In September 2024, I wrote a column that I’d like to revisit. The theme was right up front in the headline: “Iran is Losing. That May Matter More Than Israel’s Mistakes.”
I wrote that column after Israel had executed a series of military and intelligence coups. In the aftermath of its terrible, inexcusable failure to prevent the Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians and foreign nationals on Oct. 7, the Israel Defense Forces had killed senior leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, decimated Hamas and seriously damaged Hezbollah, and (with American and British help, among others) swatted aside Iran’s missile and drone attacks.
That’s not to defend or excuse everything that Israel did. As I argued at the time, Israel’s tactics in Gaza were both brutal and inadequate if the goal was to defeat Hamas. The I.D.F. was making the same mistakes that we made in the immediate aftermath of the invasion of Iraq — by failing to take and hold ground, Israel was guaranteeing that it would fight for the same neighborhoods and the same cities over and over again
But in the cold calculus of war, Israel was clearly ahead. Its enemies hadn’t just been weakened; they’d been exposed. Particularly Iran. It spent decades building a missile and drone force that Israel and its allies had deflected with apparent ease.
You all know the rest of the story. Israel pressed its advantage. So did the United States. And both countries escalated the conflict to the point of — as the memorandum of understanding between Iran and the United States confirms — a substantial military defeat.
I’m not going to belabor the reasons I believe that Iran has defeated the United States and Israel (at least in this round), but as my colleagues on the editorial board eloquently noted, it’s hard to claim victory when you achieve none of your war aims, and your enemy appears to have achieved most of his.
According to the terms of the memorandum, Hezbollah, incredibly enough, enjoys an enhanced degree of diplomatic protection. The agreement is supposed to end the fighting in Lebanon and guarantee Lebanese territorial integrity at the same time Israel is invading the country.
In addition, Iran receives immediate relief from the American blockade and immediate access to billions of dollars in frozen funds. Iran may also receive a bonanza of reconstruction funds, and the nuclear limitations on Iran already appear less robust than those that President Barack Obama was able to negotiate in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (better known simply as the “Iran deal”) in 2015, which President Trump ripped up in 2018. Obama, for example, persuaded Iran to ship about 97 percent of its stockpile of enriched nuclear material to Russia. The memorandum as written only requires a “down-blend” (dilution) of Iranian enriched nuclear material.
But for the purpose of this newsletter, I’m less interested in the what of the agreement than the why. Why is it that two nations, the United States and Israel, that possess such staggering military power haven’t been able to bend their opponents to their will? Why do they sometimes face outright defeat, even as they inflict lopsided losses on their opponents?
The United States and Israel attained air superiority over Iran, sank most of its navy, and destroyed the vast bulk of its air force, and yet America blinked.
Iran wasn’t toothless. It destroyed more aircraft and damaged more bases than we were led to believe at first. But as serious and as costly as those losses were, they were far less, in blood and treasure, than we inflicted on Iran.
Israel and the United States both, in their contexts, enjoy the same military advantage and suffer from the same military limitation, and the leaders of both nations haven’t learned where their advantage ends and their limitations begin.
The United States is a global superpower, while Israel is a regional power, but they both share something in common — unlike the vast majority of nations on earth, both the United States and Israel possess enough military strength to independently defend their nations from any conceivable conventional threat.
There is no army, for example, or any likely combination of armies, in the Middle East that could defeat the I.D.F. and overrun the country.
Similarly, while Russia and China are formidable adversaries, neither country (alone or in combination) possesses anywhere close to the military power necessary to conquer the United States. They may be able to win a military conflict on the edge of their own frontiers (such as in Estonia or Taiwan), but they don’t possess the ability to project enough conventional strength to threaten the existence of the United States, unless of course they resort to nuclear weapons. (A big unless, I realize.)
A military that is powerful enough to guarantee national security all on its own is a very powerful military indeed, but neither America nor Israel has a military strong enough either to eradicate its enemies or bend its enemies to its will. They can defend their nations, but they cannot conquer their way into permanent peace.
This results in a frustrating kind of reality where both nations enjoy security without the guarantee of peace. Their nations are in no danger of extinction, but they’re at constant risk of attack. Israel in particular enjoys a bizarre form of security without safety. The nation is in no danger of destruction, but its citizens face an unacceptable risk.
As a result, there is the constant temptation to rely on the nation’s considerable military power not just to preserve the nation’s independence, but also to eliminate that risk. And the militaries of both nations are strong enough to make presidents and prime ministers believe that they’re perhaps more capable than they really are.
I’m reminded of a vivid analogy from a different context. In 2021 Noah Smith, a popular and thoughtful economist, wrote about the problem of debt and deficits. We know that at some point the debt gets too high, but we don’t know when that point is. He said, we were walking down “an infinite corridor with an invisible pit.” We know the pit is there, we just don’t know where it is. If we keep walking, we fall in.
And so it is with military conflicts. Israel and the United States both know there are limits to their military power, but they don’t seem to know — or remember, anyway — precisely where those limits are.
Even worse, each success seems to generate more confidence than caution. And so you end up walking ever more quickly toward that invisible pit.
It’s easy to forget, for example, the American military successes that preceded our setbacks. Allied forces defeated Saddam Hussein’s army with surprising ease during Desert Storm. The opening phases of both the invasion of Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq went surprisingly well.
These steps, taken together, helped persuade a critical mass of American leaders and American citizens that more was in our grasp. Could we remake Afghanistan and Iraq? Could we remake the Middle East? And it’s easy to imagine American and Israeli leaders believing that the next steps in the war with Iran and its proxies would be as successful as the last.
In fact, Trump has openly used past success to justify his present war. He won’t stop talking about Venezuela, as if that nation or the raid to capture its president bears any meaningful resemblance to Iran or the military operations necessary to destroy Iranian power.
The plain fact of the matter, however, is that if you can’t dominate or destroy your opponent, you have to accommodate him, and that means compromise. When you choose to destroy your opponent, you will almost always have to deploy an immense amount of force and endure a considerable amount of loss.
Coercing Germany and Japan into unconditional surrender took millions of soldiers, untold devastation, and two nuclear strikes against Japan. Even the much simpler act of deposing Saddam Hussein and bringing Iraq under a modicum of control during the “surge” took hundreds of thousands of American and allied troops and years of constant combat.
The two presidents before Trump entered the White House in 2017 — George W. Bush and Barack Obama — took contrasting approaches. Bush chose to dominate through his invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Obama’s Iran deal was a compromise, an accommodation.
But the worst possible outcome is the Trump approach —- to try to dominate and fail. Because then you’ll be forced to compromise far more than you’d like.
We’re not always able to tell when an administration is about to overreach, especially when they are overreaching in the midst of victory. But there are tells, and here is one — to quote the book of Proverbs, “Pride comes before destruction, and an arrogant spirit before a fall.”
Last June, when Vice President JD Vance was defending Operation Midnight Hammer, Trump’s single-day strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities, Vance said, “I certainly empathize with Americans who are exhausted after 25 years of foreign entanglements in the Middle East.”
“I understand the concern,” he continued, “but the difference is that back then, we had dumb presidents, and now we have a president who actually knows how to accomplish America’s national security objectives.”
Is that so?
The evidence of unreasonable pride is everywhere. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel had too much confidence in his ability to persuade Trump. For his part, Trump had too much confidence in his ability to bully Iran.
And so it turned out that the “dumb presidents” understood reality far better than Trump. There are no shortcuts. If you’re going to destroy your opponent, you’re going to have to use immense force. If you’re going to compromise with your opponent, it’s best not to lose a war (or blink in the face of adversity) as a prelude.
But Vance’s pride reveals a deeper problem. By scorning their predecessors, Vance and Trump are far too ready to reject their achievements. Trump was eager to withdraw troops from Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan and risk squandering victories against Al Qaeda and ISIS, and by tearing up the Iran deal without a viable replacement (and then launching an ineffective war), he may end up helping create a more radical, more powerful and more dangerous Iran.
In their arrogance, Trump and Netanyahu defied their predecessors in all the worst ways, and now they court a profound defeat when, not long ago, a meaningful victory, however partial, was well within their grasp.
Some other things I did
My Sunday column was about Christian nationalism, specifically that there really is nothing new under the sun. MAGA Christian nationalism does have a recent historical analog — Vichy France. No, really:
If you read the words “Vichy France,” to the extent that they register at all, one word is likely to come to mind: collaboration.
The Vichy government certainly accommodated itself to German dominance. Its troops fought American and British troops during Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of French North Africa in 1942. Worse, the regime deported tens of thousands of Jews from Vichy France, sending them to their deaths in Nazi concentration camps.
All of those things are true, but they’re only part of the story. And that’s not why I’m writing about Vichy France today. The beating heart of Vichy — its animating purpose — wasn’t collaboration with Germany, much less an alliance with the Nazis. While there were plenty of fascists and Nazi sympathizers in Vichy’s ranks, its true purpose could be summed up in four words.
Make France great again.
Here was the Vichy regime’s core argument: Liberal democracy had failed. Its individualism and its decadence (especially its decadence) had resulted in the military and moral catastrophe that was the fall of France.
With liberal democracy in decline, its most dangerous successor wasn’t necessarily fascism, at least to the Vichy government, but communism, and there was only one way to combat communism and restore French greatness — what many in Vichy called the National Revolution.
And what was the National Revolution? As Jackson wrote, “The National Revolution defined itself first and foremost in opposition to liberal individualism, which uprooted people from the ‘natural’ communities of family, workplace and region.”
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