When America loses a war, it is generally because of political reaction at home, notwithstanding smashing success on the battlefield.
When America loses a war, it is generally because of political reaction at home, notwithstanding smashing success on the battlefield.
T o his credit, President Trump resisted putting an end date on the Iran war in his speech to the nation on Wednesday night. In some ways, that’s just a nod to reality: The regime in Tehran came into being with an act of war against the United States; “Death to America” is not a mere slogan, it is the driving ambition of the revolutionary Shiite government, an assertion of its identity as champion of the global jihad against the West. The regime is poised to survive this latest round of fighting, and as long as it does, its war against the United States will continue.
Regrettably, that’s not the reality to which our president was nodding. Instead, he’s stuck on a fact that is less momentous, except to him: He hasn’t yet reckoned how to bow out with something that looks nearly as successful politically as it has been militarily.
To beat a dead horse yet again, the problem with Trump’s approach to war, which is the same as his approach to everything else, is his resistance to setting out clear objectives, explaining himself, and marshaling allies before launching. These cut against the nature of a cunning man who has come miraculously far by a combination of audacity, always keeping his options open, and maintaining overconfidence in his gut instincts.
The consensus is that on Wednesday night, Trump gave the speech he should have given five weeks ago. I can’t argue with the reasoning behind this conclusion; after all, I’ve repeatedly said the president should have gone to Congress, and should have explained to the American people why our national security required military action against the Iranian regime.
Still, I’m not sold on the conclusion because it just wasn’t a good speech, and I don’t think it would have been any better five weeks ago.
I’m thankful that the president didn’t stake out a sure loser position — a reiteration of his errant message to our enemies over these last weeks that he wants an off-ramp and, therefore, they can “win” by hanging tough, a talent they’ve perfected over the past half century.
The speech, however, was not coherent, much less compelling. The aging Trump swallows and slurs some words (happens to all of us). It is genuinely discomfiting to watch him struggle to read off the teleprompter, which he plainly hates, and divert to tired tropes (how our “dead” country has become the world’s “hottest” on his watch) when he can’t stick to the script. When he’s finished, even a sympathizer’s reaction is relief, not inspiration or a sense of commitment.
Five weeks ago, the president wouldn’t commit ex ante to a set of achievable objectives. His intentions were thus inferred from his actions and digressive, contradictory social media posts.
Was the anti-“forever war,” anti-neocon president going for regime change? Sometimes he seemed to say as much, to the point of encouraging an uprising by the Iranian people — in response to which the regime brutally slaughtered up to 40,000 people while the U.S. was still moving its overstretched combat assets into the Gulf. In the end, American and Israeli forces initiated the fighting by an impressive decapitation strike in which the regime’s top leaders were killed. That looks like nothing so much as attempted regime change, regardless of how it’s described.
A deep understanding of the regime’s jihadist principles and the extensive tentacles of its Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) would have counseled that regime change would not be achievable absent an open-ended commitment in terms of time and resources.
That’s been my beef from the start: It is bass-ackwards to start by saying, “I won’t do ground troops or a forever war, and my objectives are regime change, suppression of nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities, keeping the Strait of Hormuz open, dismantling terrorist proxies, etc.” You have to settle on the objectives first. If American national security truly demands that those objectives be accomplished, then you decide what assets are needed to accomplish them and commit to fighting for as long as it takes.
If you’re not willing to do that — whether due to constraints of politics, resources, or even the president’s fickle temperament — then you have to be modest about objectives from the start. Otherwise, success will end up looking like failure. History teaches us that, geopolitically, sometimes how it looks is more consequential than how it is.
Iran was always going to be hard — necessary to my mind, but never easy. There are two major considerations: (1) the revolutionary jihadist regime’s capacity to project power globally, and (2) that regime’s capacity to oppress and enslave the Iranian people. We would like to address both. The former’s importance is obvious; the latter’s owes to our belief that liberty is worth promoting for its own sake; that a free and prosperous Iran would transform the Middle East to our great advantage; and, most significantly, that as long as the jihadist regime survives, so do its death to America aspirations.
Yet, we don’t need to address both considerations. Or, better to say, they are not close to equal considerations. What matters most to American national security is depressing Iran’s ability to project power.
The regime’s survival is a longer-term threat. It needs a long-term strategy. And face it: The regime is going to survive for the foreseeable future.
You know all those stories you read about how it would be a mistake for Trump to direct attacks on Iran’s energy infrastructure because that would harm the Iranian people? Well, all right, but understand: We are not talking here about a diverse Western economy. The IRGC effectively owns the energy infrastructure. It gets more than half of the oil revenue and controls probably two-thirds of the country’s GDP. If we don’t dismantle the infrastructure, we leave intact the IRGC’s lifeline. And make no mistake: It’s the IRGC that runs Iran now.
The president seems to have convinced himself that a highly effective decapitation campaign and massive bombing of military facilities would prompt regime change, or at least a quick surrender. There can be no doubt that the president was advised Iran would respond to the onslaught by closing the strait and attacking the Arab regimes Tehran sees as extensions of American military power; but his gut told him they wouldn’t do it . . . they’d be too busy pleading for a cease-fire.
His gut was wrong, largely because his head is in no position to inform his gut about the nature of this jihadist enemy.
That doesn’t mean we’ve lost. To the contrary, as Noah Rothman has ably catalogued, the U.S. effort is a substantial military success on nearly every objective measure. It will be a very long time before the IRGC is in a position to project power globally at anything near the scale of the last two decades. For American national security, that’s a boon.
But politically speaking, the president is vulnerable. The American public is broadly opposed to the war, even if the Trump base is all in. Since the president did not amass support prior to striking, the public, broadly speaking, doesn’t understand why it was necessary to strike. It doesn’t know what we’re trying to accomplish. It knows only that global trade — oil especially, but not exclusively — was flowing on February 28 but it’s not now. Gas prices are up. Energy prices are up. The “affordability” crunch Trump said he’d address is getting worse. NATO seems to be imploding. The “Death to America” regime is still there. And with Trump at his lowest approval level since the Capitol riot, Democrats are already crowing about what they will do to make Trump pay when they win at least one congressional chamber in November — not about whether they will win.
The bottom line of Trump’s Wednesday night speech? No firm end date, but the end is near and, when it comes, the Strait of Hormuz may still be closed. About five minutes ago, it seems, the president vowed to bludgeon Iran into submission on that point; now, suddenly, he says it’s not our problem . . . even as he now vows to bomb Iran “back to the stone ages.”
When America loses a war, it is generally because of political reaction at home, notwithstanding smashing success on the battlefield. Winning is not just about achieving military goals; it entails selling the American people on critical national security aims and then unmistakably achieving them. If the president doesn’t do that, a win can be made to look like a loss.