The war in Iran

When will American presidents learn, for good, the limits of military power? For the better part of a century, the United States has operated on a simple, comforting (yet clearly erroneous) assumption: that overwhelming military force can reshape the world to our liking. Korea complicated that assumption. Vietnam shattered it. Iraq and Afghanistan, two wars that cost trillions of dollars and the lives of thousands of American troops, should have buried it for good. Instead, this spring, the country tried the same gambit one more time in Iran — and came away with the same hard lesson.
As a candidate, Trump liked to call previous presidents stupid for sinking blood and treasure in senseless military interventions. It was one of the few things Trump said that actually made sense. He promised as a candidate that he would never start a war, but like most of Trump’s promises, this one was hollow to the core.
Trump thought his war would be different. Quick and decisive. Trump compared it to the January raid that captured Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro and predicted a similarly tidy outcome.
He was wrong, of course. Iran was not Venezuela, and decapitating its leader left even more hardline individuals in charge. American and Israeli bombing of the country didn’t yield surrender. It prompted Iran’s military to hit back at U.S. allies in the region and caused billions of dollars in damage to oil and gas facilities in neighboring countries and to U.S. bases in the region, killing 13 American servicemen and women and wounding hundreds. Iranian-backed Hezbollah fighters lobbed hundreds of missiles at Israel. Then the Iranians closed the Strait of Hormuz, disrupting the global trade of oil and its byproducts for months.
In the end, we experienced the fastest and most complete U.S. capitulation in our 250-year history. While Trump, encouraged by corrupt Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu, thought he could easily take out the Iranian regime, he was ultimately forced to negotiate a memorandum of understanding that accomplishes none of Trump’s stated goals and leaves the Iranians in a stronger position in the region than before the war— with hundreds of billions of dollars now headed their way as the Trump administration has even agreed to war reparations.
Stunning.
But then, perhaps not surprising. One of the more sobering developments of this war, and of the decade leading up to it, is how thoroughly drone technology has narrowed the gap between superpowers and the rest of the world. Iran doesn’t have an air force capable of challenging American carrier groups. It doesn’t need one.
Cheap, mass-produced drones — along with the missile barrages they often accompany — let a country like Iran severely damage U.S. bases, allied shipping, and even American warships at a fraction of the cost of the systems built to stop them. We saw it in Kuwait, where Iranian drones and missiles overwhelmed defenses enough to kill American troops and down U.S. aircraft. We’ve seen the same dynamic in Ukraine and elsewhere.
There is no question that the U.S. military performs at the highest level. They can accomplish any realistic tasks put to them. But they can’t succeed when those who call the shots don’t understand the limits of military power.
Trump and those around him did not understand that Iran was not Venezuela because they have no sense of history. They are more interested in their reality TV administration, with its scripted strutting and preening, than they are in learning about the world and the forces that have shaped it. We’ve never had a more intellectually lazy administration, nor one with less strategic sense than the current one.
Despite Trump’s constant criticism of the diplomatic achievement of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, under President Obama, that detailed agreement put Iran’s nuclear program on ice for 20 years and enforced a rigorous inspection regime. It now seems unlikely that the administration can achieve anything as protective as the JCPOA, which was accomplished as a result of sustained and coordinated diplomatic effort, not bombs.
As we saw yet again, military action wasn’t the solution to a vexing problem. Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, of Louisiana, didn’t mince words this past week when he called Trump’s war and its consequences America’s “worst foreign policy blunder in decades.”
The worst blunder, that is, since the disastrous war in Iraq, which was preceded by the disastrous war in Afghanistan, which was preceded by the disastrous war in Vietnam. Congress, which never authorized Trump’s war on Iran in the first place, would do well to start asking why it is we keep paying this same steep tuition for a lesson we don’t ever seem to learn.