The American-Israeli attack on Iran was more than a bad idea; it has turned into a watershed in the decline of the American empire. Some might prefer the word “hegemony” to describe the world order the United States leads, since its flag does not generally fly over the lands it protects or exploits. But the rules are the same: Imperial systems, whatever you call them, last only as long as their means are adequate to their ends. And with the Iran war, President Trump has overextended the empire dangerously.
A Middle Eastern military misadventure is one of the last ways a casual observer would have expected Mr. Trump’s presidency to go wrong. The problems he alluded to in all three of his presidential campaigns had mostly resulted from our leaders’ governing beyond their means. At home, proponents of wokeness underestimated the costs and difficulties of micromanaging interactions between groups. Abroad, the mighty American armed forces proved to have no particular talent for democracy promotion, and there was the recent debacle in Iraq to prove it. Overextension was a danger that President Joe Biden contemptuously dismissed. “We’re the United States of America,” he used to say, “and there’s nothing we can’t do.”
Mr. Trump, people thought, would be different. For all the grandiosity of the expression “Make America great again,” Trump voters did not expect him to take on new problems. The greatness would be mostly atmospheric — braggadocio, not adventurism. The United States could become greater even if it withdrew to a less expansive sphere of influence. When he proclaimed an updated Monroe Doctrine, refocusing American attention on the Western Hemisphere, retrenchment was what most people thought they were getting. In last November’s National Security Strategy, he added, “The days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy in both long-term planning and day-to-day execution are thankfully over.”
This was a logical, even an admirable, foreign policy plan. Just as important, history showed it to be workable. Britain had to surrender its far-flung system of colonies and protectorates after World War II. Letting go was often awkward and sometimes left violence in its wake. But except for its ill-fated attempt to join France and Israel in seizing the Suez Canal from Egypt in 1956, Britain did not try to hold territories it could no longer afford. It wound up on reasonably good terms with its former colonial possessions. Its disengagement was a success, though this can be hard to see because what was being managed was decline. Mr. Trump had a chance of pulling off something similar.
The assumption in Washington over the past decade has been that the world is engaged in a game of geostrategic musical chairs and the music is about to stop. China may soon overmatch us not just in military-industrial capacity but also in information technology. The world will harden into a new, less favorable geostrategic configuration. This is the last moment to reshape it in America’s favor.
At first, Mr. Trump moved to oust China from its strongholds in the Western Hemisphere. Almost as soon as he returned to office, the United States pressured CK Hutchison, a Hong Kong-based multinational conglomerate with connections to China, to sell two ports in the Panama Canal Zone. Venezuela, dependent on China as a market for 80 percent of its oil exports, saw American troops abduct its leader Nicolás Maduro last winter. And Mr. Trump has warned that Cuba, a destination for Chinese investment, “is next.” It will also be better, the thinking goes, if the United States has a more secure foothold near the North Pole (a foothold such as Greenland) when the time comes to divvy up the energy and mineral resources that global warming unlocks there. Whether or not this hemispheric policy is defensible, there is a coherence to it.
The attack on Iran was different. It was not a defensive consolidation; it was the assumption of a dangerous, open-ended responsibility. Yes, it might be better if the mullahs fell. But for the United States, an energy-independent country withdrawing to its own hemisphere, this is not a vital interest. War with Iran was not on the radar screen of anyone in the administration just a few months ago.
That is because the United States lacks the military means to impose its will on Iran in a long conflict. In 1991 a million soldiers from more than 40 countries were needed to reverse the invasion of Kuwait carried out by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, a country less sophisticated than Iran and a fraction of its size. When Iran and Iraq fought each other to a standstill in the 1980s, deaths ran into the hundreds of thousands on each side. The United States would have to send a significant portion of its armed forces — which total only 1.3 million troops — to stand a chance of subduing Iran, and that force, if successful, would have to stay for a long time.
The argument can be made that the United States no longer depends on mustering huge armies: It has sophisticated missiles and other standoff weapons. But those weapons are needed to defend allies and interests in other theaters, and the United States is depleting them. According to reporting in The Times, it has already used 1,100 of its long-range stealth cruise missiles, earmarked for potential conflicts in Asia, leaving just 1,500 in the stockpile, and fired an additional 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles, about 10 times as many as the military buys in an average year. American leaders have been scolding their European allies for years about the inadequacy of their fighting forces. But if one measures America’s military might against our pretensions rather than our G.D.P., it is just as inadequate.
It would be wrong to say the United States is trapped in the war it started. It has options. But it is now going to pay a very steep price, no matter which of them it chooses. It can desist in Iran — having demonstrated, for no good reason, that its military is far less dominant than the world had assumed. Or it can draw resources from theaters that are of vital national interest, such as Europe and East Asia, to fund what the president refers to as his Iranian “excursion.” Or it can resort to the extreme military options Mr. Trump darkly alluded to in social media posts starting in early April, which will redound to the everlasting shame of the country he leads. The United States stands to lose its reputation, its friends or its soul.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel urged this war on Mr. Trump because he, too, recognized the musical-chairs logic of the moment. Once the music stops, the United States may lack the firepower to protect Israel from its neighbors in the traditional manner and will probably lack the inclination. Ironically, the war’s catastrophic outcome shows Mr. Netanyahu’s basic understanding to have been sound: Israel’s prospects for enlisting the United States in such anachronistic adventures were dwindling. Mr. Trump’s gullibility provided Mr. Netanyahu with a last chance.
It is tempting to ask where in the process of imperial decline the United States now finds itself. It certainly has elements in common with Britain a century ago: deindustrializing, overcommitted, complacent. On the eve of World War I, Britain was dependent on Germany for industrial and even military technology — and unwilling to re-examine the free-trade system on which German supremacy had been built. By the eve of World War II, Britain was essentially bankrupt. There are parallels in America’s dependence on China today.
The skepticism about American hegemony that led Americans to turn to Mr. Trump was a healthy one. If a globalist system built on free trade, democracy promotion and mass migration is so great, Trump voters asked, then why have we had to borrow $35 trillion since we took it up? That’s a genuinely good question. Mr. Trump was the perfect candidate for Americans who suspected something had gone wrong with their elites. His argument, basically, was that American-led globalism was so beneficial to politicians that once in power, they would defend it even against their voters, no matter what they said while campaigning. Events, alas, have proved him right.
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