Here in the U.S., we’re looking at the Iran War in terms of whether the U.S. should have started it in the first place, how it’s affecting oil prices, how it’s going to affect the midterms and a bunch of other things. But there’s another way to look at it, which is that Iran is putting on a global performance of standing head to head with the full might of the U.S. military and pulling it off. By their actions, we can see pretty clearly that the Iranian government does not fear Donald Trump. They’re not acting scared. If anything, they’re upping the rate of their provocations, as the state of war and effective stalemate transitions to a new normal of sorts.
It is fair to say that this is not actually the full might of the U.S. military in a theoretical sense. The president could order the U.S. military to mount a full scale ground invasion of Iran, occupy the country, dismantle the state’s system of command, control and repression. Those things are very likely possible, albeit at vast cost. But the real test of a military is not what it can do in some theoretical sense, the precise armaments it has and so forth but what the country which controls that military is able and/or willing to do in a specific economic, geopolitical, and political context. And the U.S. is clearly not willing to do those things. So in a practical sense — not the abstract power and capabilities of the U.S. military but the country’s ability to do those things — this is the full force of the U.S. military.
What this all amounts to is that this war has turned into a vast spectacle of the limits of U.S. power. This is of course a big reason you don’t start something like this in the first place, why you don’t start wars or any major commitments without a clear understanding of your own power, your own options — and not in the vague sense of our military is super big but how are we going to be willing to use it in this specific situation.
What is further the case is that the most likely near- and medium-term scenario seems like a version of the “frozen conflicts” we know from the peripheries of Russia over the last 20-plus years. The mechanics are different of course. But the overall frozen-ness looks increasingly similar with the key difference that it is Iran rather than the U.S. which is holding key gains during this freeze — the biggest being control of the Strait of Hormuz and the huge deterrence that creates.
The U.S. is not new to spectacularly bad foreign policy decisions. The big ones that jump out to me are Vietnam and the Iraq War. What at least seems distinct to me is that for all the folly of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, if you understand the history you can also see how the bad decisions grew out of the logic of the Cold War, a set of assumptions that were deeply held across a wide spectrum of elite U.S. foreign policy thinking in the U.S. and indeed non-elite thinking as well. This is part of the irony of the title of David Halberstam’s “The Best and the Brightest.” These people were not idiots. And yet they made terrible and disastrous decisions.
With Iraq, elite foreign policy thinking was much more skeptical. It was also much more fractured. To a degree, what happened with the Bush presidency was that a counter-foreign policy establishment got hold of the levers of power at a critical moment. With all this said, though, the 9/11 attacks created a climate of intense public fear and vast deference to the White House and the president. Many of us remember these events pretty vividly. Most of us wish lots of things had never happened. But basically the Iraq War does not happen without the 9/11 attacks. The fact that one had nothing to do with the other is not relevant to this basic fact: no 9/11, no Iraq War.
Where is the analog here? If anything, the decision to go to war with Iran runs strongly counter to the whole backlash to “forever wars” which has characterized U.S. foreign policy in an evolving way for more than a decade. Especially in the Middle East and especially given how much Trump himself has tried to identify himself with that backlash. Then there’s the fact the U.S. public seemed to have little idea this was even going to happen.
I’ve always had a somewhat different understanding of a president’s war powers than many others. In practice, our constitutional order places pretty few limitations on a president in this capacity. What the Constitution says in theory is secondary to what has happened in practice for going on a century. The president really calls the shots with the U.S. military. I’m not saying that as how it should be but how it is. But it is in a president’s very strong interest to bring the public along or at least loop them in on what he’s trying to do.
In any case, this whole debacle stands out — perhaps not decisively as the most disastrous U.S. foreign policy decision — but in terms of the opaqueness of the decision-making and the way the decisions stemmed almost entirely to the emotive whims and impulses of Trump: his need to act out in the face of declining fortunes at home, his hunch that Iran would be as fun as his quasi invasion of Venezuela, and whatever bill of goods Benjamin Netanyahu was selling him. It’s that sense of disjuncture which stands out to me, the out-of-the-blueness, the discontinuity. And that is very much the mark of a personalist regime, one in which the full breadth of the U.S. government’s foreign policy architecture has been hollowed out and you really are operating within the whims, fantasies, impulses of one guy.