow up any deal if the terms are too favorable to Iran.
That is a lot of uncertainty! But I think we can look at some outcomes here both in terms of what was militarily achieved, what the consequences of a ‘deal’ might be and what the consequences of not having a deal might be.
The Trump administration has offered a bewildering range of proposed objectives for this war, but I think it is fair to say the major strategic objectives have not been achieved. Initially, the stated objective was regime change or at least regime collapse; neither has occurred. The regime very much still survives and if the war ends soon it seems very plausible that the regime – able to say that it fought the United States and made the American president sue for peace – will emerge stronger, domestically (albeit with a lot of damage to fix and many political problems that are currently ‘on pause’ coming ‘un-paused’). The other core American strategic interest here is Iran’s nuclear program, the core of which is Iran’s supply of roughly 500kg of highly enriched uranium; no effort appears to have been made to recover or destroy this material and it remains in Iranian hands. Actually destroying (dispersing, really) or seizing this material by military force would be an extremely difficult operation with a very high risk of failure, since the HEU is underground buried in facilities (mostly Isfahan) in the center of the country. Any sort of special forces operation would thus run the risk of being surrounded and outnumbered very fast, even with ample air support, while trying to extract half a ton of uranium stored in gas form in heavy storage cylinders.
When the United States did this in Kazakhstan, removing about 600kg (so roughly the same amount) it required the team to spend 12 hours a day every day for a month to remove it, using multiple heavy cargo planes. And that facility was neither defended, nor buried under rubble.
Subsequently, administration aims seem to have retreated mostly to ‘fixing the mess we made:’ getting Iran to stop shooting and getting the Strait of Hormuz reopened and the ships moving again. They do seem to be asking for quite a bit more at the peace table, but the record of countries winning big concessions at the peace table which they not only haven’t secured militarily but do not appear able to do so is pretty slim.
Now it is possible that Iran blinks and takes a deal sooner rather than later. But I don’t think it is likely. And the simple reason is that Iran probably feels like it needs to reestablish deterrence. This is the second sudden bombing campaign the country has suffered in as many years – they do not want there to be a third next year and a fourth the year after that. But promises not to bomb them don’t mean a whole lot: establishing deterrence here means inflicting quite a lot of pain. In practice, if Iran wants future presidents not to repeat this war, the precedent they want to set is “attacking Iran is a presidency-ending mistake.” And to do that, well, they need to end a presidency or at least make clear they could have done.
Iran is thus going to very much want a deal that says ‘America blinked’ on the tin, which probably means at least some remaining nuclear program, a de facto Iranian veto on traffic in the strait and significant sanctions relief, along with formal paper promises of no more air strikes. That’s going to be a hard negotiating position to bridge, especially because Iran can ‘tough it out’ through quite a lot of bombing.
And I do want to stress that. There is a frequent mistake, often from folks who deal in economics, to assume that countries will give up on wars when the economics turn bad. But countries are often very willing to throw good money after bad even on distant wars of choice. For wars close to home that are viewed as existential? Well, the ‘turnip winter‘ where Germans started eating food previous thought fit only for animals (a result of the British blockade) began in 1916. The war did not end in 1916. It did not end in 1917. It did not end until November, 1918. Food deprivation and starvation in Germany was real and significant and painful for years before the country considered surrender. Just because the war is painful for Iran does not mean the regime will cave quickly: so long as they believe the survival of the regime is at stake, they will fight on.
There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.
Strategic Implications
So my conclusion here is that the United States has not yet achieved very much in this war on a strategic level. Oh, tactically, the United States has blown up an awful lot of stuff and done so with very minimal casualties of its own. But countries do not go to war simply to have a war – well, stupid fascist countries do, which is part of why they tend to be quite bad at war – they go to war to achieve specific goals and end-states.
None of the major goals here – regime change, an end to Iran’s nuclear ambitions – have been achieved. If the war ends tomorrow in a ‘white peace,’ Iran will reconstitute its military and proxies and continue its nuclear program. It is in fact possible to display astounding military skill and yet, due to strategic incoherence, not accomplish anything.
So the true, strategic gains here for all of the tactical effectiveness displayed, are functionally nil. Well what did it cost?
Well, first and foremost, to date the lives of 13 American soldiers (290 more WIA), 24 Israelis (thousands more injured), at least a thousand civilian deaths across ‘neutral’ countries (Lebanon mostly, but deaths in Kuwait, Iraq, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, etc) and probably at least a thousand if not more Iranian civilians (plus Iranian military losses). The cost of operations for the United States is reportedly one to two billion dollars a day, which adds up pretty quickly to a decent chunk of change.
All of the military resources spent in this war are in turn not available for other, more important theaters, most obviously the Asia-Pacific (INDOPACOM), but of course equally a lot of these munitions could have been doing work in Ukraine as well. As wars tend to do, this one continues to suck in assets as it rumbles on, so the American commitment is growing, not shrinking. And on top of spent things like munitions and fuel, the strain on ships, air frames and service personnel is also a substantial cost: it turns out keeping a carrier almost constantly running from one self-inflicted crisis to the next for ten months is a bad idea.
You could argue these costs would be worthwhile it they resulted in the destruction of Iran’s nuclear program – again, the key element here is the HEU, which has not been destroyed – or of the Iranian regime. But neither of those things have been achieved on the battlefield, so this is a long ledger of costs set against…no gains. Again, it is not a ‘gain’ in war simply to bloody your enemy: you are supposed to achieve something in doing so.
The next side of this are the economic consequences. Oil and natural gas have risen in price dramatically, but if you are just watching the commodity ticker on the Wall Street Journal, you may be missing some things. When folks talk about oil prices, they generally do so via either $/bbl (West Texas Intermediate – WTI – one-month front-month futures) or BRN00 (Brent Crude Oil Continuous Contracts). These are futures contracts, meaning the price being set is not for a barrel of oil right now but for a barrel of oil in the future; we can elide the sticky differences between these two price sets and just note that generally the figure you see is for delivery in more-or-less one month’s time. Those prices have risen dramatically (close to doubled), but may not reflect the full economic impact here: as the ‘air bubble’ created by the sudden stop of oil shipments expands, physical here-right-now prices for oil are much higher in many parts of the world and still rising.
Essentially, the futures markets are still hedging on the idea that this war might end and normal trade might resume pretty soon, a position encouraged by the current administration, which claims it has been negotiating with Iran (Iran denied the claim). The tricky thing here is that this is a war between two governments – the Trump administration and the Iranian regime – which both have a clear record of lying a lot. The Trump administration has, for instance, repeatedly claimed a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia was imminent, and that war remains ongoing. The markets are thus forced to try and guess everyone’s actions and intentions from statements that are unreliable. Cards on the table, I think the markets are underestimating the likelihood that this conflict continues for some time. Notably, the United States is moving assets into theater – an MEU, elements of the 82 Airborne – which will take some time to arrive (two weeks for the MEU which is still about a week out as I write this) and set up for operations.
In either case, while I am not an expert on oil extraction or shipping, what I have seen folks who are experts on those things say is that the return of normal operations after this war will be very slow, often on the order of ‘every extra week of conflict adds a month to recovery’ (which was Sal Mercogliano’s rule of thumb in a recent video). If the war ends instantly, right now, ship owners will first have to determine that the strait is safe, then ships will have to arrive and begin loading to create space in storage to start up refineries to create space in storage to start up oil wells that have been ‘shut in,’ some of which may require quite a bit of doing to restart. Those ships in turn have to spend weeks sailing to the places that need these products, where some of the oil and LNG is likely to be used to refill stockpiles rather than immediately going out to consumers. For many products, refineries and production at the point of sale – fertilizer plants, for instance – will also need to be restarted. Factory restarts can be pretty involved tasks.
This recovery period doesn’t just get pushed out by 24 hours each day it gets longer as more production is forced to shut down or is damaged in the fighting. As I write this, futures markets for the WTI seem to be expecting oil prices to remain elevated (above $70 or so) well into 2028.
Meanwhile, disruption of fertilizer production, which relies heavily on natural gas products, has the potential to raise food prices globally. Higher global food prices – and food prices have already been elevated by the impact of the War in Ukraine – are pretty strongly associated with political instability in less developed countries. After all, a 25% increase in the price of food in a rich country is annoying – you have to eat more cheaper foods (buy more ramen, etc.). But in a poor country it means people go hungry because they cannot afford food and hungry, desperate people do hungry, desperate things. A spike in food prices was one of the core causes of the 2010 Arab Spring which led in turn to the Syrian Civil War, the refugee crisis of which significantly altered the political landscape of Europe.
I am not saying this will happen – the equally big spike in food prices from the Ukraine War has not touched off a wave of revolutions – but that it increases the likelihood of chaotic, dynamic, unsettled political events.
But it does seem very clear that this war has created a set of global economic headwinds which will have negative repercussions for many countries, including the United States. The war has not, as of yet, made Americans any safer – but it has made them poorer.
Then there are the political implications. I think most folks understand that this war was a misfire for the United States, but I suspect it may end up being a terrible misfire for Israel as well. Israeli security and economic prosperity both depend to a significant degree on the US-Israeli security partnership and this war seems to be one more step in a process that very evidently imperils that partnership. Suspicion of Israel – which, let us be honest, often descends into rank, bigoted antisemitism, but it is also possible to critique Israel, a country with policies, without being antisemitic – is now openly discussed in both parties. More concerning is polling suggesting that not only is Israel underwater with the American public, but more Americans sympathize with Palestinians than Israelis for the first time in American history.
Again, predictions are hard, especially about the future, but it certainly seems like there is an open door to a future where this war is the final nail in the coffin of the American-Israeli security partnership, as it becomes impossible to sustain in the wake of curdling American public opinion. That would be a strategic catastrophe for Israel if it happened. On the security side, with Israel has an independent nuclear deterrent and some impressive domestic military-industrial production the country is not capable of designing and manufacturing the full range of high-end hardware that it relies on to remain militarily competitive despite its size. There’s a reason Israel flies F-35s. But a future president might well cut off spare parts and maintainers for those F-35s, refuse to sell new ones, refuse to sell armaments for them, and otherwise make it very difficult for Israel to acquire superior weapons compared to its regional rivals.
Economic coercion is equally dangerous: Israel is a small, substantially trade dependent country and its largest trading partner is the United States, followed by the European Union. But this trade dependency is not symmetrical: the USA and EU are hugely important players in Israel’s economy but Israel is a trivial player in the US and EU economies. Absent American diplomatic support then, the threat of economic sanctions is quite dire: Israel is meaningfully exposed and the sanctions would be very low cost for the ‘Status Quo Coalition’ (assuming the United States remains a member) to inflict under a future president.
A war in which Israel cripples Iran in 2026 but finds itself wholly diplomatically isolated in 2029 is a truly pyrrhic victory. As Thucydides might put it, an outcome like that would be an “example for the world to meditate upon.” That outcome is by no means guaranteed, but every day the war grinds on and becomes less popular in the United States, it becomes more likely.
But the United States is likewise going to bear diplomatic costs here. Right now the Gulf States have to shelter against Iranian attack but when the dust settles they – and many other countries – will remember that the United States unilaterally initiated by surprise a war of choice which set off severe global economic headwinds and uncertainty. Coming hot on the heels of the continuing drama around tariffs, the takeaway in many places may well be ‘Uncle Sam wants you to be poor,’ which is quite a damaging thing for diplomacy. And as President Trump was finding out when he called for help in the Strait of Hormuz and got told ‘no’ by all of our traditional allies, it is in fact no fun at all to be diplomatically isolated, no matter how powerful you are.
Of course the war, while quickly becoming an expensive, self-inflicted wound for the United States has also been disastrous for Iran. I said this at the top but I’ll say it again: the Iranian regime is odious. You will note also I have not called this war ‘unprovoked’ – the Iranian regime has been provoking the United States and Israel via its proxies almost non-stop for decades. That said, it is the Iranian people who will suffer the most from this war and they had no choice in the matter. They tried to reject this regime earlier this year and many were killed for it. But I think it is fair to say this war has been a tragedy for the Iranian people and a catastrophe for the Iranian regime.
And you may then ask, here at the end: if I am saying that Iran is being hammered, that they are suffering huge costs, how can I also be suggesting that the United States is on some level losing?
And the answer is simple: it is not possible for two sides to both win a war. But it is absolutely possible for both sides to lose; mutual ruin is an option. Every actor involved in this war – the United States, Iran, arguably Israel, the Gulf states, the rest of the energy-using world – is on net poorer, more vulnerable, more resource-precarious as a result.
In short, please understand this entire 7,000+ word post as one primal scream issued into the avoid at the careless, unnecessary folly of the decision to launch an ill-considered war without considering the obvious, nearly inevitable negative outcomes which would occur unless the initial strikes somehow managed to pull the inside straight-flush. They did not and now we are all living trapped in the consequences.
Maybe the war will be over tomorrow. The consequences will last a lot longer.
This is a very interesting analysis, and I realize it’s exactly the kind of analysis this blog has and must have. But man, it’d be nice if ANY mainstream critics of the US administration had any criticism that wasn’t, “this is dumb”, or “they didn’t plan for this”, or “they aren’t following the proper legal channels for this”. I yearn for “this is murderous and criminal and everyone involved should hang”
Tragically for us to get to that point, as long as Bush draws breathe it’ll need to eclipse Afghanistan in pointless horror and cruelty and as bad as this is it’s still many hundreds of thousands of dead from that point.
I’m not sure the deaths of ‘foreigners’, let alone ‘brown foreigners in the middle east’ is what’s going to switch the broader political commentary class to saying ‘this was criminal’. Those who actually care about that are, broadly, already doing so (Brett being one of them, as evidenced by his continual raising of the deaths and suffering this will cause).
What’s going to make these people hang is if they are so stupid that they unseat the USA as the world’s current hegemon, which is looking more and more likely by the day.
The main difference being that, unlike this one, the war in Afghanistan was legal domestically and internationally approved of, coming on the back of a UN resolution. Iraq was famously much less justified, but the combination of both is that Bush ends up with the weird record of having started two wars, and the internationally condemned invasion founded on lies turned out to also be the right one to start.
The other problem being that whilst Bush is the biggest name in the ring, he’s hardly the only one – Clinton started off the sanction regime on the Taliban (the UN resolution to invade re-affirms resolution 1267, which was in 1999), and Obama enacted a surge in troops during his first term.
It therefore serves almost no-one’s political interests to condemn the invasion of Afghanistan (possibly including the Taliban, who, after all, eventually ‘defeated’ the invasion of what could be broadly summarised as ‘all other countries that aren’t Taiwan’ without even being that much of an exageration). It doesn’t serve non-US interests, as other countries supported it, either implicitly through being part of the UN, or explicitly via ‘also invading’. And it doesn’t serve either political party in the US, as both were heavily involved, even if the connection to each is different (especially as Biden got lumped with the unenviable task of admitting they’d lost the war some time ago).
One of the first things that the post says about this war is that it’s illegal. You might interpret that as “not following the proper legal channels”, but IMO “illegal”, as words go, isn’t that different from “criminal”.
That is indeed quite literally “not following the proper legal channels”. I meant “criminal” as in “monstrous” or “morally abhorrent”
I don’t have much patience for an attitude of “People are basically doing what I want them to do, but they are not using the right magic words while doing so!”
Conversely, I have zero patience for people who think legal and constitutional restrictions are merely obstacles to blow through at will. There are very good reasons why pretty much every developed country reserves the power to make war to their parliament, rather than the chief executive.
@Jochen Träm:
I was talking about people who criticize our host for not using the right magic words when expressing his opposition to the war.
“Illegal” and “criminal” are typically considered synonyms.
“Criminal” is a more morally loaded term though (and many jurisdictions including mine do have a category of “petty offence” for something that’s illegal but not considered a crime).
They can be. They can also not be, such as in this case, which is why I specified. “Criminal” has several meanings
I suspect everyone reading this agrees with you emotionally. On a practical level, a nonviolent campaign to get the regime out is twice as likely to succeed as violence. Frustrating as it is, if the price of getting them out of power and stemming the damage is that they live, we have to go that way. If that happens, I’m strongly in favor of making sure they never walk free again or are in any position to leak secrets or profit from what they know, however.
Part of the problem is that the non-violent campaign had already essentially failed for the forseeable future – like China did at Tiananmen square, a sufficiently ruthless regime (with a sufficiently disciplined and equally ruthless army) can suppress a peaceful campaign by force. They generally don’t, because most people believe they are good people, and it’s hard to convince someone that an unarmed teenager shouting rises beyond everyone’s normal experience of teenagers as loud & irritating and into ‘actively evil’. Both the government and, more importantly, its military must at least half way believe that for ‘shoot 10,000 people’ to be an option, not least because no amount of talking about corrupt, greedy, political fat cats is ever going to be sufficient explanation for someone doing the same thing on a private’s salary (they don’t have to convince everyone in the military, just enough that its not a man in a suit ordering several hundred men with guns to do something they really don’t want to, which is a situation that rapidly ceases to exist all of its own)
If no one get hang for the all the things they did in Vietnam, no one is going to get hang for this.
I mean, the US hasn’t gotten more murderous than shooting and blowing little kids into pieces by grenades, has they?
I want everyone to remember that the US struck first. Seventy years ago. We (and Britain) decided that a democratic Iran was not in our interest and installed a dictator.
Iran is the enemy WE made, and we have not once stopped provoking THEM. We have bombed them, launched special operation, had our proxies start wars that killed hundreds of thousands. So yeah, they fight back. But there is no read of Iranian American relations where we are not vastly more the villain. Nothing Iran has done has come close to installing a dictator, or that time we sicked Saddam on them.
“and we have not once stopped provoking THEM.”
There have been various intermittent times of friendlier relations than what you describe.
“Nothing Iran has done has come close to installing a dictator”
The current Iranian regime has installed *itself* in Iran.
The current regime was installed after a referendum generally agreed to be fairly conducted. It then withstood a war of aggression for eight years and has gone through numerous elections since. Iran has also seen a lot of development in the last 40 years. That it is now deeply unpopular among a considerable segment of the population is obvious – just how much and who is less clear. Nor is it clear that a different, more popular regime would be any friendlier to the US or Israel, both of which have conducted years of sabotage, assassination and outright war, much of it targeted at the part of the population least likely to like the current political arrangement (the urban middle classes).
“It then withstood a war of aggression for eight years and has gone through numerous elections since.”
Elections in which only pro-regime candidates were allowed to stand.
“Iran has also seen a lot of development in the last 40 years.”
I think very little of right-wing political arguments along the line of “Yes, they’re murdered really a lot of innocent defenseless people, but have you looked at the economy?”
“That it is now deeply unpopular among a considerable segment of the population is obvious – just how much and who is less clear.”
Yes, which is a point that I myself have made in some other posts in this thread.
“Nor is it clear that a different, more popular regime would be any friendlier to the US or Israel”
I did not say anywhere that it would be.
The spontaneous Iranian Revolution was kidnapped by aggressive Islamists which have kept too much political power since then.
“Nor is it clear that a different, more popular regime would be any friendlier to the US or Israel, both of which have conducted years of sabotage, assassination and outright war, much of it targeted at the part of the population least likely to like the current political arrangement (the urban middle classes).”
It would almost certainly be more friendly to the US and Israel because that option would make it easier to trade with the rest of the world, get investment into the oil industry etc, which would be good for the majority of the populace. The fact that the current government is so locked into an economically damaging foreign policy it what makes it so much less popular that all the other authoritarian states in the Gulf – people know that they would do better under almost any other government in the Gulf.
It is a rare voter who votes to be cannon fodder in some revolutionary’s anti-American crusade, not because everyone loves America – especially given the government its people have presently voted for – but because few people want to be cannon fodder in a crusade against anything.
“The current regime was installed after a referendum generally agreed to be fairly conducted. It then withstood a war of aggression for eight years and has gone through numerous elections since. Iran has also seen a lot of development in the last 40 years. That it is now deeply unpopular among a considerable segment of the population is obvious – just how much and who is less clear.”
———-
I would like to point out that “the current US government is bad” does not equal to “the current Iran regime is very good for the Iranian people”. Especially under an essay in which our host repeatedly stated that the the Iranian regime is *odious*.
The current Iranian government’s installation in Iran (which seemed fairly popular at the time it began, if not now) is not something Iran has done to us, the United States, Raphael. The post you are replying to is discussing the balance of strategic provocations between Iran and the United States.
Weighing that balance, there is the fact that the US propped up the tyrannical Shah for over twenty years, and that the US encouraged and aided Saddam Hussein in waging a highly destructive war against Iran for a further eight years. Iran spent a nearly continuous period of three decades from 1956 to 1988 under intensive, immediate, directly personal oppressions, upheaval, and external warfare as a result of how the US treated Iran during the Cold War.
Decades of embargoes may also be counted in the mix- we can argue that these are “I retaliated against your retaliation” measures, but that logic must be applied consistently. If we consider Iranian aid to the Houthis or Hezbollah as a ‘provocation’ then so too can the Iranians consider a US embargo that is ongoing in the 2020s to be a provocation.
We can compare to this the magnitude of the Iranian provocations against the US. These provocations are real. But they have had relatively little direct effect on any but a tiny minority of Americans. Their effects on, say, Israel or 21st century Iraq are more significant, granted. But those are not provocations against US, only against US client states who have their own strategic situation, their own needs, and their own relevance.
It is very hard to make an honest, full accounting of the relationship between Iran and the United States and come to the conclusion that the US has been more severely hurt by Iran in the history of the two countries’ relationship than the reverse. And we began to inflict these pains on them at a time long in the past, barely within living memory now, at a time when Iran had almost no prior interaction with the United States at all.
“The current Iranian government’s installation in Iran is not something Iran has done to us, the United States”
While you and I believe that I’m not sure the State Dept agrees.
“Weighing that balance, there is the fact that the US propped up the tyrannical Shah for over twenty years”
If they had propped him up more successfully the Iranian people might have been spared the tyrannies of the last forty-seven years. Such as the massacres of a few weeks ago.
“the US encouraged and aided Saddam Hussein in waging a highly destructive war against Iran for a further eight years.”
a) By all accounts that was his own idea
b) Almost all his military equipment was provided by Russia, Irans current supporter. And the rest by France and Germany.
c) If you go around crying “Death to X” I feel you lose the right to complain if X takes the other guys side in a war.
It is as well to remember that the Iranian government are people too. They have as much moral responsibility for their action as anybody else.
I don’t think we can really speculate effectively on counterfactuals of what the previous form of government would have been if it had never been overthrown. All we can say is that there were popular grievances with it at the time that were a basis for support going to the revolution. I don’t think revolutions of that kind can be strictly written off even when the replacing government turns out to be authoritarian and repressive.
As I gather, the phrase “death to X” is often not quite presented in its proper cultural context. As a slogan against America, it’s certainly not friendly, but not necessarily strictly literal.
If you go around crying “Death to X” I feel you lose the right to complain if X takes the other guys side in a war.
I can’t say this from personal experience, but I have heard from people who have some experience with Persian language and literature that it’s an unusually…..florid language (there’s a reason that Persian poetry is famous over large portions of the world, including areas which weren’t ever majority Muslim), and that exaggerated and over-the-top rhetoric is just typical of the language. Again, no personal experience, but I would not necessarily translate an expression directly from Persian into English and expect it to carry the same connotation.
I recall hearing Iranian people talk about taxi drivers exclaiming “death to traffic” during rush hour.
It’s a bit like claiming that the United States is a culture where the vast majority of the population are unapologetic serial rapists, as evidenced by the ubiquity of Americans responding to even relatively mild personal offense by threatening each other with sexual assault (i.e. “f**k you”).
“If they had propped him up more successfully the Iranian people might have been spared the tyrannies of the last forty-seven years.”
This is a bit like saying that if only the United States had assisted Hitler in defeating the Soviet Union, the peoples of Eastern Europe might’ve been spared the tyrannies of the Warsaw Pact.
While technically true in a narrow sense, it’s not particularly honest to disregard the prior tyrannies of the regime that was defeated, or to dismiss outright the idea that the new regime might genuinely be, if not a positive good, then at least the lesser evil.
Perhaps someone can say how Imperial Iran was anymore tyrannical than any other American ally in the 1970s Middle East. Or enemy. Or the modern Iranian regime that replaced it.
There is just something weird about denouncing America because it allied with Iran fifty years ago when it was like all the other countries in the region.
If only there was a contemporary comparative study available we could consult…
https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/act40/001/1973/en/
A report made during the old regime, and made many years before the new regime took power, can hardly use a comparison between the old and new regimes. Or am I missing something?
Ad9 asked “Perhaps someone can say how Imperial Iran was anymore tyrannical than any other American ally in the 1970s Middle East. Or enemy. Or the modern Iranian regime that replaced it.” The Amnesty report obviously can’t do the last, but we can hope it would be of some use with the first two.
Random, so far as I can tell from that report, 1970s Iran did not have a government significantly more brutal than its neighbours.
The unusual features of the current Iranian regime, then, are not a consequence of the unusual features of the previous regime. Partly because that regime came to an end before the great majority of current Iranians were born, but mostly because the previous regime had no unusually features and was boringly normal for the area.
The Shahs boys would appear to have tortured a smallish number of political opponents, not shot down tens of thousands of unarmed people in the streets, as the current Iranian government did earlier this year.
Do you think a person who is critical of US foreign policy for being friendly with pre-revolution Iran on ethical grounds is any less critical of how much they support the government of countries like Saudi Arabia?
That being said, the main distinction is not “Iran under the shah is worse than Arabia under the House of Saud”, it is “America provided material assistance to a more authoritarian government assuming power from a more egalitarian one because the latter was engaging in policies that it did not like”. America actively made Iran worse, prior to that prompting the response of revolution.
Isator, I thought that this was a comment thread about why the current Iranian government is so much more explicitly and expensively anti-America than any other government in the region. Saying that America treated Iran like any other country in the region half a century ago, when it was governed like any other country in the region, does not do that.
“There have been various intermittent times of friendlier relations than what you describe.”
The problem here is that the US more or less took over the position the UK used to have, IE: Aiding a local strongman that they considered an ally. Naturally lots of Iranians did not see that as a friendly thing to do. (the strongmen in question, be they Qajar or Pahlavi, had different opinions ofc.)
I yearn for “this is murderous and criminal and everyone involved should hang”
Trust me, I dream of this kind of thing too. But, considering the other side has a lock on all political authority right now, it’s going to take a while.
> hungry, desperate people do hungry, desperate things
As someone who was in Sri Lanka when the gasoline and fertilizer ran out in ’22 I cannot stress enough how true this is and how quickly even a relatively rich and stable society can change under stress.
“my view is that Benjamin Netanyahu has is playing an extremely short game”
->is playing
“And if I can reason this out, Iran – which has been planning for this exact thing for forty years certainly can.”
I think there should be a 2nd em dash after “years”.
“Germans started eating food previous thought fit only for animals”
->previously
“with Israel has an independent nuclear deterrent and some impressive domestic military-industrial production”
-> while Israel has
Examples of when/how Iran has attacked the US?
They provided a lot of the more sophisticated weapons used by Iraqi insurgents. Notably explosively-formed penetrators, that could be used in IEDs and penetrate armored vehicles.
They did – after assisting the US in toppling Saddam, when the then US government started talking openly about invading Iran (remember that debate about ‘going left or right from Baghdad’ – to either Damascus or Tehran?). Then they cooperated with the US in driving ISIS out of Iraq. Then they opposed the US’ aim of toppling Assad, seeing (correctly at the time) that this would throw control to ISIS. Which they did effectively. So the US, at Israeli instigation, murdered Soleimani while he was being received by the Iraqi government.
So it’s been a two-way street all along.
IIRC didn’t they also provide the US with intelligence that helped them fight the Taliban around the time of the 2001 invasion?
Thank you for this detailed explanation. There are no winners here, just losers. Unfortunately this loss includes people who paid with their lives, and others who will pay with their pocketbooks.
I don’t agree that it is impossible for both sides to win a war. For example, if Ukraine were to defeat Russia convincingly, then Ukraine would win and Russia would have a chance of winning. In fact, losing is pretty much Russia’s only hope of winning; it’s the only way to delegitimate the regime and hope for improvement.
For the Russian people, hopefully. For Putin’s regime, that would still be a resounding loss. It’s not like you can say the Japanese and Germany won WW2 just because they ended up improving themselves from it.
I think this is the key piece of context.
We’re not talking about losing and winning from a humanitarian perspective in this context. It’s whichever regime is in charge that’s making the decisions, so it’s winning and losing for them that changes the decision-making calculus.
Russians no longer accept “hoping for improvement” as a payment method.
You obviously want your side to win so you can praise your victory and pretend it was not only well deserved but also good on the loser. And if that loser is still miserable, huh, you can pretend they had nothing to lose anyway.
Bret’s analysis is completely correct, which leads to the question of why the war with Iran is happening at all, and it comes down to just one factor: the worldview and psychology of Donald J. Trump. It goes beyond mere stupidity or amateurish ignorance (although Trump has plenty of both). By Trump’s worldview the world is divided into winners and losers. Compromise, tactical concession, sober prudency, settling for half a loaf– in Trump’s eyes these are the half-measures of weaklings, people lacking either the means or the conviction to do what it takes to win; and therefore using them amounts to being a loser. Even the devastating counter-measures being undertaken by Iran are seen as a vindication: by this calculation, Iran was always secretly planning to “play us for suckers”, and have now shown their hand, thereby showing that negotiation was an error. Trump evidently believes that either the USA can crush Iran or that the Iranians will come to that conclusion first and sue for peace. But patience is not one of Trump’s virtues and one wonders what he’ll do when weeks drag into months and the situation hasn’t improved.
Mostly true, though I think a lot of people laying the ideological groundwork since long before Trump got into politics is part of the reason, too.
“But patience is not one of Trump’s virtues and one wonders what he’ll do when weeks drag into months and the situation hasn’t improved.”
Oh, other people, including in this thread, have already speculated on that: He might well try to do a u-turn by starting to talk a lot about how The Jews Made Him Do It and it’s therefore really important to finally turn against The Jews.
While I broadly agree with this, I personally think it’s foolish to lay all of this blame at the feet of the senile old nutcase. There are a lot of people surrounding him who are enabling this, or may well be driving it with Trump simply a populist figurehead.
I think it’s naive to think that simply getting rid of Trump would prevent this sort of thing happening in the future.
Nearly everyone who helps make this kind of thing possible has already rallied firmly around Trump. There are anti-Iran Democrats and ‘apolitical’ hawkish figures within the Beltway, sure. But if Harris were president I am almost 100% sure we wouldn’t be fighting this war and there would be no realistic chance of us ending up in it.
This is not a truly bipartisan outcome. It is a direct result of the Republican Party actively promoting the idea that brutish, self-serving, cruel and ignorant government focused on spectacle and ‘beating’ foreigners and designated second-class citizens is the objectively correct way for a president to handle both domestic and foreign policy. The kind of person who still, in 2008, thought Bush Junior had been a good president was always going to think that Trump was a great president.
True, though my point was more about whether Trump is an architect or a tool. I veer towards the latter.
Like a lot of people that history has put in a position to make impactful decisions, Trump is neither an architect nor a tool. He does not actually control everything that happens, but his character and his personal choices set large forces in motion in ways that they simply do not and cannot move without someone of similar inclination doing the same thing.
And people cut from the same cloth as Trump, with that same degree of invincible privilege along with all the other traits, aren’t that common.
Yeah that seems like a reasonable synthesis. I suppose I detected a whiff in the comment I was initially replying to of a current of thought that seems prevalent in many people: the idea that if Trump is suddenly removed, none of this madness would be happening. Maybe that’s disingenuous, but I don’t think it’s entirely misplaced.
Trump has been instrumental in getting various different people with really dodgy judgement into positions where they can exercise power. He has provided ample cover for them with his cult of personality. But I question how much he is ‘driving the bus’ and how much he is a necessary liability for the people who are actually driving the bus.
I question how much of this ‘comes down to just one factor: the worldview and psychology of Donald J. Trump’, vs how much of this comes down to the attempt of various people behind Donald J. Trump to ensure that the unreliable, unpredictable cultic figurehead of their political movement stays in power to allow them to keep doing what they’re doing (whatever that ends up being).
It’s likely to be somewhere in-between the two extremes of ‘Trump is nothing but a figurehead’ and ‘Trump is running the entire show and everyone else is opportunistically following in his wake’, as you say, but I didn’t particularly get that impression from the comment I was replying to. And my personal take is that Trump is more figurehead than bus-driver, though I could be wrong of course.
There’s a fair amount of inverse “good tsar, bad boyars” going around about the current US government; whether it’s the urge to personalize and thereby contain all the bad stuff enacted by the state or whether it’s an instinct to simplify the fight I’m unqualified to even start guessing at.
I do think there are certain things that are very… personalized, in the Trump cabinet. But it’s not *just* Trumps own personal foibles but also the kind of people he has picked as his cohorts.
And that, I think, is one of the major differences from his first term: It was a lot more institutional.
it’s the urge to personalize and thereby contain all the bad stuff enacted by the state or whether it’s an instinct to simplify the fight I’m unqualified to even start guessing at.
I think it’s copium and/or hopium, personally: a lot of people (understandably) want to believe that this horrific status quo is all Trump’s fault, because that would be much easier to deal with (he is, after all, 80 years old and in terrible shape).
I don’t know if Donald Trump is really senile. But he is definitely too incompetent to even recognise competence when he sees it.
Bret’s analysis is completely correct, which leads to the question of why the war with Iran is happening at all,
I think that Bret’s analysis misses one big thing, which is that Evangelical Protestants are, today (not really in say January 2016, but today) the core of Donald Trump’s voting base, and they really love Israel and really despise Iran, for reasons that they see as religious and ideological. If you see this war in terms of concrete cost-and-benefit strategic concerns, instead of in terms of ideology and values, you’re going to miss something important.
Trump has now become the “American Tojo” that RFK didn’t want his brother to be when he counseled JFK to NOT listen to all the military leaders and cabinet officials who urged JFK to bomb Cuba without warning in 1962 during the missile crisis.
A solid analysis, but I have to disagree with the “illegal” part. Was Obama’s bombing of Libya illegal? And here’s a blog post that lays out a good number of undeclarred wars that the US engaged in early in it’s history: https://www.rodmartin.org/p/is-trumps-iran-strike-constitutional?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
If you’re talking about the 2011 military intervention, that was carried out in accordance with a resolution of the UN Security Council. The current standard of international law concerning just war is based on the UN Charter, which allows for nations to engage in war for reasonable self-defence and at the direction of the Security Council in the interests of maintaining international peace.
Iran was not an immediate and direct threat to the territory or sovereignty of the United States that would make engaging in war acts like this legal under those principles.
I think Gamereg might be talking about US domestic law rather than international law. And yes, under that, you can easily make the case that 2011 was illegal.
There is a gap between “we are acting to honor treaty frameworks ratified by the Senate” and “laws governing when we can go to war? What laws? I don’t need no stinkin’ laws!”
Looking through the UN Charter, (I believe Chapter VII is the one you’re referring to), I don’t see any explicit statement that no member nation can initiate armed conflict without Security Council authorization. Nor do I see any penalties perscribed for any unauthorized use of military force. And yes, like Raphael said, I was referring to domestic law, which is what the blog I linked to discussed. Given how toothless the UN is, and the fact that repressive regimes like Iran are member states, I have a hard time caring what the UN thinks.
Try Chapter 1 Article 2:
All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.
All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.
And Chapter VI Article 33:
The parties to any dispute, the continuance of which is likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace and security, shall, first of all, seek a solution by negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies or arrangements, or other peaceful means of their own choice.
The Security Council shall, when it deems necessary, call upon the parties to settle their dispute by such means.
The US signed and ratified the UN Charter in 1945, which I believe gives it the same force as US domestic law?
“The US signed and ratified the UN Charter in 1945, which I believe gives it the same force as US domestic law?”
According to the Supremacy Clause, yes:
“This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.[”
However, right-wingers of almost all stripes in the USA have traditionally pretended that that clause somehow doesn’t really exist, and that international law of any kind doesn’t really exist, either. It’s something even neocons and paleocons have traditionally agreed on.
Russia is also a member of the Security Council; and Russia’s attempt at naked conquest of Ukraine (given only the tiniest and thinnest of fig leaves as supposed “regime change”) more or less signaled that renouncing war as a means of national policy is dead in the 21st century.
Repressive regimes like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Russia or Israel being a member of the UN is in part the reason why the UN can function at all. If it was just another club for the NATO boys then its utility would be even more limited than it already is.
I wouldn’t necessarily conflate NATO with “liberal democracies” (after all, Portugal was a founding member, Greece and Turkey were always members in good standing, and some of its members today aren’t particularly enthusiastic about liberalism), but that nitpick aside, yes, this is dead right. The whole point of the UN is to be a forum where countries with *very different ideological perspectives* can settle their differences through diplomacy rather than, well, war. As poorly as it accomplishes that objective (and I’d say that’s largely because countries like the US have too much power, not too little) it’s certainly better than *not* having a United Nations.
“And here’s a blog post that lays out a good number of undeclarred wars that the US engaged in early in it’s history”
If something is illegal, it doesn’t become legal because people did it before.
Then any member of Congress or pundit who says this current conflict is illegal should have the guts to go on record stating that EVERY armed conflict that didn’t involve an official declaration of war by Congress, regardless of which president initiated it, was illegal, and stand by that statement even if a future president they like initiates unauthorized armed conflict.
I say again, Democrat supporters have frequently been critical of Barack Obama’s war record.
I can’t speak for Democratic politicians, but I’ve been commenting on politics on the internet since the mid-2000s, and I was extremely critical of Obama’s Libya intervention at the time, both in terms of the rationale and the actions, and most of Joe Biden’s foreign policy too (although at least he confined himself mostly to economic and diplomatic pressure). For that matter I’m opposed to most US foreign policy interventions historically, whether they happen under Democratic or Republican presidencies.
Thanks Bret. A lot of this I just heard last night, in a long interview with Scott Ritter. He has very blatant biases, but said pretty much the same as you. He did add, however, that Trump’s suggestion of taking Kharg Island is sending Marines to die, for no reason, with the only resupply from the air.
Three notes: one, it’s clear to a lot of us that Netanyahu pushed Trump into this. And Netanyahu has a history of trying decapitation strikes on his enemies, and it *always* fails, but he keeps thinking it will the next time.
Second is that Trump is now semi-blaming Hegseth for pushing it.
Finally, the Ford, largest aircraft carrier ever built… is now in Greece for repairs, and may be for a year. So we are now down to 10 carrier groups. The one remaining in the Gulf I strongly suspect needs major reprovisioning at this point. Meanwhile, Iran has struck most of the US bases in the area, thereby degrading their usefulness. Yes, there’s another carrier on the way, but IIRC that’s at least a week away. I understand that Israeli jets need refueling to return to Israel… while we lost one refueling tanker and one damaged. The result of all this is the Trump & Hegseth promised “massive strikes” are about as real… well, I’ve already seeing memes saying that the US is in Bagdad Bob territory for believability.
Aaah, that explains why there’s been so much desperation from Trump and co to get their Gulf and European allies to support them.
Not desperate enough to promise to do anything whatsoever for them in exchange. Perhaps we have finally found a lie that would be too outrageous to say, even for them.
All this makes sense, but I would add one thought on why Trump imagined decapitating Iran’s leadership would collapse the government: he can’t imagine a government that’s anything more than the person in charge. In other words, just as he can’t trust and thus thinks only thinks suckers can or would trust, he think he’s a king and without him there’s no country, so without the current ayatollah there’s no regime.
What boggles my mind is that, having legitimized the murder of foreign heads of state, he still plays golf four days a week, out in the open in the era of cheap drone warfare.
I think a more rational actor in Trump’s place might consider that potentially hostile nations are still a long distance away to deploy drones and might still deem such an attack upon the United States to not be in their self-interest.
Trump himself probably just assumes that nobody would dare.
Although… I would not ascribe any valour to it, but I would acknowledge that Trump himself does not appear to give visible indicators of a man traumatised by attempts having been made on his own life that came close enough to success to actually strike him.
I’m pretty sure the Secret Service is very concerned about a cheap FPV drone with a hand grenade attached and takes measures.
“I would acknowledge that Trump himself does not appear to give visible indicators of a man traumatised by attempts having been made on his own life that came close enough to success to actually strike him.”
While it’s becoming increasingly difficult to determine between conspiracy and reality, I see two potential explanations for this:
1. Trump is so narcissistic that he simply believes he is incapable of being in actual danger.
2. Trump has not actually experienced an attempt on his own life that came close enough to actually strike him.
Well, explanation 2 would have to argue very convincingly against that one time Trump was shot in the ear by an assassin.
An ear that seemed to recover miraculously quickly for an 80yr old…
I suspect that his injury was caused by secondary frag rather than an actual bullet. (There were actual bullets flying around that day, because someone in the audience was killed.)
Quite possibly, though it’s also possible that they just shot someone in the audience as part of the ploy.
That’s what makes this such a tricky thing to get to the bottom of. It genuinely could be either, and the information we have at hand isn’t sufficient to clarify it either way.
Mighty bloody suspicious that he doesn’t seem in the least bit paranoid (or even cautious) though…
3. Trump simply doesn’t do thoughtful introspection. Even after close brushes with death. Knowing him, that seems like the most plausible explanation to me. And keep in mind that this stance has become a serious feature of his followers’ ideology. See, for instance, Marc Andreessen’s recent comments.
That his ear bears no evidence of this, that a photographer was set up for the perfect shot, and that this picture became the defining image of his campaign, suggests otherwise.
Look, if the world only exists to have you in it, and ceases to exist after you die, then it doesn’t make sense to spend any time worrying about
Strongly disagree.
I’ve been through my share of dangerous experiences–including multiple people trying to kill me with guns, hitting close enough that the rock chips drew blood. (For what it’s worth I’m not in the military, just a field geologist.) I doubt that 99% of the people who know me are aware of this. Even my family didn’t know it happened until I told them; it simply didn’t impact me once I’d gotten my team away from the danger.
How a person responds to events like attempted murder is going to be highly variable. I’ve known people who were shot and who thought it was just a funny story; I’ve known others who were in far less danger and became absolute wrecks. There is NO generalizable, stereotyped human response to danger, and speculation about the mental state of someone based on how they respond to a murder attempt is entirely futile when it is not self-serving. There may be other evidence, but Trump’s lack of reaction to being shot is well within what I’d consider normal range for human behavior–treating it as an (extreme) inconvenience when it happened, and irrelevant after.
For the record, I think most of the “evaluation” of Trump’s reaction are attempts at post-hoc justifications to support a priori conclusions. People who hate the man are interpreting this event in the worst way possible. I’m not a fan of Trump–his pushing of Christian nationalism alone would make me an enemy, as it puts me in serious danger–but I still think critical thinking needs to be applied.
and might still deem such an attack upon the United States to not be in their self-interest.
This, exactly. Not only would it bring down apocalyptic retribution on the heads of any country or party that was responsible, but I don’t even think it would accomplish that much. On foreign policy, at least, the circle that Trump has gathered around him are probably even worse than he is, and certainly no better.
I don’t think it would be that difficult for a competent conspiracy to find a patsy to take the blame (again) for taking out a head of state that is targeted, and deflect any responsibility.
@Kevin,
No, I don’t think that would work. If Donald Trump ever was to…..become incapacitated through other than natural causes, the Republican Party and his inner circle would just go after anyone they saw as a foreign or domestic enemy (Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Russia, China, the Democratic Party, anyone perceived as “Communist” or “Islamist”, the dreaded transgender antifa, and assorted other enemies). Whether or not there was a paper trail linking them to the act- if there isn’t, they will just cook one up.
Hector, would they be doing this out of a heroic desire to avenge their beloved leader?
If not why would they be risking war with *Russia and China*, with all their nukes?
@ad9,
Hector, would they be doing this out of a heroic desire to avenge their beloved leader?
Yes, exactly that.
Hector, you are the first person to tell me that anyone in the upper regions of the Republican Party has any affection for Trump at all. Much less that they would be willing to risk nuclear war for his sainted memory.
@ad9,
The Republican “base”, or a large chunk of it, thinks about their sainted leader exactly this way. I don’t think you get how unhinged these people are.
Hector, I am sure they would happily demand the execution of a hundred thousand Democrats, including all their elected officials and a law that only Republican votes be counted in future elections. Those are things that benefit them and their faction and their power.
They won’t demand nuclear war, because that might get them hurt instead of other people.
You are making an assumption here about what Trump assumes other people would assume about the consequences of killing him. That is a lot of assumptions for you to make.
And what “apocalyptic retribution” would be brought down on Iran? You cannot threaten people with the possibility of an act you are committing already.
What boggles my mind is that, having legitimized the murder of foreign heads of state, he still plays golf four days a week, out in the open in the era of cheap drone warfare.
Well, for countries in conflict, they are following the dictum “Never interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake”
If Trump died, the USA might end up with a competent head of state.
There’s no speculative element to it. If Trump dies before his term ends, JD Vance becomes president.
Is he competent?
Definitely more competent. Not any better in a moral sense, but that is a different question than competence.
Vance might be more competent, but he’s also vastly less charismatic.
I agree.
Also, he is vastly more reprehensible morally, since he unlike Trump, probably know what is right, but ignores it.
Definitely more competent. Not any better in a moral sense, but that is a different question than competence.
Trump and Netanyahu’s fondness for murdering leaders they don’t like is surely going to rebound upon them one day, I have to assume. Why would they be exempt if they declare open season on “enemy” leaders?
Or more likely, rebound on their successors.
I understand that we have been living in “weeks where decades happen”, to quote
LeninGeorge Galloway*, for quite a while – but I am nevertheless incredibly surprised that so far, only one person out of the dozens to have had commented on this blog had recalled that Trump already broke a very similar taboo when ordering the assassination General Soleimani (which also killed a Brigadier General and three lower-ranking Iranian officers – in addition to a deputy of Iraq’s pro-Iranian armed formations and four of the latter’s staff.)Even at the time, many people had judged Iran’s response (a missile attack which injured 110 US servicemen but avoided any fatalities) inadequate next to something so severe – and in hindsight, they were clearly proven right.** Afterwards, Iran actually was known to have aimed for assassinations of not just Trump, but of any one out of a dozen or so of his officials they judged responsible for the attack. Their failure to kill even fairly low-ranking members of National Security Council with limited security had likely represented the final, total failure of deterrence against the kind of an attack we had just seen. If Iran failed at any of those assassinations then, why would it succeed now, when Trump has full Secret Service protection?
* Yes, it’s actually been this notorious figure of the modern day who first said the exact words that he himself attributed to Lenin)
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lenin-decades-quote/
** In fairness, it’s entirely possible Iranian leadership intended to take further retaliatory steps immediately after those missile attacks but had to abandon them after their air defence ended up downing a Ukrainian airliner with 130 of their citizens aboard, with a total death toll of 176. While technically fewer people died than when USN Ticonderoga cruiser Vincennes downed an Iranian airliner with 290 people aboard in 1988, thousands of Iranians justifiably didn’t care for this comparison and protested en masse anyway. (I recall the pretzel logic of some conservative commentators at the time – that Trump cannot be held responsible for casualties on a plane that was only endangered because his operation placed Iranian air defence on peak alert – but that if the protests in response to that shootdown ended up toppling IRI, he ought to be credited for that.)
A remarkable sign of that period is that some protesters apparently chanted “Our enemy is right here; They lie to us that it’s America” and refused to walk over American and Israeli flags that were painted on asphalt in front of their route. With the ongoing air campaign already responsible for >1,500 dead civilians and counting and many more getting to witness the destruction firsthand (i.e. the entire Tehran having to choke on a cloud of burning oil) I somehow doubt we’ll hear such sentiments in a foreseeable future.
A very thoughtful analysis which I largely agree with. I do wonder about one factor: what, if anything, will be the effect of the killing of so many top members of the Iranian regime? As you point out, the regime is pretty institutionalized, so these strikes have not caused its collapse but is there a point at which they compel compliance from the surviving leaders? Perhaps there are a few leaders who do aspire to martyrdom, as there seem to be, but I suspect they’re in a minority. Iranian policy, though provocative, has tended to be relatively restrained these last few decades, in that they’ve avoided the kinds of actions that would produce a war like this. (Which I think they didn’t expect) Is there a point at which Khameini Jr. (or whoever) decides that they’ll make a bad deal rather than be personally killed? I don’t know and it hasn’t happened yet but this kind of mass decapitation of the leadership is a relatively novel factor in modern warfare.
Israel has done similar things with Hamas and Hezbollah, and they are still there, and uncompelled. Bear in mind that every threat is a promise to take the threat away if the other guy does what you want. If your promises are not credible, nor are your threats.
What this does to the regimes ability to sustain itself domestically, I do not know. A process of depending on an ever smaller and ever more radical base can leave you with very few supporters.
Especially because the regime was already unpopular. You’re right that Trump has a credible commitment problem given how erratic he is which does complicate things. Hamas and Hezbollah have stuck around despite losing a lot of their leaders, although their situation is trickier, because fighting Israel is their raison d’etra. By contrast, Iran would only benefit from not wasting its money sponsoring radical groups. The question is if they could survive the legitimacy hit.
Israel is already seen as enacting an All-But-Genocide on the nearby Palestinian citizens (the way the Gaza War went and is going doesn’t help the optics); for them to turn into the offensive and start mass-murdering head of states would just galvanize the Muslim population there I can imagine.
Killing large numbers of civilians is not the same thing as killing the leadership of a deeply unpopular regime. Not saying it will be effective but I think the backlash from what Israel did in Gaza is likely to be larger than from blowing up the Islamic Republic’s elites.
That really depends. A lot of who you have to deal with is after all *other leadership groups*. Who naturally do not want to get blown up. And of course blowing up the negotiators is going to make negotiations more difficult in a lot more *direct* way than blowing up civilians.
Right, it’s different. Specifically, if you do one of those things, what deters response from potential intervening countries is thinking, “Yes but, at least they aren’t doing the other thing.”
I consider Benjamin Netanyahu to be a war criminal. However, this is an accession again him personally and some other members of his government. I have nothing against Jews in general.
I don’t want to be “that” guy/gal, but I think I must point out this little typo:
“The people are not important…”
when I’m positive you meant either:
‘ not unimportant ‘ or ‘ NOT not important ‘.
In the current discussion it makes a helluva difference.
Already corrected; were you going by the version in the automated email?
Just since when did mass aerial bombardment cause regime change? Starting with, say, the Spanish civil war (since mass aerial bombardment didn’t really exist before then):
Franco won by boots on the ground, not his opponents surrendering to the Luftwaffe.
The UK, in 1940, despite the Blitz, had no intention of overthrowing the King (or Churchill)
Germany, in 1944 didn’t overthrow Naziism. Russian tanks in Berlin did that.
Japan, in 1945, didn’t try to overthrow their emperor, although they kicked a few warmongers out. The [nuclear, but also fire] bombing didn’t do it – the invasion did.
North Korea didn’t revolt against Kim Jong Il.
North Vietnam didn’t revolt against Ho Chi Minh [about THE failure of mass bombing].
In Afghanistan, the Taliban just melted into the hills, then came back. No amount of bombing made them surrender.
Iraq I left the regime entirely intact.
Iraq II didn’t cause regime change until, again, boots on the ground finally arrested Saddam Hussein.
et flippin’ cetera.
The Japanese did capitulate after the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, this was based on false information possibly resulting from torture.
Strategic bombing as a concept— that you can cost-effectively target a nation’s high-value targets and inflict enough destruction upon them to cripple that nation’s war-making capacity— has a dubious track record. Only nuclear weapons have a high enough ratio of destruction to cost to salvage Giulio Douhet’s concept, which was based upon the presumptions and perspective of technology in the post- World War One era. By August of 1945 Japan was prostrate and reduced to hoping that a suicidal enough resistance by Japan’s civilians might inflict unacceptable enough casualties upon Allied invaders to allow for some truce less than absolute surrender. The atomic bombs simply allowed the pro-surrender faction in Japan to save face; how do you fight an invincible superweapon?
I think this analysis is generally correct but is missing a few things.
First, Russia currently has three allies: China (dubious at best), North Korea (demonstrably incompetent), and Iran (their best support). I don’t believe we can discuss any action against Iran without considering the impacts on the Ukraine war. There may be some strategy of pulling Iran’s attention back home and away from Ukraine–enough people have called for it in the past. To be clear, I don’t think Trump is thinking in these terms (he appears to be very impulsive), but there may be members of his Cabinet and inner circle who do. See Cuba.
Second, Trump is personally under significant pressure. He’s in the Epstein Files and when countries are arresting hereditary royalty a sitting president guilty of far greater crimes must necessarily feel uncomfortable. His tariffs would be a joke if they weren’t such a problem. He’s annoyed ALL of our allies at this point, outright threatening war with some of them. He’s looking more and more mentally unfit for office. (Please note that I’m not giving my views here; much of this is objectively true and the rest is common enough perception.) Trump NEEDS a win to maintain power. And since he made his presidency about being macho and manly, he needs a military win. Iran, with the revolts and water crisis, looked like a soft target. Even if my previous paragraph is true, it’s also true that this war of choice was brought about because Trump personally felt the need to secure his political power.
“Trump NEEDS a win to maintain power.”
Why? He is President. In what way does not having a win cause him to stop being President?
If the midterm elections this November give the Democrats a majority in one house, Trump will never get anything he wants through Congress again. If they get a majority in both house, even more so. If they get big enough majorities they can impeach him (and he stops being President) or push through bills he hates and override his vetoes.
There is a reason he is pushing so hard to suppress the votes of married women and anyone else who can’t jump through the complicated red tape requirements.*
* Even assuming that the requirements are fairly enforced, just like they were in literacy tests for voting. (This is sarcasm, since they weren’t.)
“In what way does not having a win cause him to stop being President?”
I take it you do not understand American politics. Look up the term “lame duck” sometime–just because you hold the title doesn’t mean you hold the power.
There are a few ways Trump can lose power while still retaining the title. First, Democrats can win enough seats in Congress to effectively block him. Or enough Republicans can defect on important issues to render his attempts at making policy futile. We’re already seeing this happen to some extent.
Second, his Cabinet and those close to him can turn against him. This would leave him ostensibly in power–and holding the bag if the Iran thing (or Greenland thing, or tariff thing, or ICE thing, or…) goes belly-up. These people can build support outside of Trump’s sphere, either through consolidating their own power within the Republican Party or trying to reach across the aisle to the Democrats. Again, we’re seeing this happen to some extent already.
The American people can also turn against him in significant numbers. The Left turning against him wouldn’t impact him much–his campaign was built on angering the Left–but if enough Bud Light drinking dudes in the Rust Belt turn against him, he will quickly discover that titles don’t mean a lot in the USA. Other presidents have run into similar opposition. Again, see “lame duck”.
There’s also the obvious cognitive decline and declining health. The man is not well, and the presidency is extremely stressful. If he screws up badly enough his enemies may get enough support to push him out for incompetence–a first in the nation’s history, but Trump’s done enough of those to deserve a few being done back to him.
Remember, the USA is all about the next election. The reality is that Trump is about one foot out the door already. He keeps floating the idea of a third term, but I doubt he will live long enough even if he is stupid enough to try such a flagrantly illegal act (which would require many other people to commit flagrantly illegal acts to have any hope of success). He has a few years in the Oval Office, then he’s gone. Even if HE doesn’t know it, his supporters do. Which is why they support him–they believe that by supporting Trump they increase their chances at winning the next election. If Trump comes off as someone who showed Iran what’s what, and pushed the world around with tariffs, and is generally a hard, strong man for a hard, strong people, his supporters will win elections. If he comes off as the person who humiliated the USA on the world stage, got his butt kicked by a second-rate country that can’t even give its people enough water to survive, and turned the EU (or China) into the dominant superpower…..well, the myth of American Exceptionalism is deeply engrained and not kind to those who threaten the myth.
Basically, the presidency isn’t a monarchy. It’s not the sole source of power. Those around Trump are VERY aware of how his actions reflect on them, and their chances at re-election or higher office. Trump is swimming in a school of sharks; via Iran he’s chummed the water. If he can control the frenzy it could work out for him even if it doesn’t for the nation (not a new concept with this president). If he can’t, he’ll experience what sharks in feeding frenzies tend to experience.
That is an argument that the President will have less power if his party do badly at the mid-terms. Which is true. But he will still be President. The elections are no more existential for him than for any other sitting 2nd term President.
“That is an argument that the President will have less power if his party do badly at the mid-terms.”
No. Most of that has to do with things that are happening right now and have nothing to do with elections.
Then they are not existential issues for his presidency, and while he might LIKE to do something about them, he does not NEED to.
When it comes to the crunch, the only thing a president NEEDS to do is avoid being successfully impeached. And the best way to do that is to avoid doing things that are both criminal and fantastically unpopular. It’s not hard.
@Dinwar,
Russia has other allies, to varying degrees, but most of them are fairly soft rather than hard allies, and they’re all even less powerful, in a military and economic sense, than Iran.
Others have questioned the “illegal” adjective attached to this operation, some appealing to notions in US law. I’ve tried to read all of the relevant comments, but I don’t think that I’ve seen anyone make quite this point.
It is quite unclear to me whether “illegal war” (and similar phrases) has any meaning in the US system. True, the Constitution says that only Congress can declare war. And, true, Congress hasn’t declared war during Trump’s Presidency. That must mean these wars are “illegal”, right?
But, constitutions (and laws) aren’t self-enforcing. By themselves, they are worth no more (and probably less) than the paper/parchment/whatever they are written on. Institutions (and the people in them) are necessary for enforcing things.
When we look at the state of the institutions, the failings aren’t merely that Congress hasn’t declared war during Trump’s Presidency. No, Congress hasn’t declared war during Trump’s LIFETIME.
The US hasn’t had a functioning concept of “illegal war” for several decades at this point, and arguing about whether Trump’s invasions are “illegal” or not are merely distractions, keeping good people from focusing on the larger picture: the United States has fallen, and the world will be lucky to escape with merely an eight-digit death toll.
The long-term best case scenario would be that this spirals into a catastrophe so bad it irreversibly ruins the republican party, and the next democratic president completely and permanently abandons Israel to it’s fate, and then makes some extremely tentative overtures towards normalizing relations with Iran, ideally in exchange for some domestic liberalization reforms in Iran.
Alternatively, the Middle East uses this as an excuse to resolve their issues internally. It’ll be a bloodbath for a while, and I of course deplore the loss of life should this arise. However, in the long run it may be better. A LOT of problems in the Middle East stem from colonialization–specifically the intentional setting of boarders to divide and weaken the resultant nations. If there is a general regional war maps would be redrawn, and there’s a good chance that either 1) the entire area would come under one ruler (making dealing with them easier), or 2) the various groups in the region would establish boundaries that make sense to them, resulting in relative stability (even if they’re not all friendly to the USA).
I remember that “just let them fight it out” was also a common sentiment as the solution to the troubles in Ireland/Northern Ireland, and the conflicts created by the breakup of Yugoslavia.
Europeans fought each other to “resolve their issues” in the Thirty Years War, the Napoleonic wars, WW1, WW2, and numerous others in between. Three centuries of redrawing maps in regional wars didn’t work for Europeans, so I don’t see any reason to think it would work for the Middle East.
Colonialization didn’t help the Middle East, but it didn’t create every conflict either. If one faction thinks they have a historical or god-given mandate to rule over the other factions, that’s not something that can be settled just by borders on the map. If Iran (Shiite) and Saudi Arabia (Sunni) fight it out over who controls Mecca, that’s not going to end with one battle or campaign.
And the fate of the Palestinians, Maronites, Kurds, … in a general regional war is probably not bloodbath, but genocide.
Considering how large fraction of the region’s population actually believe the other groups to be evil this seems plausible.
And here we get to once again observe how the same people who would normally be expected to defer to experts in any other situation feel entitled to go with what may be their gut feeling over the many, many experts’ conclusions that the Palestinians are already subject to genocide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_humanitarian_and_human_rights_groups_accusing_Israel_of_genocide_in_Gaza
The mention of Maronites in this lurid fantasy is particularly despicable given that we have already seen something which more-or-less fits this speculation of a “general regional war” when 1980s civil war in Lebanon had pulled in half the region – and not only were the Maronites not genocided, but they were repeatedly the perpetrators of great massacres.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karantina_massacre
Following the same logic that had been used to excuse Israeli response to October 7, the Maronites in fact ought to have had their towns flattened and subjected to a blockade of food, medicine and everything else required for life, with a very obvious aim to completely remove them from the country after that event alone, which had essentially matched the death toll of October 7. And if not then, it ought to have happened after the much-better known Sabra and Shatila massacre later on (depicted in, e.g. Waltz with Bashir), whose death toll had significantly exceeded October 7, in no small part due to Israeli support for the perpetrators, which appears to have been far more direct than anything Iran had ever been accused of in regards to its role in October 7. Thankfully, Assadist Syria had been saner than that, even as it very much had the opportunity to do just that during the 20-odd years it occupied the country.
FFS @YARD I’m responding to the idea in a particular comment.
If I wrote say that global warming would cause increased desertification in the Middle East, that doesn’t mean I deny any desertification is occurring now. Do I deny that the UN and others say Israel is committing genocide now? No!
I think the scenario proposed in a comment would not lead to a good outcome. I don’t pretend to be an expert on the region, I never have.
You aren’t the first person I’ve encountered who thinks that a big war is just what’s needed to rectify the ‘artificial’ borders of Africa/the Middle East/[insert other colonized region here]. And, well, I’ve always found that notion dubious. It seems to me that whatever borders result from such a war would mostly depend on the relative positions of the various belligerents when hostilities cease (you know, like the vast majority of wars in human history), rather than whatever various nationalists in the region would view as their ideal outcome.
And, once you take into account that the “ideal” outcomes for various different nationalist groups are, in fact, mutually incompatible, it seems to me that such a war would be more likely to generate a new series of irrendentist claims, than to create stability.
Indeed! In fact, just before the 2022 invasion, Kenyan ambassador to the UN went viral for making a speech that specifically rejected this logic!
https://www.npr.org/2022/02/22/1082334172/kenya-security-council-russia
I wonder if the other commenters never heard of this speech, or if they did, but had already forgotten it ever happened – and I also wonder which scenario is worse.
@YARD,
I think the reason African countries mostly haven’t gone to war over ethnic boundaries has less to do with principle, and more to do with the fact that all these countries know *their own* borders are completely arbitrary and nonsensical as well- they don’t want to establish the precedent that borders can be questioned since then their own state borders would be at risk as well.
The one big exception is the war between Ethiopia and Somalia in the 1970s, and that’s kind of the exception that proves the rule, since Somalia is *not* a diverse state with arbitrary boundaries, it’s one of the few actual ethnically homogeneous nation states on the continent.
@Dinwar,
I’m generally sympathetic to that argument, and to the idea more broadly that borders in the Middle East (and elsewhere in the postcolonial world) should be drawn to better reflect demographic and ethnic lines, but the one thing I would say is that America and Israel need to have as little input in the process as possible- they are not benevolent, disinterested agents here.
This had already nearly happened in the 1950s, when Nasser had enough respect across the entire region that it was conceivable he could have had created a single Arab nation. In fact, he actually DID manage to persuade Syria to unite into a single state with Egypt in 1958 – but then went too hard and too fast in giving all the leading roles to Egyptians, so they split away 3 years later, and no-one after Nasser, in Egypt or elsewhere in the region, had the clout to attempt this “Pan-Arabism” again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Arab_Republic
Although in fairness, even this brief and halting union of Egypt and Syria probably would not have happened if Syria did not come under a very credible threat of a Turkish invasion, one that would have had received military support from Israel and the more pro-Western Arab nations and likely the US and UK also – all as the result of an (apparently mistaken) perception it was due to become a full member of the Warsaw Pact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_Crisis_of_1957
This also happened to coincide with Egypt faring better during the Suez crisis in the face of a direct attack by the Western powers than many had expected. I have seen others compare the present situation with the Suez crisis already (eerily, this war is even taking place almost exactly 70 years later!) – but it really is remarkable how Egypt had objectively lost virtually all its conventional engagements over those 9 days, yet won politically.
A Wednesday post by OGH? Is that on anyone’s Rapture checklist?
Thanks for the post.
One point on which I disagree on is the comparison to Germany continuing to fight despite a British blockade. The situation now is entirely different, as Iran is essentially committing a portion of its capabilities to blockade the world. The entire world has a vested interest in ending that blockade, something that can’t be said for Germany in WW1.
As for what this means in future? The most honest answer is that I’m not sure, and probably the general public won’t know the full details until years after the event.