Grand Strategy in Iran and Venezuela

Does the Trump administration have a grand strategy at work in Iran and Venezuela? Maybe. It’s hard to say what this administration is thinking, for three related reasons: The thinking of a lot of disparate people goes into a war-making decision; the president himself is a man of instincts, interests, and improvisations, not ideas or strategy; and there has been so little effort to publicly explain or justify what they’re doing (in good part because they’re not asking Congress or anyone else for permission). So instead of making unsupported assertions, it’s more sensible to discuss possible grand-strategic thinking that may be influencing the war in Iran. Because there are serious strategic thinkers in the orbit of these decisions, whether or not they have much direct influence.

Here’s the basic point: If you’re facing a dangerous adversary, you don’t want to fight him all at once if you can avoid it. You’d rather pick off the weakest links in his system of alliances and proxies one at a time — defeat in detail, if you will — before all of your enemies can assemble. Napoleon understood this; he had great success in defeating his enemies individually and keeping them from uniting between 1799 and 1809, and his downfall came once they finally all got on the same page. America needs allies, too: As Josh Treviño explained over at Fox News, however much some on the right may wish to junk our alliances, America could not project the kind of force it does without friends who let us use bases, airspace, and sea-lanes through their territory. And as Phil Klein observes, we suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan because we let Iran attack us in those countries without fighting back; we’d have been far better off isolating the Iraqi and Afghan opposition from outside help. The same story can be told about our wars in Vietnam and Korea. In the Second World War, we didn’t invade German-held France until we had taken out Mussolini’s regime in Italy. In the Civil War, we systematically pruned the Confederacy, first by severing its connection to its territory west of the Mississippi, then capturing the great river and gutting the Deep South, before the stronghold in Virginia could be taken.

If you see a confrontation coming, or underway, with the axis of China-Russia-Iran, what would you like to do? First, you’d want to keep one of the major players (Russia) tied up as long as possible in an existing quagmire of its own making. Second, you’d want to strip the most dangerous proxies of their asymmetrical capabilities — which means defanging Hezbollah and Hamas, as Israel has largely done. Third, you’d want to deny them peripheral allies such as the Assad regime in Syria — mission, again, accomplished. Fourth, you’d take out the most unstable element of the axis — Iran’s nuclear arsenal. Fifth, you’d want to take out their allies closest to our shores, Venezuela and Cuba. We’re one for two there, even at the cost of leaving much of the Venezuelan regime intact, and Cuba is tottering. Sixth, you’d then want to move on the weakest link in the axis — Iran — while its offensive capabilities and terrorist proxies are at their nadir, Russia remains preoccupied, and Iran’s people are restive. Seventh, you’d want to disrupt the raw materials needed by the axis — specifically, the flow of Iranian and Venezuelan oil to China and Cuba, both of which badly need it.

Obviously, this strategic sequence has been partly fortuitous. It wasn’t the U.S. that made Russia invade Ukraine or Hamas launch the strategically catastrophic October 7 attacks. Across two very different administrations, our responses have hardly resembled a coherent plan except by accident. But then, as Bismarck (himself a master strategic improviser rather than planner) may or may not have said, “God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.” But if you wanted to plan on a potential confrontation with China over Taiwan, in which you understand that the decision to pick the time of that confrontation lies with Beijing, a master plan to take China’s pawns, rooks, knights, and bishops off the board one at a time might look something like this.