The cease-fire in Iran, which seems likely to be the end of the war for all practical purposes, fails my simple test for victory: There is not a visible win here that the average American citizen can see without the need for mediating explanations from intelligence assessments. As I’ve said from the beginning, this war was worth fighting — if and only if it brought a permanent end to the Islamic Republic government that was founded in 1979 and has been effectively at war with us ever since. That would be a grand-strategic victory in taking Iran permanently off the board as a weapon against us. Instead, we’re stopping now; they’re just pausing.
War is a deadly serious business, and should not be waged except in that spirit. As a democracy built on our own revolutionary ideas, our natural way of war is to impose total defeat on the enemy and reconstruct its government. That’s consistent with the default preference of a democratic people for wars that solve problems so that the people can go back to peacetime conditions. It is typically the case that when America goes to war, if the enemy still exists when the fighting ends, we lost.
The Trump theory of war, as seen in Iran and Venezuela, seems to be nation probation: We hit the enemy hard, kill or capture their current leaders, destroy a good deal of their warmaking apparatus, and then maintain the continuing threat that we might come back and do the same if the new leaders of the same regime misbehave. You want a recipe for forever war? That’s it. Nation probation requires the continuing political will to resume combat at any time. That’s costly and difficult for any military, and politically exhausting in a democracy. Sure, the mullahs and the Venezuelan narcostate may reason that Trump might hit them again — but would JD Vance? Would a Democrat, likely elected on a platform of needing to prove that Trump’s wars failed? Only if Trump is succeeded by a Republican, and one from the more hawkish side of the party, is there apt to be the will to keep the probationary conditions on — and only then, for the duration of that presidency.