Trump Prepares His Iran Off-Ramp

The time to prepare the public for the sacrifices of warfare is before launching a war, not after you’ve started shooting.

L ast night, citing unidentified “people familiar” with the thinking of President Trump’s advisers, the Wall Street Journal reported:

Trump’s team concluded in recent days that they needed a more aggressive communications plan to sell the public on the war as many consumers deal with rising gas prices[.]

Well, actually, they needed a communications plan before invading Iran.

There was a rich case to be made. Everything from a half-century of Iranian jihad against the United States to up-to-the-minute murder plots, anti-American proxy support, destabilizing ballistic missile production designed to attack regional American bases, and steps toward restarting the nuclear weapons program even as enriched uranium — enough to make several bombs — remains unaccounted for.

But the case doesn’t make itself. The president had to make it.

Over the weekend, in arguing that the Constitution endows Congress, not the president, with the authority to take the country to war, I observed that it was in the president’s profound political interest to seek congressional approval, even if — based on past legislative authorizations and present threats to vital American interests — the president probably did not need further statutory authorization:

I’d add this maxim because war-making carries great risk and is apt to fail calamitously in the absence of public support: The further we are from an actual threat, the greater is the president’s political need for congressional support. A legislative authorization of military force is a prudential requirement regardless of one’s view about whether it is a legal mandate.

And here we are.

In the absence of exigent circumstances, such as a sneak attack by enemy forces, the time to prepare the public for the unavoidable sacrifices of warfare is before launching the war. It is not after you’ve started shooting — when Americans, to whom the need for doing this and doing it now has not been explained, are reading about Americans killed in action and a likely American strike that resulted in the deaths of well over a hundred school children.

With uphill midterm elections on the horizon, in which the driving issue may be high prices, the time to get congressional support for waging war is before commencing attacks that have foreseeably resulted in surging oil and gas prices. The time to convince political allies that Iran cannot be ceded the power to close the Strait of Hormuz — through which a fifth of the world’s oil supply moves — is before they’ve effectively closed it in response to American attacks. With constituents restless and frustrated, it doesn’t at this point help incumbents facing tough elections to hear Steve Moore, an outside economics adviser to the president, relate, “When the price of gas and oil rise, so does everything else. Given affordability was already an issue, this leads to real challenges.”

You don’t say.

The president is perplexed that, despite the ferocious aerial attacks and decapitation of its leadership, the Iranian government has not only refused to surrender but fought back by dragging the region’s America-friendly Arab states into the war. But if the president had tried to make the case to Congress and the public, as our system prompts him to do, he would have been forced to explain how he’d deal with a revolutionary jihadist regime, which believes to its core that Allah has ordained that it fight America to the death.

The regime is deeply unpopular, but it is well-armed. The dissenting Iranian people are not. Consequently, there can’t be a successful popular uprising unless the regime’s troops refuse to fire on the people — unless they switch sides. But if that was the plan (or the hope), what were the chances? In Iran, the glue is neither nationalism nor ties rooted in rich Persian civilization. The regime is sharia-supremacist. It seeks global Islam. As the eminent Iranian-born analyst Amir Taheri quotes Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the regime’s founder:

We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah. For patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land [Iran] burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.

The troops of such a regime were never likely to refuse to fire on civilians. To the contrary, they’ve killed tens of thousands of them just recently, and untold masses more in the last half-century. The ideology in which the Iranian security services have been steeped instructs that the regime is righteously waging jihad in Allah’s cause while the people, seeking to dismantle the sharia state and adopt Western ideals of liberty, are infidels and apostates who deserve to die.

Our transactional president believes that everyone has a price, that everyone will eventually act in some Trumpian conception of their self-interest. He is confused by zealots who defy that world view. Those who believe in nothing have a hard time wrapping their brains around those who believe intensely, even in loathsome tenets.

But if the president had tried to make a public case for war, he’d have been forced to think about it and have an answer for it. He’d have had to offer a plan for accomplishing significant, attainable national security goals — against a country three times the size of Iraq, with challenging terrain and a population of 90 million, including millions who support the regime (even if the majority does not).

The president would have to have been realistic about how long the fighting might take given that the regime has been entrenched since 1979 and has a sophisticated, well-armed security apparatus that would cling to power. He’d have to have shown he was prepared for the easily anticipated scenario that the mullahs would use short-range missiles and drones to attack their Sunni Arab neighbors — particularly, those countries’ stocks of potable water, a major vulnerability in the Gulf. (At a press conference this morning, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth conceded, “I can’t say we anticipated necessarily that’s exactly how they would react, but we knew it was a possibility.”)

The president has flailed this week. No one who watched his erratic performance when the Covid-19 pandemic challenged his leadership skills in his first term can be surprised. We’ll demand regime change . . . or not. Unconditional surrender . . . or not. Ground troops not off the table . . . and not on the table. Reinstatement of the draft . . . or no such plans . . . or no plans for now. The jarring scene at Dover Air Force Base of a commander in chief clad in a white baseball cap at the dignified transfer of the remains of six fallen soldiers. And of course, the endless stream of unhinged social media posts.

The facts that our forces are performing spectacularly and that U.S. casualties are extraordinarily minimal by historic standards for a mission so ambitious are laudable — sources of real patriotic pride. Nevertheless, after ten days of American air power pummeling Iran, the war is already deeply unpopular among the American people — 53 percent opposed, 40 in support according to Quinnipiac. While Trump is used to lockstep support from the Republican Party he has taken over, 37 percent oppose the U.S. invasion.

That’s because the president didn’t seek the country’s support. He wouldn’t go to Congress. He wouldn’t try to make a persuasive case. He wants to be an autocrat in a system and culture that resist autocracy. He went with his gut, and this is what he’s got.

Indications are that the Iranian regime is digging in for a long haul, battered but surviving, confident it can outlast the impulsive American president, even if it can’t outfight the American military.

And so the climbdown has begun.

Trump said yesterday that he was “way ahead of schedule” and that the war would be over “very soon.” The war “is very complete, pretty much,” he added in a CBS news interview. What about regime change? “We want a system that can lead to many years of peace, and if we can’t have that, we might as well get it over with right now” (emphasis added).

Translation: The president’s gut told him this would be quick — in and out. No need to prepare people because it would be over so quickly there’d be nothing to do but bask in the glow of success. But if that’s not in the cards, his impulse is to fold. The stock market is way down, oil is way up, and at minus-19, Trump’s own net negative approval rating is worse than the war’s. So, he’s laying the groundwork to pull the plug: declare victory, hope for the best, and move on to the next news cycle. It would be an embarrassment to leave the regime in place, but one Trump could try to explain away by saying he’s left it a shell of its former self; but if he impetuously withdraws while the regime has a chokehold on global trade through the Gulf, that would be a calamity.

At this morning’s Defense Department briefing, there was no talk of regime change. General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, defined the objectives as deeply degrading Iran’s capacity to project power: destroy missiles and launchers, sink its navy, and “prevent the regime from being able to attack Americans and our partners for years to come.”

Those are significant aims, but let’s face it: Trump could walk away now and say he’s already accomplished them. History would present a different verdict.