Why is Trump Waging War on Iran?
His goal is to compensate for U.S. global decline by intimidating rivals with short, safe shock-and-awe demonstrations of destructive military power. Iran, so far, is failing to comply
Trump’s war is illegal, unprovoked, and driven primarily by the needs of Israel’s genocidal and expansionist leaders. You know all that, no need for me to restate what dozens of finer minds are articulating every day.
But Trump’s purposes reflect his global purposes more than they are in line with traditional U.S. geopolitical goals in the Middle East: Sure, those in DC and Israel who goaded him into this disastrous war seek a reordering of the Middle East on Israeli terms, but Trump is motivated less by a geopolitical regional security management than by an overriding desire to camouflage and compensate for the relative decline of U.S. global power by demonstrating a willingness to unleash America’s vast destructive military power, but in short, noisy and highly televisual bursts, but mostly from safe distances that limit the risk to U.S. personnel, assets and strategic interests. His goal is not simply narrow reordering of, say, the governance of Venezuela through military extortion, but to use a low-risk deployment of his military in a shock-and-awe operation to intimidate all of Latin America into bending the knee to U.S. writ.
Consider Iran in the same light: Trump hasn’t changed his mind on costly, risky open-ended military entanglements; he has been persuaded – presumably principally by the Israelis and their champions in Washington – that the risks of his Iran aggression are minimal and manageable, while the reward would be an epic win which would leave all U.S. rivals and challengers cowering. Trump has been sold on a vision of Iran being Venezuela on steroids – a dangerous delusion.
Trump has been seriously misled on the simplicity of the mission he’s ordered. Clearly, Iran’s regime is far more resilient than he’d been led to believe, and its structure has been clearly built to survive “decapitation” strikes. Its capacity demonstrated in the first three days to inflict damage on U.S. assets and allies across the region will have given him pause, not least because of the economic impacts already in effect and potentially exacerbated in the coming days by the damage Iran is inflicting on Gulf countries hosting U.S. military facilities.
There’s no end game
Perhaps most importantly, three days of fighting with no end in sight have highlighted the absence of a credible end game on the part of the aggressors: Trump has been sold a fantasy that the Islamic Republic could be obliterated by a combination of U.S.-Israeli airpower and a popular uprising. There’s no historical precedent for such a scenario. But the deployment of ground troops in an another expeditionary war of choice (a prerequisite for installing a new regime) is simply no longer a politically tenable option for Trump or any other U.S. president.
Without ground troops, the U.S.-Israeli ability to shape any outcome in Iran is negligible. The regime, with some 2 million men under arms in various formations and structures, enjoys a monopoly of force on the ground — and a proven willingness to use that force against its own citizenry — that makes the chances of a victorious rebellion slight, at best, for the foreseeable future.
Trump’s calls for unarmed Iranian civilians to step up and do the job the U.S. had previously relied on its own ground troops to do may more likely echo of George HW Bush’s 1991 call for Iraqis to rebel and oust Saddam Hussein. (Despite agitating for a rebellion to bring down Saddam, the U.S. watched passively as the regime’s forces massacred Shia and Kurdish rebels who heeded Bush’s call.)
The 4-week air campaign Trump has promised (perhaps setting an expiry-date in hope of assuaging the fears of investors as stock markets tank) is unlikely to topple Iran’s regime. In its most optimistic scenario, it could unleash a protracted, bloodier-than-ever Iranian civil war, that could rage over years. That would suit the Israelis just fine, but the chaos it would unleash on all of Iran’s neighbors would be unprecedented and unmanageable. In short, the Israeli project of transforming the Middle East’s strategic map is not about the impossible dream of a new regional order – the type of thing Netanyahu fanboy Jared Kushner puts in his power points – but a new regional disorder, devolving over years, in which Israel holds all the cards and constantly expands its domain at the expense of all of its neighbors.
Trump’s off-ramp narrative is being mapped
Trump’s rhetoric, as ever, is all over the map. One minute he’s talking about negotiating with Iran’s new leadership, next moment his saying his war will continue until all of its objectives are met. (Except he’s never clearly defined those objectives, even to the military waging his war.) Trump can literally never be taken at his word, because he’s continuously making statements wildly at odds with one another. Most analysts predict the combination of rising oil prices and tanking stock prices, regional mayhem and American casualties will force him to end this even before his four-week deadline. And, of course, he’s created the narrative off ramps for a declaration of victory and standing down already:
-- a trophy killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader
-- destruction of more of Iran’s nuclear and military facilities
-- subcontracting the regime’s overthrow to unarmed Iranians on the ground.
On the latter, unpack his statement to “all Iranian patriots who yearn for freedom” in a Sunday video speech: “I made a promise to you, and I fulfilled that promise. The rest will be up to you, and we’ll be there to help.” Trump is saying the job is done, the fate of the Iranian regime will now depend on the willingness of its own citizenry to mount a successful rebellion. Declare victory, then, handing the torch to Iranians who seek the regime’s overthrow, but lack the means to achieve it.
He’s begun laying the narrative tracks on an off ramp.
The regional conflagration
Iran won’t make that easy. Indeed, while Trump has spoken of negotiations with Iran’s new leaders, Iran’s leadership has made clear that it has no intention of making the same mistake twice (the perfidy of another U.S.-Israeli attack mounted in the midst of ongoing negotiations is plain to see). Iran’s leaders expect that if they concluded a new truce now, the U.S. and Israel would break it whenever they sense an opportune moment. But it’s beyond the obvious reasons why no adversary can trust negotiations with the United States.
Iran has, three days in, shown a capacity to inflict an unprecedented cost on its neighbors who proclaim neutrality while hosting the U.S. military assets being deployed against it. The much feared regional conflagration is at hand. And Tehran is clearly betting, in the way it’s deploying its military force (clearly holding back on unleashing its full missile capabilities in order to stretch the interceptor-inventory of the U.S.-Israel and their partners), on a protracted confrontation demonstrating a harsh lesson to deter future aggressions. Also, of course, consensus on any concessions will be harder to attain within Iran’s leadership absent Khamenei, although his designated hand, national security chief Ali Larijani, has the credibility to enforce that – though he’s the architect of the current response designed to put a prohibitive price on regional allies enabling U.S.-Israeli aggression, and on the Americans and Israelis themselves.
Iran’s strategy appears to be to inflict sufficient, sustained damage on the U.S. and its allies to deter future aggression. It’s a high risk strategy.
A key variable remains the responses of the Gulf States.
The Gulf dilemma
The regime-change attack on Iran by Israel and the U.S. has shattered the assumption that Gulf States could preserve their secure and prosperous status quo by maintaining a posture of neutrality and engagement (even urging the U.S. to refrain from launching this attack) at the same time as hosting the very U.S. (and in some cases Israeli) assets that are now being deployed against Iran’s regime. The Gulf states had long based their own security on that posture, with the U.S. military presence as the effective guarantor of their safety, while they also continued engagement with Tehran.
Trump’s new war has negated that posture. Iran’s military assaults on U.S. bases and civilians sites where U.S. security personnel are suspected of being hidden has shattered the tranquility of the Gulf’s international magnet cities – Riyadh, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Doha. And Iran has attacked some of those countries’ energy production infrastructure. The stakes have never been higher. The U.S. and Israel would obviously like to see the GCC countries respond by deploying their own military resources to confront Iran alongside their own. Their leaders have condemned Iran’s actions and threatened to punish Iran in response, but that also carries major risks given the exposure of the infrastructure on which their tranquility and prosperity has been built.
Iran may be betting it can force the Gulf allies to make different choices, at minimum that they force the U.S. to end its campaign against Iran. But the impact of Tehran’s attacks over the past three days may also have had the effect of pushing those countries closer to the U.S. despite the self-evident risks of that alliance. Like everything else it’s too soon to tell, though not too soon to declare that the region has been fundamentally changed by Saturday’s offensive — however things settle in the coming days and weeks, they’re unlikely to return to the status quo ante.