Following days of Israeli bombardment of Iran and missiles fired on Tel Aviv and other cities in reprisal by that country, the United States suddenly finds itself on the precipice of direct involvement in another major conflict in the Middle East.
Simply knowing the history of American warfare in that region and in countries nearby in the last generation is enough to render this surprising. The United States’ interventions in Iraq were enormously costly in both lives and treasure and left a broken country in their wake that has never fully rebounded. America’s long occupation of Afghanistan ended in abject retreat, having achieved even fewer of its goals and after exacting even higher costs.
Although far less debated, the United States’ intervention in Libya may present the relevant precedent for what could happen if Washington commits itself to war against Iran. That intervention, conducted in collaboration with European allies, helped overthrow the longtime dictatorship of Muammar al-Qaddafi, but it also shattered that country, sending it spiraling downward into warlord-driven violence and civil war. And the collateral damage it delivered to neighboring states, as small arms spread freely through Africa’s Sahel region, was devastating.
Some of the biggest reasons for opposing what appears to be an American slide into war against Iran are purely domestic. What is known of the decision-making process thus far reveals President Donald Trump to be vain, unserious, and temperamental. Until a week or so ago, Trump had staked his foreign-policy reputation on avoiding conflict and seeking peace. The inconsistencies in implementation have, of course, been great, as in the war between Russia and Ukraine, which Trump has done little to discourage given his reluctance to fault Russian President Vladimir Putin for invading his neighbor or to criticize him in any meaningful way.
Still, Trump has projected a degree of seriousness about two things that may now be reversed with a war against Iran. One of them is the emphasis on ending conflicts, just mentioned, while the other has been his desire to limit American involvement across a range of issues in other countries’ affairs, from economic development to war.
Trump’s vanity and improvisation in the apparent slide toward direct armed confrontation with Tehran can be seen through his shifting statements about Israel’s decision to strike Iran. The White House had previously been urging Israel not to launch an attack on Iran in ways it feared could draw the United States into the conflict, and this caution appears to have been based in part on an appreciation of the risks of failure and of the many unintended consequences that might ensue.
After some of Israel’s impressive early successes, though, including the targeted killing of many of Iran’s military leaders and top nuclear scientists, Trump seemed eager to take a share of the credit, and suddenly began to slip the word “we” into references to Israel’s ongoing offensive.
His unseriousness can also be seen in other statements, such as “nobody knows” if he will attack Iran or not, even while calling his demand that Tehran “surrender” unconditionally an “ultimate ultimatum.” This is no way to enter into a major conflict that is full of risks for the United States, for Iran, for Israel, and for the world. What it does appear to be, though, is a way to surrender decision-making about American strategy and national security decision-making to another country’s leader, namely Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who would be realizing a long-held goal of getting the United States to help Israel wage war against Iran if the White House commits to front-line involvement.
The United States is rightly committed to the defense of Israel, but it has suffered a progressive decline in its ability to distinguish its national interests from those of its most important traditional Middle Eastern ally. This has been on clear display recently across two administrations, in Washington’s failure to effectively pressure Israel to end its ongoing slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza and its widespread encroachments and abuse of Palestinians on the West Bank. And over the longer term, it has been clear in the weakness and inconsistency of Washington’s efforts to pursue the so-called two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict that so many American administrations have paid lip service to.
One could fill a small catalog with other reasons why the United States should be leery of getting directly involved in the war. Some of the most important ones proceed from an “even if” logic. Even if Washington can knock out Iran’s nuclear weapons infrastructure, it won’t necessarily eliminate the Iranian know-how and resourcefulness required to reconstitute the program. Knowledge is hard to destroy with bombs, and it seems inevitable that some, perhaps many, Iranians will feel more justified in pursuing this technology than ever before. If the United States and Israel fail in their goal of military eradication, meanwhile, the imperative for Tehran might then shift to rushing as fast as possible to full nuclear weapons development, something that both the International Atomic Energy Agency and Trump’s own director of national intelligence say it has so far avoided. When Trump was asked recently about the assessment of his own intelligence chief indicating Iran was not building a nuclear weapon, he said he didn’t care and had his own beliefs to follow. This recalls the false premise of America’s invasion of Iraq—the claim that that country possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Even if Trump and Netanyahu could eliminate Iran’s revolutionary Islamic leadership, there is no way to guarantee that an even more problematic political outcome could be avoided. Iran could become an equally hardline but more competent military dictatorship, or to speculate in the opposite but just as alarming direction, this large and ethnically complex country could dissolve into a chaotic state of violence, criminality, and mass emigration. These are the kinds of possible eventualities that many of Iran’s neighboring Arab states seem deeply worried about.
Meanwhile, there are risks to America’s standing in a world grown tired of Washington’s rash and often unilateral imperial behavior. Some Americans may exult in the sensation that their country remains “number one” in the world and can therefore impose its will on others when it wishes. There is not much about Trump’s America First-ism that I agree with, but its anti-interventionist tendencies are worth crediting. An adventurist approach to the war in Iran is a luxury the United States—which has lost power relative to the rest of the world even as it remains far from declining as a power in absolute terms—can ill afford.
Finally, I come to the single most important domestic reason for caution about attacking Iran. Many observers have noted Trump’s seeming fondness for a regal conception of the presidency, or at least his gilded presidency. Just last weekend, this drove millions of American citizens into the streets in what were called “No Kings” rallies.
Nothing says imperial more than a president following his own gut or whim in deciding on war. The American presidency was never designed this way. The Constitution clearly limits its powers in this area and requires the country’s elected executive to obtain congressional authorization before launching into conflict overseas. Trump would merely be the latest in a string of American presidents who have ignored this requirement, if he goes to war with Iran. However one feels about Israel, Iran, and the Middle East, giving him a pass on this will powerfully ratify Trump’s sense of the regal dimensions of his authority, and will further weaken democracy in the United States and the ideals that inspired its creation.
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