The Iran War Is Trump’s War

Let’s think about the Iran war in the light of Donald Trump’s career to date. What has made him so historically significant, so effective as a politician in spite of all his sins and faults, so enduring and dominant in the American political landscape? One thing especially: an incredible instinct for the weaknesses of enemies and rivals, a willingness to tear away what looks like strength to reveal the rot beneath, an eye for the main chance and an appetite for conquest.

The Republican establishment in 2016 offered a case study in the vulnerabilities that he exploits: a party elite that had been discredited by the Iraq war and the financial crisis but didn’t fully realize it, a cadre of politicians who were easily unmanned by insults and braggadocio, a long list of names who staked out high-minded opposition and then inexorably bent the knee.

The same pattern prevailed in his defeat of Hillary Clinton’s complacent campaign and then his post-2020 comeback against a political establishment that constrained him for a while but allowed itself to be hollowed out by radicalism. And the scene at his second inaugural, where lords of industry who once participated eagerly in the resistance lined up to pay him homage, was the perfect capstone: He had taken their measure all along.

Which left only the world to conquer.

It was obvious enough in Trump’s first term that he was not really a dove or an isolationist. But the second term has made it clear that the recurring Trumpian arguments for foreign policy restraint should be understood primarily as rhetorical bludgeons against his neoconservative and liberal opponents that, having served their purpose, can be discarded when new opportunities appear. Likewise his impulse for deal making should be understood as just one means of power projection, whose pleasures are milder than the thrill of seeing geopolitical rivals humiliated or captive or simply dead.

So what does his eye for weakness see in Iran? First, a regime that has seen its networks of regional power ruthlessly dismantled over the past few years, primarily by Israeli operations, and that has the same government as in the 1980s but a drastically different domestic situation — with far less religious zeal and far less legitimacy for the clerical regime. (Note that this sense of Iranian weakness is a very different rationale for war from the argument about imminent military danger that Trump’s subordinates feel obliged to offer to Congress and the press.)

Second, Trump senses a larger weakness in the quasi-axis arrayed against the American imperium. During Joe Biden’s administration it felt as if Russia, Iran and China were all acting in a kind of loose concert, probing and testing and attacking. But these powers are not actually allied with one another, and when one is imperiled, the others do not necessarily rush to its defense. Still less are they loyal to their client states, whether in Latin America or the Middle East. So the Russian quagmire in Ukraine becomes an opportunity to knock off the Assad regime in Syria. The Chinese and Russians do not bestir themselves in defense of Venezuela (or, tomorrow, Cuba). And Iran in its weakness doesn’t have a powerful authoritarian alliance to back it up. It’s just a wobbly dictatorship that, if toppled, leaves the anti-American world order weaker than before.

Finally, Trump senses a window of opportunity created by advances in military technology, with the earlier strikes on Iran and the raid in Venezuela as proofs of concept, which make it possible to conduct a kind of fatal surgery on an adversary’s leadership class: It’s not shock and awe; it’s drone strike and assassinate. The hope is that this new combination can produce a more tractable elite without the necessity of Iraq-style occupation and counterinsurgency.

Obviously there is more to the story here than just Trump’s instincts. But I think it makes sense to put them at the center of the story, rather than Israeli influence or Saudi pressure (real as those are), the residual power of a baby boomer conservatism that took shape during the Iran hostage crisis or the supposed tendency of right-wing nationalists to look abroad for splendid little wars when domestic politics aren’t going their way.

Put another way, the reason that some of these forces matter is that they dovetail with Trump’s instincts: Trump himself identifies with the Israelis and Saudis and is himself a baby boomer for whom the idea of settling unfinished Cold War business, from Tehran to Havana, has a special historical appeal. He is the key agent here, the central historical character, and the right-wing nationalism he leads and shapes is clearly just being brought along for the ride, voicing much less enthusiasm and more obvious dissension than George W. Bush’s conservative movement ever showed during his Middle East wars.

Take away Trump’s raw instinct, his belief that he has taken the measure of the world in the same way he once took the measure of the Republican establishment, and the pro-war coalition — already a minority of the country in most polls — would unravel tomorrow.

And therein lies one obvious potential future, in which the Iran war is the moment when the Trumpian instinct for weakness finally and fatefully misjudges. This is the pattern of many historical conquerors: The long run of success yields the inevitable hubris, and the grand career ends with a grand debacle and would-be successors reaching for the knife.

I imagine that Trump thinks (or intuits, if you prefer) that he can avoid that fate as long as he never fully invades a country, that the high-tech air-war strategy inherently limits the downside risks of hubris.

But the dark path here — a half-collapsed Iran fighting a decentralized war against its neighbors, a suppurating crisis that will be blamed on Israel by the further right and left alike — seems bad enough to pin Trump down in George W. Bush territory for the remainder of his term. “We destroyed their nuclear program” will not be enough of a justification in his own coalition, let alone the country as a whole.

No: Success now requires some version, however unique to the Iranian situation, of the Venezuelan endgame, in which a somewhat friendlier regime holds power and conducts negotiations and keeps the lid on chaos.

I think Trump believes that’s what this war will achieve. Soon we’ll know if his instincts have one more victory in them or if nemesis is finally here.