Claire—I wrote this in February, 2024, with Biden still in office. I’m reposting it today first because it’s interesting to see, concretely, what until four days ago I thought possible and impossible.
I assumed that nothing like what we’ve seen in the past four days was possible, because Americans simply wouldn’t support it. I don’t think I was wrong. Americans don’t support this. It didn’t occur to me, when I wrote this, that we might have a president who simply wouldn’t care.
It seems we’ve taken Rules 1, 2, and 3 to heart. Rule Number 4? We’re doing the opposite, though violence has a clarity of its own. Rule 5? It remains to be seen. Rules 6 and 7 have been overtaken by events.
Rule 8? I have no idea what the administration is thinking. But if the reactions I’m seeing in the media, conventional and social, are anything to go by, Americans have no intention of facing reality. It appears to me the better part of the American public views this war as an extension of its domestic politics. But it isn’t. It’s a war—by definition, an event that invokes a foreign adversary. Iran is an actor in its own right, one whose history, people, and regime are as important to the story of this war as our own. The other parties to this conflict, declared and undeclared, also matter, or should matter, in our appraisal of why this war broke out, who is to blame, what it means, and whether it’s just.
That Donald Trump is presiding over a war in Iran doesn’t mean Iran posed no threat. It doesn’t mean that diplomacy was working—or that diplomacy could have worked. It doesn’t mean that Iran’s nuclear ambitions and ballistic missile program were no threat to Americans. It doesn’t mean that we have no acute strategic interest in this part of the world. It doesn’t mean that the war’s wisdom can be assessed without reference to the history and politics of the Middle East, or that it can be assessed at all, at this early stage.
That Trump is presiding over this war does give us good cause to worry that it won’t be prosecuted competently, that the US government is unprepared for its consequences and incapable of managing them shrewdly, that our institutions have been so weakened that we lack the critical tools of statecraft essential to managing those consequences, and that the American constitutional order is dead.
But at least we seem to be following three out of nine of these rules. If we manage to follow Rule Number 5, perhaps it will be good enough. But no outcome that leaves that regime in place can be considered a victory. If it survives, it wins. Period.
Whether winning can be achieved at a price we’re willing to pay—see Rule Number 9—I just don’t know. As re-reading this proves, the future is hard to predict.
February 3, 2024
So we’re all waiting for this big retaliation against Iran, right? The most telegraphed strikes in history? I keep checking the news, but the tease is endless. We’re going to hit Iran so hard they’ll never do it again, apparently, but not so hard that it really upsets them. It’s going to be an ultra-precision, super-calibrated strike. The Pentagon has been studying it for days. And telling us about it for days. And telling us when it will happen and where it will happen and under what atmospheric conditions. Everyone in our government is leaking to every journalist he can collar to put out the word that we really don’t want another war in the Middle East, so Iran shouldn’t be upset when we do it. Which will be soon! Just you wait! And besides, we’d like to make a deal with Iran—wouldn’t they like that?—so really, Iranians, don’t get mad. We’re only doing it because we’d really like you to stop killing us. You can tell we’re sincere about not wanting to hurt you because we’re not actually going to hurt you, we’re just going to hit a bunch of your proxies’ ammo dumps—and neither of us care if a few of your proxies die, right? So truly, don’t take it personally: You’ve got to understand, it’s an election year and we’ll all look like a bunch of wussies if we don’t do anything. So seriously, we’re going to hit you so hard. At a time and place of our choosing! Any minute now! Maybe even today! Are you ready? Here we go! We’re gonna hit you!
Is there anyone on the planet whose eyes aren’t rolling as they watch this? (I’ll be plum embarrassed if I hit “send” on this newsletter then check the news only to see that Tehran has been vaporized, but I’ll take that risk.)
American strategists have been making the same mistakes since Vietnam, no matter who’s in power. They all do the same thing. It never occurs to them to wonder how it could be that we have the strongest economy and the most powerful military the world yet our strategic position keeps getting more and more parlous.
The Iran problem is really hard. I don’t discount that. I certainly don’t know how to solve it. But I can confidently say what won’t work.
I challenge you to name a single time when a postwar American president has successfully deployed American force while violating the following rules:
Rule 1: Make a damned decision
When the US uses force in hesitant dribbles—announced with words like “proportionate,” “precision,” “targeted,” or “calibrated”—it only excites our enemies and encourages them to try harder. We publish reams of theoretical work about “escalation dominance,” but we act as if we’ve never heard of it.
It’s always the same cycle. It begins when our enemy does a bad thing. Shocked, we go away to study the problem. We emerge from our lucubrations to say we’ll respond at a time and place of our choosing. Then we hit a camel in the ass with a very expensive bomb.
Ten minutes later, they do it again.
We return to our lair to study the problem again. We emerge gravely. “This time,” says a jumbo-sized Pentagon official, “We’ll be whacking two camels at the time and place of our choosing.” He clears his throat. “This means we’re going to whack those camels at 07:20 on Tuesday morning at the crossroads just south of Abdul’s gas station at Khirbat Ra’s al Wa’r. So long as the weather’s clear.”
“Sir! Could you repeat that, Sir?”
“You bet, Bret. That’s Kilo-Hotel-India-Romeo-Bravo-Alfa-Tango—got it? 33.88056° north, 39.51889° east.”
“Sir! Is hitting two camels escalatory?”
“Only for the camels, Bret. Those camels should not be sleeping well tonight.”
Two days later, bang! We hit two camels. We issue another a stern warning.
Twenty minutes later, they do it again.
We’re baffled. What’s with them? Don’t they realize we’re the United States of America and we’ve got the most powerful military the human race has ever beheld? That we can keep doing this until every last camel’s ass in the Middle East is fried to a crisp and branded “Don’t mess with Texas?”
Bang! Two camels and a goat. That’ll learn ‘em!
The cycle continues until—wham!—something bad happens. Maybe by accident. Hard to know whether someone really meant to hurt you when they lobbed 200 drones and missiles at you. Maybe they were just bored. But now someone’s dead, and the public realizes: We’re at war out there!
Domestic outrage erupts, stoked by our completely irresponsible politicians. (Doesn’t matter which party. They’re all irresponsible.) They flap toward the camera like moths to the light, flying right into each other in their eagerness to issue the first peroration about the President’s perfidy, treason, and incompetence. Ted Cruz emerges from the Senate sauna in a towel: “I’ll be the one to say it, Bret: The President’s a pussy. A Papa-Uniform-Papa-Papa-Yankee—”
“He’s … beg pardon?”
“Whatever. Journalists like you who hate America are the problem.”
The Senators grill the Joint Chiefs. Testy! The journalists publish chin-strokers about the way our adversary plays chess, not tiddlywinks. Meanwhile, we’ve skedaddled: We don’t actually want to fight someone who might be serious about fighting back—for God’s sake, man, you could get hurt that way!—but we remain blithely confident that because we have an incredibly powerful military and massive oceans between us and our adversaries, no one would ever dare cross us—because crossing the mighty United States of America would be nuts. Witness our policy in Ukraine: “Let’s try sending a few rifles. What, that wasn’t enough? Let’s form a Pentagon Study Group to think deeply about whether we should send a tank.”
Why doesn’t this ever work? Hell, I don’t know. I don’t have a theory here. It should work, I agree. After all, if the US military hit my camel’s ass with a smart bomb, I’d stop screwing around with the US military. Frankly, all you’d have to do is say, “Knock it off or the USS Eisenhower fries your camel’s ass to crisp” and I’d stop it immediately. What kind of fool would tangle with the USS Eisenhower?
But thinking this way is what’s known in the trade as “mirror imaging.” The assumption that an adversary thinks the way you do is a classic mistake. We’ve repeatedly tested the theory that American enemies, like middle-aged American women, are readily deterred by a minor display of American military force. We have found it wanting.
So here’s Rule Number One for the use of coercive violence: Engage with overwhelming force, fast and hard, or just get the hell out of there before you get our troops killed and yet again teach our adversaries that you can get rid of Americans by patiently harassing them.
If you can think of a single counterexample to this rule in the whole of history of American military engagement, tell me, because I can’t.
“I think we signal resolve pretty well,” John Kirby told assembled reporters on Wednesday. “And as I said the other day, we’ll respond on our own time, on our own schedule, and we’ll do that.”
Could he really think we signal resolve pretty well? I sure hope he doesn’t really think that, because that would be delusional. We’re awfully good at signaling vacillation, ambivalence, indecision, hesitation, and a sincere wish that these problems would just go away, though. If that were the key to success in geopolitics, we’d be sitting pretty.
Rule 2: Do it fast.
If you’re an American president who’s concluded that an American enemy must be clobbered, just do it. Immediately. And for God’s sake, don’t tell everyone a thousand times before you do it.
The American public’s attention span is measured in picoseconds. Our partisan divides are so great and our politicians are so irresponsible that if you haven’t finished clobbering your enemies by the end of your term, your opponent will run on a platform of unconditional surrender. (Same policy, new slogan: “Don’t do stupid shit.” “End the forever wars.” “America First.”)
Now, this may not be how you think things ought to be, nor is there any specially good reason for it to be true. Other countries are able to pursue a strategic objective for more than five minutes. But we are not. Look at the evidence. Don’t confuse what ought to be with what is. This is the way it is. Our domestic politics are as much a hard constraint on our ability to use our military effectively as our order of battle. Grasp this or your military adventure will end the way every other American military adventure does.
By “Do it fast,” I mean, do it fast. It should not require days of meditation and study to respond to the highly foreseeable killing of American troops. Iranian proxies have been lobbing missiles and drones at us pretty much every day for the past three months, scrambling our troops’ brains (and ours, apparently, because we didn’t have plans at the ready in the event this wound up with our troops getting killed).
Why does it matter? Because if you spend a lot of time agonizing and cogitating, you look weak and your enemies gain a psychological advantage. They have time to muddy the whole world’s perception of whatever ensues. Iran has been using this time to insist it’s “not looking for war,” which obviously isn’t quite true; if you launch 160 strikes on American forces, you do want war, you just don’t want the kind where your enemy fights back. Nonetheless, saying “We don’t want war” is the kind of thing that stupid people abroad and at home will find persuasive. Then, when ultimately we do fight back, we’ll be viewed as the aggressors. (Meanwhile Iran will flood TikTok with videos about what the CIA did to Mossadegh and next thing you know your kids will be climbing over the White House fence screaming, “Death to Israel! Death to America!”)
Never underestimate the shortness of the American attention span. I’ve read at least four times this week that we’ve suffered “the first American deaths” since Hamas launched its assault on October 7. It seems we’ve already forgotten that 31 Americans died on October 7. Biden said yesterday that he holds Iran responsible for supplying the weapons that killed our troops, which is fair enough. But if that’s his logic, why didn’t he hold Iran responsible for supplying the weapons that killed so many American citizens on October 7? The same weapons are now being used to hold Americans in captivity in Hamas’s tunnel dungeons. If we wanted to send a message to Iran that we will not stand for the murder of Americans, October 7 was the day to do it. And since we allowed that to go unanswered, why are we so surprised that they did it again?
Rule 3: Hit them where it hurts.
Despotic regimes don’t much care about human life. That’s why they’re despotic. If your “proportionate” response takes out their proxies in Yemen, Tehran will not care. It won’t deter them one bit. Despots care about three things: their money, their military, and their lives. If you want to deter a despot, you must make him believe he’s at risk of losing one or more of these things entirely. Whacking some logistics base in Syria will not move him in the slightest.
“These are going to be very deliberate targets—deliberate strikes on facilities that enabled these attacks”—US official, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to discuss sensitive details.
Citing an unnamed US official, ABC News reported that the US response to the attacks will be spread out over several days and involve strikes on “multiple targets.” It is unclear if any of the targets in question are on Iranian soil.
If you’re not hitting them where it hurts because that might upset them and then they might hit back—that’s the meaning of the word “escalatory”—that means you’re not inflicting enough pain on them to deter them. And if you’re not deterring them, why are you doing this?
Rule 4: Don’t give mixed messages.
As in dog training, consistency is key in enemy-management. Neither dogs nor enemies are capable of reading your mind. If you say, “We don’t want a wider conflict” over and over, your enemy will believe you. The problem is they understand it to mean, “We don’t want a conflict, so do whatever you please.”
Please, American presidents. For the love of God. Stop saying, “We don’t want a wider war,” and “We’re seeking to prevent this from escalating.” Don’t talk about how incredibly precise your strikes are going to be. That is anti-deterrence.
You deter by conveying to your enemy these two things:
You’re more willing to go to war than he is.
You’re more likely to win.
If you have a military like ours and you successfully convey to your enemy that you’re looking for any excuse to clock him, you’ll have a damned good deterrent. But you need to do both, and the first part must either be true or an exceedingly good bluff. And alas, we can’t bluff our way out of a paper bag.
Rule 5: Win.
Everyone now thinks that the Domino Theory was a tragic error. It wasn’t. Believing that it was a tragic error is itself a tragic error. It wasn’t correct in quite the way the Johnson Administration believed: Asian countries didn’t go communist, one by one, after we left Vietnam. But the Johnson officials were correct to intuit that defeat would bequeath defeat. They were right to fear an American defeat would teach the world not only that it was possible to defeat a superpower, but how to do it; viz., by bleeding us slowly and waiting for our domestic politics to do the rest. (The entire world is now studying the advanced version: Bleed us slowly while waging a hybrid war against us to hasten the process.)
By “win,” I mean an obvious and unambiguous victory, not one of those deals where we shake hands and fly out saying “peace with honor” only to see the Viet Cong or the Taliban or ISIS roll into town on our own Humvees before the last plane pulls up its landing gear. Every one of these humiliations has reinforced a message that we’ve been deeply unwise to impart the world: “We might have a trillion-dollar military, but if you harass us long enough, we’ll leave.”
Rule 6: Be honest.
If you’re not willing to go to war, you have two options left. The first is to do nothing warlike and give your adversary what he wants. The second is to bluff.
Iran wants to kill Americans, kill Jews, kill Ukrainians, kill Sunnis, kill its own citizens, repress women, hang homosexuals, evict us from the Middle East, build a nuclear weapon, destroy the state of Israel, and preside like satisfied seventh-century warlords over the immiserated hellscape of their Greater Persian Empire. Can we live with that?
I’m not asking rhetorically. They’ve made patient progress toward these ends since 1979 and so far, we’ve been living with it. If you ask a hundred American voters about the issues that matter most to them, not one will say, “Iran.” It won’t even be in the top ten. Most of us are prepared to live with it.
If we’re not willing to fight—and we can’t pull off a bluff—then we need to be honest with ourselves. Our best option is to do exactly what the Biden Administration has been trying to do. We should politely ask Iran for a deal in which we pay them to kill us less often and they wait a few years before testing their first nuke. We should agree to leave the Middle East and let them dominate it. Then we should cross our fingers and say, “Que sera, sera.” I don’t personally think this is a great plan, but everyone calls me a warmonger when I say things like that.
The thing about this plan is we have to really do it. If we decide to do this, let’s do it with eyes open. Let’s not pretend Iran doesn’t want to kill Americans, kill Jews, kill Ukrainians, evict us from the Middle East, build a nuclear weapon, destroy the state of Israel, and preside like satisfied seventh-century warlords over the immiserated hellscape of their Greater Persian Empire. That’s intolerably naive and unworthy of adults.
Nor should we pretend that we can somehow urge, bribe, or cajole them out of these ambitions, which are as fundamental to the Iranian regime as liberal democracy is to ours. Biden will no more succeed in ridding them of these goals than they will persuade him to declare Imam Ali the rightful Caliph and drench his sword in the blood of the kufr.
If we decide to acquiesce to their ambitions, we can’t also decide to bluff. They won’t believe us. Bluffing and deal-making work at cross purposes. If we opt for “make a deal,” we need to accept that we’ve got little leverage, be very polite, accept the humiliation, and stop firing missiles at their camels.
Rule 7: Remember the asymmetry.
Before leaving the White House for a campaign event on Monday, Biden said: “I don’t think we need a wider war in the Middle East … that’s not what I’m looking for.”
Iran knows far more about us than we do about them. An open society is an open book. Ours is unusually open and unusually closed in the sense that flow of information between us and the world only goes in one direction. We pump out news of our culture, political life, strategic deliberations, war-making capacity, and morale by the metric tonne, and it quickly spreads to every corner of the globe, where our adversaries pore over it attentively. No comparable volume or quality of information about the world flows in to America, however. Americans in Duluth could be the crew on Gilligan’s Island for all they’re likely to hear of trends in Iranian strategic thought. (We’ve rehearsed the reasons for this here many times. It’s one reason CG came into being.)
Am I saying that villagers nestled in the slopes of the Sahand Mountains in East Azerbaijan pay more mind to our politics than the citizens of Duluth pay to theirs? Absolutely not. The good folk of Duluth probably know more about their Iranian counterparts’ lives than vice-versa. But unlike Iran, the US is a democracy. We can’t go to war without the consent of the citizens of Duluth, and if Duluth believes we’ve no quarrel with Iran, we can’t go to war with Iran.
Tehran is not bound by this constraint. Iran’s leaders know far more about the citizens of Duluth than Duluth knows about Iran’s leaders. Iran’s leaders know full well that Duluth does not want war with Iran.
They know, too, that Americans are far less tolerant of casualties in war than they are. They know it’s an election year. They know our domestic politics are in sub-civil-war chaos. They know our attention is severely attenuated. They know that not since the 1930s have Americans been so gripped by isolationism. They know military recruitment is down. They know that there’s one thing about which Americans agree: We should never again fight a major war in the Middle East. They know that many Americans have decided they don’t love Israel so much after all. They know it’s trivially easy to confuse and boggle our citizens using Russian-style information operations and hybrid war.
They know we’re so politically divided and so badly governed that we can’t send military aid to Ukraine (where they’re a key belligerent), however much it would be in the US interest to do so, and even though Ukrainians are doing the fighting and dying on our behalf. They know, in other words, that we are utterly unwilling to go to war with them—and we’ll tie ourselves in pretzels to avoid it—and if they didn’t know, we keep reminding them, explicitly.
We can deter Iran from killing Americans or we can avoid the risk of a wider war, but we can’t do both. Our “calibrated strikes” only reinforce the message that we aren’t willing to go to war. We can make peace with Iran or we can compel them to stop pursuing their malevolent agenda, but we can’t do both. Of course our efforts to coax Iran back into the nuclear deal have persuaded the regime that we have no will to fight, and that given this, there is no reason for them to stop doing what they’re doing.
Our leaders seem poorly to understand what seems to the rest of us so very obvious about the limits of the US military. Certainly, we have every advantage in firepower, technology, and wealth. Our enemies have a huge compensatory advantages, however, and always will. Aways and by definition, they are despots, because liberal democracies don’t go to war with each other. Despots can do things we can’t. The Kremlin can send wave after wave of bewildered Yakut peasants to be ground into hamburger. The Ayatollahs can use tens of thousands of twelve-year-old boys as minesweepers. Despots can suppress news of any setback and throw anyone who objects in prison. Or shoot them. We can’t do this.
They know this. Don’t tell yourself they don’t. The only one you’re kidding is yourself.
Rule 8: Face reality.
Our leaders are not, perhaps, being entirely honest with themselves about the following:
The Iranian behavior that we find objectionable is not incidental to the Iranian regime, but its essence.
Because this is so, financial inducements, economic pressure, and pinprick strikes on Iranian proxies will not bend Iran to our will.
In the short term, nothing less than the credible threat of massive damage to the things they most care about deters them. But we cannot credibly make this threat because these actions, precisely, are those that incur the risk of a major war.
In the long term, nothing short of a regime change war will change the nature of that regime—and it won’t change unless we change it. It’s coup- and revolution-proof. There’s no way to dislodge it short of invasion and occupation, which would be significantly bloodier, costlier, and riskier than the war in Iraq.
Nothing would persuade Americans to get near that. This fact obviates any advantage in negotiation we possess owing to the size of our military.
This means we face Iran not as a superpower, but as a country only slightly more powerful than Vanuatu. We should comport ourselves accordingly.
“Accordingly” means, “as supplicants.” Supplicants can’t afford to go around whacking a bully’s camels in the ass. It irritates them.
Because Iran understands the domestic constraints on American presidents very well, we can’t bluff. No American president has the ability credibly to threaten Iran with defeat in war.
All of this warmup and “time and place of our choosing” rhetoric is worse than pointless and ineffective. At best it helps us save face, but only to ourselves. The rest of the world sees right through it. (The mouthy opposition politicians screaming for Iranian blood are even more ridiculous: It’s easy to do that when you don’t have to make any real decisions.)
My guess is that one American administration after another has simply been unwilling to accept at least one and probably most of these arguments. These facts are not easy to accept. We—Americans, that is—derive a great deal of satisfaction and pride from being powerful. It’s difficult and painful to think of ourselves as anything less. The idea of supplicating before Iran is nauseating. But if our citizens are not willing to incur the risk of a major war with Iran, this is our only option. In an open society, a president can’t bluff unless his citizens are genuinely eager for war and behaving that way. We are not.
No American president could readily admit to himself that there’s not much he can do about Iran and the threat it poses. To say to the electorate, “I will ask them politely to stop and offer to pay them more” would be political suicide. Americans don’t want to know the truth.
But it’s dangerous when politicians and electorates determine together that they don’t want to know the truth. At least one of them should know it. Right now, the idea that Iran can be induced to behave the way we want at a cost we’re willing to pay has become a folie à millions. It serves only to further to deform our political life and endanger us through incoherent policy.
I’m depressed as hell just writing our options down, so it’s no surprise that American policymakers, presidents, and the public prefer to believe that there must be a better plan. But we really can’t keep living in fantasyland. Our leaders, at least, have an obligation to see things clearly.
Rule 9. It’s not how much you can buy. It’s the price you’re willing to pay.
The idea that if only Biden were “tougher” he could deter Iran is dishonest. The question is not whether Iran can be deterred. It’s whether Iran can be deterred at a cost we’re willing to pay.
Note: It is absolutely true that Biden’s a wimp. It’s also true that if he were tougher, he could have deterred—and could still deter—Russia at a cost we’d be willing to pay. (If we were sane.) But this is because the cost is paid in Ukrainian lives, not ours.
Iran is quite different. This morning, I exchanged emails with my friend Josh Treviño. We’re in full agreement about the futility of Biden’s approach. He wrote:
… the Biden team’s decision-making process is basically animated by a tangle of noninterventionist premises married to calibrated-response technocrats. Which is to say, their reflex is the former when possible (Afghanistan), but when compelled to the latter they go in too small and too hesitant to yield the desired result (Ukraine). You see this playing out with the Yemenis right now: many missed it, but the President himself acknowledged several days back that the US airstrikes are ineffective, and will therefore continue. Therefore expect the following after the Iranian murder of three American soldiers:
There will be US airstrikes across the region, but not in Iran.
The United States will leave Iraq and Syria.
It’s a grand strategic victory for the Iranians, won on the cheap. They will probably detonate a nuclear weapon by year’s end, and move heavy Iranian units directly into Syria and Lebanon. I’d like to be wrong.
But I’m probably not.
I predict the same thing.
He believes, however, that there is an option for deterrence through the use of American military force at a cost we’re willing to pay:
When America directly hits Iran, Iran folds every time. The two major examples are 1988’s Operation Praying Mantis, in which the US Navy sunk almost the entire Iranian surface fleet, and the 2020 assassination of General Soleimani. Those episodes worked—and generated Iranian quiescence—because they demonstrated American escalatory dominance.
The only way out now is to do something similar. If you want Americans to stop dying and the Red Sea straits opened, the price tag now is probably a Praying-Mantis sized operation that includes a full campaign against the Iranian nuclear facilities.
This will probably not happen.
I agree, it probably won’t. But this isn’t simply because Biden lacks the guts.
The two examples he offers are very different, and I’m not sure how much we can conclude from them. The fundamental fact of our contemporary relationship with Iran is that since withdrawing from Iraq, and even more so since leaving Afghanistan, the US public has been unwilling to countenance even the words “war with Iran.” Nor is it hard to sympathize with this aversion. No one feels the Iraq War was a great success, after all. But this has left us without the ability credibly to threaten the regime’s existence, which was not true in 1988.
Precisely as we came to view the idea of war with Iran unthinkable, Iran became intolerable. Iran, the victor of the Iraq War, used it as a springboard to expand throughout the region. It grew closer to its longstanding goal of acquiring nuclear weapons. It surrounded Israel with proxy militias. This was the strategic landscape Obama faced. He had been elected by the American people on a mandate to end the war in Iraq, not start a war with Iran. Since he did not have the option of credibly threatening Iran with war, his decision to negotiate—in the hope of delaying the Iranian Bomb and persuading Iran to kill fewer of us—was entirely reasonable.
Critics attacked the JCPOA as “a bad deal.” But the criticism was mostly unfair. This was the only deal on offer, and as such, better than none. When supporters replied that it was the deal or war, they weren’t far off. There was no world in which the Iranian regime would be dissuaded from aims that are the essence of its raison d’être without the use of American violence.
As Syria collapsed, Iran’s deepening alliance with Russia allowed it to begin building a bridge to the Mediterranean and further reinforcing its proxy militias, who gained combat experience in Syria and posed a growing menace to Israel. This was obvious intolerable.
So Americans confronted this dilemma with maturity, faced it stoically, and made the decision to risk war with Iran.
Just kidding. They did no such thing. They made the decision to wildly delude themselves. Donald Trump assured them that he would withdraw from the humiliating nuclear deal and somehow persuade the regime to cease pursuing its core strategic goals. How, he never said. There was never any reason to think this would work, and it didn’t. Trump tore up the symbol of our decision that it was better to allow Iran to win than to go back to war in the Middle East, but had no plan at all to cause Iran to lose. We thus lost even the modest benefits of the deal.
Refusing to be honest with ourselves about the choices on offer or the decisions we were making, we opted for a worst-of-both-worlds policy: We irritated Iran without ingratiating ourselves. This did not slow Iran’s expansion, its encirclement of Israel, or the pace of its nuclear research. Iranians discovered quickly that Trump had no discernible policy beyond withdrawing from the deal. They certainly were not deterred by his policies.
Trump did nothing when Iran struck Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq oil facility, which caused the biggest daily oil supply disruption in history. This was Saudi Arabia’s Pearl Harbor, and the Saudis begged Trump to retaliate. Trump shrugged:
Asked for his response, Trump said “We know very much what happened” but argued that it was “a sign of strength” that he has thus far taken no military action against Iran. “How did going into Iraq work out?” Trump asked.
The decision to ignore such an attack would have been unthinkable under any other presidential administration. Only Trump could have got away with it. Biden would have been pilloried as a coward. Iranians watched Trump with growing conviction that there was no need to fear him. By the time Trump ordered Soleimani’s death, our deterrence had eroded to the point that Iranian proxies were storming our embassy.
It’s hard to say whether the strike on Soleimani really did anything to chasten Iran. It probably had some effect. But as I wrote at the time, there’s a good chance it just left them baffled:
No one but Trump understands why he did this; no one but Trump knows what he’s seeking. Does he hope to re-establish deterrence? To begin a war with Iran? If the latter, to what end—what are our war aims? Does he hope that Iran retaliates in some outrageous way, boosting American support for a larger, costlier conflict? Or does he believe this will shock the regime into caution and quiescence?
What kind of Iranian retaliation would move him to climb further up the escalation ladder? Would any attack on Americans or our allies prompt him to execute his most recent threat to target “52 high-value sites” in Iran?
Is Iran dealing with the Trump who ordered Suleimani whacked, or the Trump who did nothing when Iran struck the Abqaiq oil facility, taking out five percent of the world’s energy production? Are they dealing with the Trump who thinks the region is nothing but “sand and death” and who wants to withdraw American forces from it as quickly as possible, with no concern for the consequences? With the Trump who has for the past three years allowed US deterrence to erode to the point that Suleimani sincerely thought we’d stand by passively as his proxies stormed our embassy? Or with the Trump who retaliated for the death of an American by killing 25 PMUs in in one strike, droned Suleimani, and sent the 82nd Airborne to Kuwait? Are they dealing with the Trump who says, as he did two days ago, that he doesn’t seek Iranian regime change, or the Trump who just changed the regime? Is he the Trump who says, “We did not take action last night to start a war,” or the Trump who took action to start a war?
I don’t know—and neither do you.
The claim that the strike ensured Iranian quiescence is not true. It didn’t touch off a wider war, that much is correct. But five days later, Iran attacked the al-Asad airbase in Iraq, injuring 109 American troops. It was not a minor and face-saving attack, as it was initially portrayed:
… Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, predicted that Iran’s intent was to kill Americans on January 8, and later disclosed Iran’s missiles were lethal 1,000- to 2,000-pound munitions. “These things have bursting radiuses of 50 to 100 feet, and that’s just the shrapnel in the actual blast. These are very, very significant, serious weapons,” Milley said Jan 30. “And you know, if you’re within a certain range of that thing, there’s no helmet or anything else that’s going to save you,” Milley added.
By my lights, that’s not a deterred Iran.
Operation Praying Mantis is another story. That did indeed change Iranian behavior without precipitating an all-out war. But Iran in 1988 was not what it is today. By the end of the Iran-Iraq War, the Iranian military was so hollowed-out and shellshocked that even had they wanted to strike back, they hadn’t much to do it with.
Iran is not only stronger now, it has proxies throughout the region. It almost certainly has sleeper cells throughout the West. If it wishes to respond by creating absolute mayhem, it can. That’s why it has those proxy militias and sleeper cells in the first place—to deter us. We can’t assume it will behave the way it did in 1988.
It might, of course. But if we mean to impress upon Iran that we’re willing to climb further up the escalation ladder than they are, we need to accept and prepare for the possibility that they will respond by scrambling up that latter faster than we expect.
Like the Kremlin, Tehran may well have convinced itself that we’re only a few blows away from collapse. They certainly didn’t think this in 1988. They may be willing to test their theory. If we’re not prepared to discover this—and if we haven’t thought through the possibility that all of our adversaries, from Russia to North Korea, might see this as a tempting time to pile on—we’d be unwise to say, “Let’s him them directly, because when America directly hits Iran, Iran folds every time.”
But we would not be unwise to say, “Let’s him them directly, because that’s the only way we’ll ever get them to stop, and if they don’t stop, we’ll face an Iran we can no longer even hope to stop.” Let’s just realize that if we do that, there’s a very real possibility of another major war in the Middle East.
I wish I could think of an easier way to solve this problem. But there isn’t one.
Postscript: I also wrote this after Trump killed Soleimani. I reproduce below a few points that are still worth noting:
Neither the JCPOA nor Trump’s sanctions halted Iranian expansion. Under Obama and Trump, the size and capability of Iran’s proxies—foreign forces directed by the IRGC-QF—grew, as did Iran’s ability to move fighters and material from one theater to another.
Neither Obama’s palliation nor Trump’s sanctions diminished Iran’s involvement in the war in Yemen. Neither dissuaded Iran from providing ballistic missiles to the Houthis (which they used against the Saudis). …
Neither Obama’s diplomacy nor Trump’s anti-diplomacy diminished Iran’s escalating conflict with Israel in Syria. Neither put a damper on the steady growth of Shia militias in Iraq. Neither diminished the pace of Iran’s targeted assassinations, nor of its cyberattacks. Over both presidencies, Iran’s partners improved their missile and drone capabilities—with the aid of the IRGC-QF, supervised by the departed and unlamented Soleimani.
The war in Syria, primarily, permitted Iran’s expansion. This coincided with Obama’s presidency. By 2014, Lebanese Hezbollah had deployed its fighters to Syria. (Under Obama.) Iran trained, equipped, and funded Shia militias from the entire region to support Assad. (Under Obama.)
Today—despite the sanctions—Iran supports Hezbollah, which it has equipped, under both Obama and Trump, with a massive range of weapons. They may even have given them chemical weapons. Hezbollah has become more, not less, involved in Lebanese politics since the 2018 parliamentary elections. It has increased, not decreased, its influence on the government.
Iran’s influence along the Red Sea grew under both Obama and Trump. In 2016—that is to say, right in between maximum appeasement and maximum pressure—Iran began sending the Houthis anti-tank guided missiles, sea mines, aerial drones, Katyushas, MANPADS, explosives, ballistic missiles, unmanned explosive boats, radar systems, and mining equipment—with which they’ve threatened shipping near the Bab el Mandeb and attacked Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Iran has helped its Shia militias in Iraq to build their own missiles. They’ve built missile factories north of Karbala and east of Baghdad. The sanctions have barely dimmed Iran’s eagerness to proliferate missiles, missile technology, and missile parts, and why would they? The sanctions don’t affect the regime, just the people.
Under Obama—and then Trump—Iran organized and funded more than 100,000 Shia fighters in Syria. Iran (Soleimani, specifically) planned and executed the 2016 operation to retake Aleppo, working closely with Assad and Russia. Under Obama— and then Trump—Iran funded the Ridha Forces, the Companies of the Islamic Resistance in Syria, the Baqir Brigade. They trained thousands of fighters and provided them with advanced weapons, sophisticated cyber capabilities, and a massive number of recruits.
Iran—under Obama—organized 15,000 Afghan militants and deployed them to Aleppo, Daraa, Damascus, Hama, Homs, Latakia, Palmyra, and Dayr az Zawr. They did the same thing with their Pakistani brigade and their Bahraini fighters. (They also tried to overthrow the Bahraini government. Several times.) Meanwhile the grew their operations in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Iran did all of this in a tactical alliance with Russia, and did most of this under Obama. They didn’t do this because of the JCPOA. They did it because the Syrian and Iraqi wars made it possible. To the extent Obama is responsible, it’s because he declined to intervene in Syria. Trump doubled down on that decision. If you deplore one but not the other, partisanship has taken over your frontal lobe.
What of the money Obama returned to Iran or the sanctions Trump has imposed? In the past decade, Iran has spent nearly US$140 billion on its military ambitions. The money we returned, about US$1.8 billion, was a drop in the bucket—nowhere near enough to fund an expansion like that. Anyone who says it was is innumerate.
Likewise, the sanctions haven’t made much of a difference. Iran has cut its military budget, no doubt in response to the financial hardship we’ve imposed. But the budget was so large to begin with that the cuts barely affect its ability to project power—it can still do a massive amount of damage, if it wishes, and that’s the only metric worth measuring.
By 2016—before Trump’s inauguration—J. Matthew McKinnis testified before the Senate,
The IRI has significantly expanded the size and complexity of its proxy force in the past five years [NB: Under Obama], due primarily to the wars in Syria and Iraq. …
The IRI continues to invest in training and arming its proxies and partners with increasingly advanced equipment, with its most trusted groups receiving the best weaponry. Lebanese Hezbollah has acquired unmanned aerial vehicles and an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 rockets and missiles through Iranian assistance, including advanced air-to-ground and ground-to-sea missiles. The IRI’s Iraqi proxies employed the QFs’ signature improvised explosive device, the explosively formed projectiles against coalition forces in the last decade. Yemen’s al Houthis, in contrast, have received mostly small arms from Hezbollah or the IRGC, although there are indications the movement has gained some Iranian rocket technology.
Perhaps more important than weapons are the tremendous strides the IRGC has made in the past five years advancing their proxies’ deployability, interoperability, and capacity to conduct unconventional warfare. The corps has effectively moved its Iraqi, Afghan, and Pakistani proxies into and out of the Syrian theater as requirements demand. In addition to building the NDF and coordinating with Lebanese Hezbollah, Russian, and Syrian government operations, the IRGC, along with some Artesh special forces units, has also begun rotating cadre of its brigade-level officers to Syria to train and lead the Shia militias in their counterinsurgency campaign. The IRI is in effect turning the axis of resistance into a region-wide resistance army. Recent estimates indicate more than a quarter million personnel are potentially responsive to IRGC direction.
All of this occurred under Obama. These proxy groups are an ideological extension of the Islamic Republic; they proclaim their ultimate allegiance to the Supreme Leader. They’re financially dependent upon the Quds force. They are, obviously, a threat to Israel, Jordan, and the GCC states; if we wish to remain a global power, they’re a threat to us.
But it’s no better under Trump. Despite the sanctions, Iran continues to strengthen and enlarge the whole gamut of Shia militias in Iraq the Badr Organization, Kata’ib Hezbollah (who killed a US contractor, leading to the mess we’re in), and Asaib Ahl al- Haq. They support, fund, and train the Afghan Liwa Fatemiyoun, the Pakistan, Liwa Zainabyoun; they support Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. They’re building routes to the Mediterranean through Iraq’s Kurdish region, the Iraqi city of Sinjar, and northeastern Syria cities like al-Hasakah into Lebanon. They’re building a southern route to Lebanon through al-Walid in Iraq, al-Tanf in Syria, and Damascus.
“These corridors,” notes Center for Strategic and International Studies, “resemble the Royal Road, the ancient land bridge built by Persian King Darius the Great in the fifth century BC.”
This might suggest something about how likely it is that Iran can be deterred by sanctions or diplomacy.
Note: As usual, I was too tired to spot typos when I sent this to subscribers. I’ve corrected this version. The original version contained some significant typos, including a missing “not,” which resulted in a sentence that said the opposite of what I meant. Also, I’d accidentally deleted an introductory sentence. (It was the one about training dogs.) Readers must have wondered, when they read the next sentence, how dogs had entered the scene. I’ve added it back.
Reading from the Atlantic Council:
William F. Wechsler: The US failed in believing it was managing Iran and its proxies
Jonathan Panikoff: It’s time to take on the threat from Iran—not just its proxies
Matt Kroenig: The US could hit back against Iran’s navy, top leadership, or nuclear program
Nathan Sales: Stop self-deterring and take the gloves off with Iran
Abbas Kadhim: The attack came as the US and Iraq are negotiating on US troop presence
Qutaiba Idlbi: The US should deliver a strategic blow to Iran’s capabilities in eastern Syria
Thomas S. Warrick: Iran doesn’t think of deterrence the same way the US does
Daniel E. Mouton: The US needs to step up its UAV defenses and hold Iran accountable
Matthew Zais: This attack is the result of the United States’ failed ‘one-Iraq’ policy
Alex Plitsas: The US must thread the needle by responding forcefully without starting a wider war
Thanks - I'd like to quibble deviously with the idea that Rule 1 has been respected. On the one hand "engage with overwhelming force" - yes. But the actual rule 1 was "make a damn decision" and as you pointed out in your re-upped analysis https://claireberlinski.substack.com/p/the-soleimani-incompleteness-theorum (cool spelling!), "1) We do not understand the US foreign policy decision-making process."
That's even more true now than in 2020; in fact it's not clear to me that any singular "decision" in the conventional sense has been made. There have been discussions, sure (mosly excluding the SecDef/War, the NYT tells us) and some orders have plainly been given. But a "decision"? Not sure...
“That Trump is presiding over this war does give us good cause to worry that it won’t be prosecuted competently, that the US government is unprepared for its consequences and incapable of managing them shrewdly, that our institutions have been so weakened that we lack the critical tools of statecraft essential to managing those consequences, and that the American constitutional order is dead.” (Claire Berlinski)
Going back to June, 1950 and the start of the Korean War remind me which war the United States was involved with that was prosecuted competently?
Which Commander in Chief assembled a team that insured America was victorious? Did we win in Korea? Did we win in Viet Nam?
Didn’t we win every battle in both Iraq Wars while grabbing defeat from the jaws of victory? How successful was the American war in Afghanistan?
Didn’t we fail even in defeat while Americans watched helicopters taking off from rooves in Saigon? Didn’t huge crowds of desperate civilians gather on the runway in Kabul?
Do you remember the incident at Abbey Gate?
No one is saying that Trump is a military genuis but do you really think Trump is less competent to prosecute this war than Truman was in Korea or Johnson and Nixon were in Viet Nam? Given what happened in Iraq twice, is there any reason to believe that Trump will do a poorer job on this war than the two Bush’s did in Iraq or Dubya and Obama did in Afghanistan?
Americans had two choices in the last election. It was either Kamala or the Donald. Do you wish it was Kamala prosecuting this war?