21 thoughts on Trump's war with Iran
A risky situation brought to us by a weak president
America’s top priority in the Middle East should be decreasing our involvement in the region. President after president keeps vowing to do that, they’ve all failed, and now Trump has arguably failed most of all.
What’s been maddening about Iran policy debates for the past decade is that the hawks keeps lying about their own policy preferences.
Opponents of the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) deal would make a big show of getting upset if you said that their preferred alternative to the deal was war. When Trump tore up the JCPOA, they again made a big show of getting mad at anyone who said this was putting us on a course for war. But here we are, at war.
Now that war is upon us, the biggest red herring in the world is that proponents will say they did this to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. No. Obama signed the JCPOA to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
To be clear, JCPOA critics weren’t delusional. The reason that Iran was willing to sign the deal was that it provided them with meaningful upside in the form of sanctions relief. And because the point of the JCPOA was to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, it did not address other concerns one might have with Iran, like the nature of its regime or its cultivation of a regional network of proxy militias or its ballistic missile arsenal. But JCPOA prevented Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. What deal opponents didn’t like was that this was all that it did.
The problem with making a deal with Iran that offers Iran upside is it lets them improve their economy and thus pour more resources into various non-nuclear undertakings. This is especially a problem from Israel’s perspective, since they are the targets of many of these undertakings.
But the problem with not offering Iran upside is that if Iran doesn’t get upside in a deal, then there’s no deal. You end up with either a nuclear Iran or a war.
Now, maybe the war will end up being a “splendid little war” conducted by air with no American casualties and minimal impacts on Israel. Maybe Iran caves and signs a humiliating deal. This definitely might happen, and I wouldn’t trust anyone who professes to be certain it will turn into a fiasco.
That said, as Robert Pape wrote a few days ago, the practical track record of countries achieving major strategic goals through air power alone is pretty thin. Ever since aerial bombardment was invented, there’s been a desire to believe wars can be won by securing air superiority and dropping bombs, but it rarely works.
It’s going to be hard to know how much damage has actually been done to Iran’s underground nuclear facilities.
The treatment received by North Korea over the past 25 years — in contrast to Iraq, Libya, Iran, and, in a different way, Ukraine — is a strong argument for countries to sprint to nuclear weapons development and then figure things out from there. The “Iran surrenders” scenario is definitely on the table, but “Iran genuinely goes for a nuclear weapon” seems like a more likely scenario.
Which again brings us back to the JCPOA debate: The Obama administration wanted to make a deal because they didn’t want Iran to build a nuclear weapon and they didn’t want to get sucked into a regime change war. JCPOA opponents were happy to have a regime change war, but they’ve never wanted to admit that.
Israel attracts a lot of moralistic outrage for its conduct toward Palestinian civilians, much of which I think is warranted, and for its refusal to engage in good faith negotiations around a two-state solution, where I think the outrage is entirely wanted.
In the eyes of a lot of western progressives, this creates a kind of moral contamination around everything else that Israel does. But judged in isolation, Israel is clearly the sympathetic party in its regional conflict with Iran. And while the Iranian “axis of resistance” has been a thorn in Israel’s side, the sponsorship of Hamas and Hezbollah and the Houthis has, in practice, only brought disaster on Palestinians.
I would have no particular objection to Israel deciding it wants to wage war against Iran, or to the United States helping Israel on the level of selling them weapons and military equipment for that war. The problem with an “Israel bombs Iran” scenario has always been that Israel lacks the capacity to take out the underground nuclear facilities, so an Israeli bombing campaign means starting a war they can’t finish and hoping to bait the United States into finishing the job for them.
A lot of people felt that Joe Biden gave Netanyahu everything he wanted, but he absolutely did not give him this.
Donald Trump could have simply embarked on this course of action if he thought it was a good idea. But he plainly did not and was trying for a while to reach a new diplomatic accord with Iran, an accord that by all accounts would look a lot like the JCPOA. But for all Trump’s bluster, he’s a fundamentally weak and indecisive leader, and he let Netanyahu jam him up in a way that Biden and Obama never did.
You can hardly blame Netanyahu for taking advantage of Trump’s weakness and lack of control over the situation. From the standpoint of Israeli policy, it is definitely better to have the US maximally engaged in the Middle East rather than cutting a deal that could strengthen the Iranian economy.
The problem, obviously, is that the US and Israel are different countries with different interests.
A lot of people spent years insisting the Trump administration’s pro-Russian views on the Ukraine War reflected either a general anti-war disposition or else a strong desire to set regional priorities and focus American energy on the Pacific. The decision to go to war with Iran puts the lie to all that and reveals what should have been clear to anyone paying attention: There’s no sophisticated strategy guiding Trump on Ukraine, he’s just on the other side.
I have grave, grave misgivings about this course of action — there are so many ways it could end up going horribly, and the upside to the United States of any possible “better deal” than the JCPOA is limited. Still, it’s at least possible that it will work out fine. Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah and earlier strikes on Iran have shown that Iranian military capacity is not as strong as many observers thought. I hope for the best. But hope is not a plan, and I seriously doubt that Trump has a better one.
I said it on the open thread, but Freddie’s “here is why Donald the Dove is better than Genocide Joe” takes are sure looking fine right now.
“1. America’s top priority in the Middle East should be decreasing our involvement in the region. President after president keeps vowing to do that, they’ve all failed, and now Trump has arguably failed most of all.”
He had his faults but gotta give it to Biden here.