President Trump may be a second-term president now, but he hasn’t lost his penchant for surprising critics and supporters alike. No one could be sure what he would do about the Israel-Iran war. Had he played a role in setting it up, by duping the Iranians into believing he wanted to strike a “deal” to arrest their nuclear-weapons program? Or was he negotiating in good faith and blindsided by Israel? Would he involve America in the war or not? And if he did, would regime change in Tehran be his goal?
For a week debate raged over these questions, with rival camps on social media deriving their most desired or most feared conclusions from contradictory statements the president had made. In the end, however, his actions were consistent with his own record. He has said since he first entered politics that Iran must never obtain nuclear weapons. And he hasn’t been shy about using force, including against Iran when he ordered the attack that killed Qasem Soleimani in his first term. He bombed Syria in 2017 and had bombed Yemen as recently as this spring. What’s characteristic of Trump’s use of force, however, is that it usually doesn’t involve a prolonged campaign. (An exception is the effort against ISIS during his first term.)
Trump bombed Iranian nuclear facilities on Saturday evening, and by Monday evening was announcing a ceasefire between Iran and Israel. He ended the war almost as soon as he got America into it, a feat that confounds hawks and doves alike. The former wish the war had been longer, the outcome more certain, and the conclusion the end of the ayatollahs’ regime. The latter wish Trump had never allowed the war to happen—assuming he had the power to stop it—or that he’d kept America out of it. Now the raging debate online is over who won the policy battle. Is a two-day war (for us) consisting of one bombing sortie actually a war? It defies the grandiose claims of both interventionists and non-interventionists, who were more alike than not in assuming that regime change was in the offing and the stakes were much the same as those on the table in the 2003 debate over the Iraq War.
“It defies the grandiose claims of both interventionists and non-interventionists.”
“We can’t just bomb Fordow and go home,” was the sentiment of more than one antiwar friend. Any ideology, hawkish or dovish, subsists on extreme scenarios. The idea that some policy either good or bad could be less than apocalyptic, or utopian, is hard to accept. But Trump is not an ideologue, which means he neither feels ideological constraints (which would have kept him out of the war altogether) nor suffers ideological delusions (which would have told him more force achieves more good).
Once again Trump proves to be ambidextrous, in defiance of conventional political logic. He’s the president who brought about the end of Roe v. Wade and the Republican leader who has moved the party away from pro-life orthodoxy. He loves a grand, seemingly impossible bargain. But can he really reconfigure international relations the way he’s redrawn the boundaries of domestic politics? A realignment in party ideologies and voting blocs is one thing; realigning the Israeli-Iran relations is entirely another. The ceasefire is fragile at best. No matter how successful the U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran may have been in destroying existing nuclear facilities, Iran can always rebuild what it has built before. Will that mean more Israeli attacks, coupled with further American intervention? If Trump is not careful, the scenario that may emerge over the coming weeks will not look like 2003, but rather like the situation that persisted for more than a decade and led up to the Iraq War.
In 1991, George H.W. Bush also won a swift victory, ejecting Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait. But then what? The “Marsh Arabs” whom Bush encouraged to rebel against Saddam were massacred. Bush and his successor, Bill Clinton, enforced no-fly zones over parts of Iraq, a form of low-intensity war with no obvious end, other than the one George W. Bush decided upon in 2003. The second Bush’s regime-change war was a dozen years in the making. All the while, America’s foreign-policy establishment was becoming accustomed to thinking of this as a proper and normal exercise of “leadership” and global responsibility. The mental habits acquired by America’s elite in the 1990s—in foreign policy, in cultural politics, and in economics—account for most of the political crises of the early 21st century, as well as for the rise of right-wing populism and Donald Trump in response to them.
What’s different about this episode, however, is that it was not an exercise in American “leadership.” This was Israel’s war, begun by Prime Minister Netanyahu, and its long-term resolution depends on Israel as well. The significance of this is not lost on Europe’s leaders, who had already begun to take seriously the idea that their nations, in concert, will have to chart a course independent of Washington. The Ukraine war, in their own backyard, had already begun to teach them the lesson, but Israel has now given an example of what a nation that doesn’t wait for “American leadership” can do. The foreign-policy restraint wing of the GOP must look upon this development with a mixture of satisfaction and concern. Having America’s allies take more responsibility for their own security, and their regions’, is precisely what restrainers have desired. But with greater independence may come a greater willingness of our allies to use force in situations where we would not use it, and might prefer that they did not use it either. If, say, Poland and Germany were to send their own forces to bolster Ukraine’s defense, would America end up having to support their war effort much as Trump supported Israel’s?
To put it bluntly: America cannot sustain the “leadership” it has exercised for the last 30-odd years, which demands global policing that is not compatible with national self-government. But the corollary to a necessary reduction in American global role will be the exercise of leadership and initiative by many other states, including our friends. And if friendships and affinities are tantamount to vital national-security interests—vital psychologically and morally, if not existentially—can our friends be allowed to wager our interests on their ventures? Netanyahu could be confident that whether or not America would join in bombing Iran, we would bail him out if he got into real trouble. “It defies the grandiose claims of both interventionists and non-interventionists.”
This is why many restrainers were aghast at Netanyahu’s actions, and at Trump’s failure to stop them, from the moment the war broke out. Yet Washington won’t be able to have it both ways—we can’t treat friends as vassals and dependents without assuming the responsibilities of imperial overlordship. Yet even if we don’t exercise command, we aren’t plausibly going to have a clean break with friends and allies, either, such that their fate will be no concern of ours. Retrenchment and the reconfiguration of our foreign policy, if it is to happen at all, might have to be as messy, risky, and even seemingly self-contradictory as Trump’s actions in this affair have been. This hard road is the only one that leads out of the trap that global hegemony has proved to be. And Trump has taken a stride down this road without stumbling—a remarkable first step, but there are many more ahead.