Why Trump's Iran war should terrify U.S. allies

A weakening empire is more dangerous than a strong one. Seven thoughts on the emerging lessons for the future global order from the Trump-Netanyahu aggression

I.

Any country that fails to accept Israel’s expansionist and genocidal prerogatives cannot rely on the United States for their security. Not only that, any Muslim or Arab country that aligns with the U.S. will be expected to accept increasingly humiliating terms — Trump’s surrogates now paint this as a “Judeo-Christian” holy war; Israel’s is the only voice that counts. And when the retaliatory rockets fly, it’s Israel that takes priority in missile defense, while America’s Gulf allies are left exposed — and global energy markets are imperiled. The scale of what America’s allies have been asked to sacrifice in service of Benjamin Netanyahu is quite astonishing. But this much should have been clear to them for some time now via the “Board of Peace” farce that required them to literally sanctify the ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and the marginalization of the United Nations and international law (what did anyone think was the intended messaging of sending Melania Trump to chair the UNSC?)

II.

The U.S. is more dangerous than ever by virtue of its destructive power and the thuggish inclination of its leadership to unleash that power without restraint or reason. And yet, at the same time, the U.S. is less coherent, and less competent in imperial warfare than at any point over the past century. This should be profoundly alarming to all of those governments who continue to, however reluctantly, throw in their lot with the U.S. in the absence of any ability to imagine an alternative order. Many of those governments seem to still imagine America in its Cold War national-security-state iteration, in which its imperial power projection was managed by a multilayered and predictable national security state whose “interagency process” and overall sense of prudence and restraint (produced in no small part by mindfulness of the power of the Soviet adversary) — an America that made many catastrophic mistakes, but nonetheless avoided impulsive recklessness, and acted with a coherent, if sometimes quite deranged, strategic logic.

That America shaped by the national-security state no longer exists, nor has it existed for some time; historians can debate the timeline of its post-Cold War hollowing out, but the hollowing out is unmistakable: America has been plunged (or been dragged by Israel) into a potentially cataclysmic war, under the sober, prudent and competent leadership of Donald Trump, the cartoonishly bloodthirsty Pete Hegseth, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. Their strategic incompetence is impossible to ignore; they’re scrambling daily to define and redefine their war aims and how they plan to achieve those.

To the extent that this crowd has any strategy in mind, it’s the belief that simply demonstrating America’s vast destructive power, and escalating in successive waves of increasingly deadly force unrestrained by any law or measure of future consequences, will bully the rest of the world to bend the knee to the emperor. A dying empire raging violently against the dimming of its ability to impose its will on the world.

Anyone with any understanding of Iran’s history and present (and presumably most of its Western and Arab allies) knows that was never going to happen. But Israel, which actually is guided by a clear and coherent (if despicable) strategy knows that the war into which it drew Trump won’t result in Iran bending the knee to him; it’s goal is to shatter and dismember the Iranian nation state, and if that is achieved at the expense of creating expanding circles of chaos radiating outward from Israel, all the better for Israel’s ability to dominate the region. Oh, and forget Colin Powell’s “Pottery Barn rule” — Trump has made abundantly clear that the U.S. has no intention of cleaning up behind it, or even suturing the wounds his choices have inflicted across the region. All U.S. allies should be afraid. Very afraid.

III.

Could it be, as Daniel Levy argues, that the Israelis were ahead of the pack in recognizing the arc of decline of U.S. power, and seeing in its most dangerous symptom – the Trump presidency – a “use ‘em or lose ‘em” opportunity to deploy American power while they still could? Perhaps, though even if not, European and Arab leaders that have continued to throw in their lot with the U.S. in the hope that the debacle is just some temporary blip are learning the hard way that the America they imagine or once thought they knew is unsustainable illusion.

IV.

Asymmetrical warfare is always a political and economic battle of endurance. As in Vietnam, the U.S. adversary wins by not losing. And weakens the resolve of the aggressor by raising the economic and political cost of the aggression in theaters far removed from the battlefield. The awesome technological power the U.S. and Israel bring to the battlefield has an asymmetrical echo, also, in the evolving capabilities of its adversaries. Science doesn’t pick sides, and the Iranian side is able to marshal a cost-effective drone and missile strategy capable of inflicting considerable damage on the vulnerabilities of U.S. and allied basis, and to drain the resources of the aggressors.

This pain of this war will be felt far and wide, whether in the price and availability of food across the Global South, or the price of energy in Europe (which has already suffered a 60% increase in LNG prices) or the price Americans pay to fill up their cars and trucks. The inflationary effects are plain to see, and from my amateur perspective, it looks rather likely that the reckless Netanyahu-Trump war of choice will plunge the world into a painful economic recession.

It’s clear that Trump and those around him literally have no idea how the world works; just a grotesque fantasy of power and of the need to create a noisy and violent impression of power that doesn’t translate into any real ability to shape events.

V.

Here’s an interesting Israeli military establishment take on the stakes of this confrontation in the wider Muslim world. Ronit Marzan sees Iran

“waging a struggle for independent Persian Islam in an attempt to differentiate itself from dependence on the West. The question at the center of the struggle is whether the Islamic space can stand on its feet without Western help… This campaign’s symbolism and prestige have a strategic value worth as much as bombs. At the center of this struggle is a geopolitical confrontation between the non-Arab Islamic powers (Iran and Turkey, separately) and the Arab Gulf states.

"When Iran launches missiles against targets in the Gulf states, it’s not just doing so to deter them militarily or to apply pressure that would end the war against it. Rather, its goal is to expose their weakness. When Arab states with immense defense budgets, such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, find themselves vulnerable to attack or worse, and they are dependent on American radar and interceptors, it undermines their narrative as sovereign states.

“Their vulnerability goes beyond technical questions, such as the effectiveness of the U.S. Patriot missiles. It touches on the exposed nerve of security independence. Revealing the limitations of these Arab states’ military power presents their regimes as unable to defend themselves and reliant on external alliances.

“Iran is seeking to establish a counter-narrative of ‘independent Iranian strength’ versus ‘Arab dependence on a foreign umbrella.’ According to this narrative… Iran is fighting for so-called Persian honor, intended to allow Tehran to enter future negotiations from a heroic position, while undermining the political and security standing of its Arab rivals in the eyes of the world’s Muslims.”

VI.
What the confrontation is making clear is how politically untenable the Trump’s decisions have made reliance on the U.S. “security umbrella” for Arab allies, by making it clear that the U.S. puts Israeli interests above all of theirs. Israel’s interests are to subordinate and humiliate the region all around it, not just of the Palestinians but of all who potentially challenge its domination of Greater Israel. Trump’s (Israeli) war on Iran simply highlights the reality, already clear in the “Board of Peace” being used to legitimize Israel’s ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, that falling in line with Trump means bending the knee to Israel and accepting Arab humiliation.

VII.

It’s too soon to predict the outcome. A U.S. war with no clear strategic logic; no narrative that has taken root in the U.S. public, with no more than one in three Americans supporting it; no allied support or buy-in outside of Israel, etc. won’t be hard for Trump to pivot – declaring victory (none of his narrative makes any sense, or is even consistent from day to day) – and moving on to Cuba. (I’m grimly reminded of how Ronald Reagan’s absurd invasion of Grenada in 1983 came literally two days after the U.S. lost 241 men to a truck bombing of their barracks in Beirut…) Then again, he may be double down. Still, what’s not too soon to predict is that there’ll be no reversion to the region’s status quo-ante. All the key players will be left facing new choices as those of the past prove redundant. The image of Condolleeza Rice visiting the White House last week (or was that an imitator in a Condi Halloween costume for Purim?) reminded me of her 2006 ostensibly reassuring comments as Beirut burned that “we are seeing the birth pangs of a new Middle East.” Indeed, but it may well be a Middle East quite different from what U.S. officials have imagined.