With his rhetorical extremity and mad-king threats, Donald Trump makes every crisis seem like an end-of-empire moment, a breaking point for American power in the world. The war in Iran is the latest example, where the shadow of imperial apocalypse hangs over his flailing attempts to resolve the crisis created by his military gamble.
Maybe Trump’s America is Britain in the 1956 Suez crisis, discovering its own impotence, realizing that the sun has set on its empire. Maybe Trump himself is King Croesus of Lydia, invading Persia on an oracle’s encouragement and discovering too late that the empire prophesied to be destroyed by the invasion is his own.
But it’s also possible that the Iran war is actually less a final rupture than a return, in a shambolic Trumpian way, to familiar patterns of U.S. foreign policy.
After all, is it really such a novel experience for the United States to try and fail to impose its will on the Middle East or the wider Islamic world? For our quest some grand bargain to give way to conflict between Sunni and Shia, Israelis and Arabs? For American military power to succeed tactically even as the strategic picture darkens?
Surely not: This is the familiar story of the 21st century, a long record of American failure dating to the collapse of the Camp David negotiations between Ehud Barak and Yasir Arafat in 2000. The litany of failure includes the doomed efforts under multiple presidents to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process; the disaster of George W. Bush’s Iraq invasion and the rise of the Islamic State; Barack Obama’s reckless decision to topple Libya’s dictator during the Arab Spring; and the consistent failure of our Iranian policy, both hawkish and conciliatory, to either tame or topple the clerical regime. Widen the aperture to Central Asia, and it includes our two decades of war in Afghanistan as well.
Amid this legacy of ashes, Trump’s first term stood out as a period when more modest ambitions yielded some success — the defeat of the Islamic State, sharp blows against Iran that never escalated to war and the low but solid ambitions of the Abraham Accords.
Whereas his Iran venture is a return to the grand ambitions of his presidential predecessors. In the past those ambitions had failed to remake the region, but Trump seemingly hoped that this time was different — that his predecessors lacked the necessary ruthlessness, and a union of American and Israeli military power could achieve swift transformation from above.
So far, alas, this time doesn’t look different at all. But then the question is whether this episode of failure will really prove much more debilitating than those that came before — worse than our military interventions in Iraq or Libya or Afghanistan, bad enough to justify talk of Britain-at-Suez or imperial collapse.
It’s not impossible to make that case. You can say that the disaster of the Iraq war was recoverable because America didn’t face serious great power challengers, whereas a debacle now could hand the future to China and Russia. You can argue that Trump’s madman act is destroying American credibility in a way that far exceeds the costs of Bush’s unilateralism or Joe Biden’s senile drift. And you can note that this crisis isn’t over yet, and Trump’s particular brand of imperial decadence still has years to make things worse.
At the same time, some important qualifiers are in order. A war in which we’ve successfully destroyed much of the Iranian military hardly resembles, say, the French debacle at Dien Bien Phu or a Napoleon-in-retreat-from-Moscow catastrophe. Nor is it really a situation like the Suez crisis, in which the new American superpower pulled rank and revealed Britain’s impotence. No successor superpower is preventing Trump from escalating: Instead, the biggest constraint on American warmaking is simply American public opinion, which understandably prefers not to suffer casualties or soaring gas prices for dubious returns.
Meanwhile, our various allies, European and Arab, may drift further from our influence, but they’re unlikely to start bandwagoning with an Iran whose military just got wrecked (even if the regime remains resilient) or a Russia bogged down in its own endless quagmire in Ukraine. And for all the potency of the Iranian threat to global markets, our economy is much more buffered against energy disruptions than it was a decade ago, let alone in the 1970s.
Clearly, an unsuccessful war hands new opportunities to China, leaves Iran with an economic weapon and a path to nuclearization and distracts our leaders from the great challenge of artificial intelligence.
But if an unsatisfying truce squashes certain kinds of hubris, if it forces us back into the Trump 1.0 posture of approaching the Middle East as a realm of problems to be managed but not permanently solved — well, then we might hope to fare a little better than King Croesus and see our empire’s fall postponed.
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