One War, Two Mistakes
· The Atlantic
When a war begins, our emotions often overtake our ability to analyze and judge. That is a problem not only for those who wage war, engaging either directly as combatants or indirectly as senior leaders, but for the rest of us. That partial eclipse of reason is on full display in the current Iran war, exacerbated by previously held beliefs about the leaders of the United States and Israel on the one hand, and about the Iranian regime on the other. As a result, those who favor the war and those who oppose it are each making a very large mistake.
The war’s advocates may acknowledge that the Trump administration has done a clumsy job of arguing its case and that it has entered the conflict with only one visible ally, but they view those as venial strategic sins. What they admire is the ferocity of the onslaught against the Islamic Republic and Donald Trump’s apparent willingness to stick it out despite rising oil prices and discontent even among his base.
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They are wrong. In any war, even the most just, maintaining domestic support is essential to victory, because the outcome is inherently uncertain. To be sure, the complaint that the Trump administration has not specified exactly how and when this war will end is captious. Abraham Lincoln did not know how the Civil War would end, and Franklin D. Roosevelt did not know how World War II would end. Woodrow Wilson was utterly mistaken in what World War I would achieve; George H. W. Bush, similarly in error, thought the Gulf War would culminate with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and a new era of security in the Persian Gulf; Barack Obama probably did not think that the sustained bombing of Libya in 2011 would create as much chaos as it resolved. Wars never end the way those who engage in them think they will.
Because of that, a president or a prime minister must work assiduously to bring his public along. Few wars had greater legitimacy in Great Britain than that of 1939–1945, but Winston Churchill rightly believed it essential to repeatedly give speeches justifying the war to the British people and explaining to them how it was going. A responsible wartime leader must busy himself with domestic politics—just as Lincoln micromanaged the appointments of postmasters in Civil War America, or as Roosevelt cunningly recruited Republicans to serve as secretaries of war and of the Navy. Similarly, even the most docile legislatures need to be convinced and to give some kind of approval.
And as for allies, irritating as they always are—and holding as they do different notions of the purposes of a war, the best course for conducting it, and the most reasonable terms for peace—they must be conciliated, persuaded, coerced, bribed, cajoled, flattered, supported, and only occasionally misled. Managing an alliance is a political art all to itself.
Some things, and usually some big things, will go wrong in a war. The enemy will land some unforeseen blows, new enemies will arise, old allies will collapse, some grotesque bungle or failure will occur. Domestic popular and legislative support, and competent alliance management, are the necessary reserves to meet such emergencies. And these the Trump administration has botched with a rare degree of thoroughness.
The administration has not secured (as the George W. Bush administration did, twice) authorizations from Congress for the use of military force. The president has yet to deliver a substantial and coherent speech from the White House about why he chose to wage this war and why. The secretary of defense can brag or belittle but not explain, the vice president appears to be in hiding, and the secretary of state cum national security adviser is focused on Cuba. Lacking any kind of disciplined National Security Council process, the administration has no common set of talking points. And when it discovered a need for allies to clear the Strait of Hormuz and escort shipping through it, the administration’s bullying and contempt excited an understandable aversion among other governments to doing its will with a smile.
But if the war’s advocates underestimate the extent of the administration’s strategic malpractice, its opponents miss one big thing as well: the Iran problem. The threat posed by the regime is severe, and all previous attempts to deal with it have failed egregiously. The Islamic Republic’s drive for nuclear weapons has been slowed but not stopped by sabotage, diplomatic agreements, and strikes. Iran has, as we now see, developed a large arsenal of ballistic missiles and drones, and was bent on expanding that arsenal to the point that no country could mount adequate defenses against it. It behaves with utter disregard for its citizens’ lives, having massacred them in the thousands, and thinks it sound strategy to lash out at civilian targets in a dozen countries, very few of which had anything to do with the attack launched by the United States and Israel.
In 2022, I spoke at the Chautauqua Institution, in New York. On the same stage, three weeks later, an assailant drove a knife into the eye of the author Salman Rushdie. That attack was the result of the 1989 fatwa against Rushdie issued by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a decree of death never formally revoked. In 2024, the Biden Justice Department revealed Iranian plots to assassinate Trump, then the former and, as it turned out, future president of the United States.
The history of the Islamic Republic is drenched in blood; it includes terrorist attacks on Jewish communities and institutions, the sponsorship of terrorist movements such as Hamas and Hezbollah, and direct attacks on American soldiers and civilians, as in the Khobar Towers bombing of 1996. From its inception, the Islamic Republic has been irrevocably hostile to the U.S. and dedicated to the destruction of the state of Israel. It is a rabid regime.
The United States has tried a number of approaches to Iran—ignoring the problem, engaging in small retaliatory actions, imposing sanctions, even negotiating an agreement that would have lifted economic pressure in return for deferring, not eliminating, Iran’s nuclear program, while disregarding the country’s sponsorship of terror and the buildup of its missile arsenal. All have failed. Those who dislike Trump’s approach generally fail to provide a plausible alternative. To ignore Iran is impossible because of our interests in the Persian Gulf and Israel. Those who would simply shrug off those considerations should ponder whether a nuclear-armed Israel would simply wait for missile attacks that it could not fend off from a country committed to the extermination of its inhabitants. They should consider as well whether other countries in the region, such as Saudi Arabia, would also turn to nuclear weapons to secure themselves. And those are only some of the possible calamities that await.
We do not know how this war will end, and it is fatuous to think that we would after two weeks of bombing a country larger than Britain, France, and Germany combined. We do not really know what is going on inside Iran, and we cannot tell what the long-term consequences are of the devastation of Iran’s armed forces, the replacement of the supreme leader by his son (a wounded, mediocre cleric still in hiding), and wanton attacks by Iran against its neighbors. But it seems to me that in any case, now and going forward, responsible advocacy requires a measure of intellectual honesty sorely missing from both sides of the argument.