Echoes The Reaction

In 2003 and for a very long time thereafter, several people who were now less than enthusiastic about Donald Trump’s war in Iran joined everyone who was now gung-ho in telling us that it was treasonable against the United Kingdom to criticise the President of the United States. In those days, everyone who did not now think that Keir Starmer had already gone too far in support of Trump, and even some of those who did, told us that we were antisemitic for opposing a war in which Israel was not even a formal participant. On 11 November 2013, Trump tweeted: “Remember that I predicted a long time ago that President Obama will attack Iran because of his inability to negotiate properly-not skilled!” In 2017, Nigel Farage condemned Trump’s bombing of Syria, marginalising himself from Mar-a-Lago for several years. But now, as Jonny Ball writes:

The beginnings of a new war are conjuring up feelings of déjà vu. After US and Israeli strikes on Iran in the past few days, much of the Western Right has adopted a gung-ho position. Prominent figures have been shrouded in a naive, short-sighted and credulous idealism that echoes the reaction to the opening salvoes in Iraq in 2003.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is dead; a murderous regime is weakened; theocrats have been brought to justice by British allies. President Donald Trump’s breach of “America First” orthodoxy and abandonment of his aversion to the Republican old guard’s “forever wars” has been forgiven in favour of a Western triumphalism.

That same enthusiasm has been audible across much of the British Right. Senior figures in Reform UK, such as Deputy Leader Richard Tice, have framed the accelerating moves to all-out regional war in civilisational terms. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage has been goading the Labour government for its reluctance to directly involve itself. Commentators on the Right have cast the killing of Iran’s head of state as a long-overdue reckoning without addressing key questions. What are the objectives? What comes next? What is the long-term strategy?

Instead, support for the US and Israeli efforts has been cast as an ethical imperative. Conservative MPs such as Tom Tugendhat have implied that opposition to the strikes constitutes an indulgence of the Islamic Republic itself. The old binary has returned: “Either you’re with us, or you’re with the terrorists.” It is a striking posture for a political camp in which many recently defined themselves against the liberal interventionism and Blairite messianism of the Iraq era. But, seemingly, few lessons have been learnt.

Therefore, in the mainstream discourse it will be the Left that points out the historical amnesia and strategic myopia at work. Few will mourn the death of Khamenei. An isolated fringe will harbour sympathies for Iran as the head of an anti-Israeli “Axis of Resistance”.

But this is an extreme minority. Most on the Left are capable of nuance. Questioning the wisdom of Trump’s interventionist turn does not equal support for Khamenei. That reading implies that foreign policy is a Manichaean moral purification ritual: remove the dictator, and a liberal-democratic state will emerge by default. This is pure fantasy. Opposition to the US-Israeli strikes is largely grounded in a realist view once shared by MAGA. It is not in the interests of the US or Britain to provoke another destabilising war in a volatile region.

Foreign policy is a theatre for the pragmatic projection of national interests. The potential for civil war, regional conflict, energy shocks, a Europe-wide refugee crisis and stagflation is real. There is no serious plan for what follows, nor any contingency should a harder-line strongman emerge. What happens if a country of over 90 million people descends into a failed state redolent of post-Gaddafi Libya or post-Saddam Iraq?

The Left is often caricatured as utopian, yet many on the Right, too, are now animated by a historically illiterate idealism when it comes to international relations. There’s a reason the UK maintains military intelligence, trading and security relations with authoritarian theocrats in Riyadh, military dictators in Egypt, and Islamist election-riggers in Turkey. Our complex world is not a morality play. Realpolitik is an exercise in interests, trade-offs, balance and restraint. Post-Iraq, post-Libya, and after the rise of anti-establishment populists, scepticism toward foreign intervention felt like a rare new Left-Right consensus. We should return to that formula before it’s too late.

Meanwhile, firmly from the American Right, Kelley Beaucar Vlahos writes:

In a startling Truth Social post overnight on Monday, President Donald Trump defied reality and claimed that U.S. weapons were "unlimited" and the U.S. could fight "forever" with "these supplies."

Of course by all measures, every measure, this is not true. It would never be true, but in the case of today, after four years of emptying our stores for Ukraine, and then more than two years for Israel, fighting the Houthis, defending Israel twice, Operation Midnight Hammer in June, and now Operation Epic Fury — well you remember the nursery rhyme: Old Mother Hubbard, the cupboard is bare, and soon we won't be able to give the dog a bone. 

Perhaps what is the most absurd about Trump's words, other than the lack of truth (he did not "rebuild" the stockpiles in one year following President Biden's departure; the missiles were still being sent to Ukraine under previous agreements and then he told the Europeans they could buy them, depleting the stores even further). But then his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan "Razin'" Caine, also warned too, that an operation, especially an extended one, could be risky. From the Washington Post last week:

Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, expressed his concerns at a White House meeting last week with Trump and his top aides, these people said, cautioning that any major operation against Iran will face challenges because the U.S. munitions stockpile has been significantly depleted by Washington’s ongoing defense of Israel and support for Ukraine. Caine’s remarks at the White House meeting have not been previously reported.

Trump immediately went to Truth Social to contradict the story, saying the opposite was true. But this concern does not come from nowhere. As we reported here the military was already "razin" the alarms last summer about the "shocking" number of missiles that had been depleted from the stockpiles. According to a deep dive by defense writer Mike Fredenberg, along with all the other diminished capacity, the standard missile (SM-3) variant was down 33% and those cost $12.5 to $28 million a piece.

And with each interception attempt requiring at least two missiles, and often more than that, thwarting a few missiles can easily end up costing more than it does to buy an F-35, making missile defense against a peer adversary seem unaffordable. Now that is truly alarming.

This was of course just SM-3s. According to reports, the U.S. used a quarter of its THAAD missile interceptors during the 12-day war in June alone. The Guardian reported in July that the U.S. only had 25% of the Patriot missile interceptors it would need for the Pentagon’s future military plans — with many already sent to Ukraine (and more promised).

Indeed, we knew back in 2024 during the fighting with the Houthis that the U.S. was expending overpriced, ridiculously expensive missiles to counter cheap Houthi weaponry. According to reports we were expending Tomahawk cruise missiles, air to air, and air to surface missiles at an amazing clip. That is likely one of the reasons Trump ended that conflict so abruptly.

Don't think that experts haven't already warned that Operation Epic Fury could be limited by these realities. On March 1, one day after Trump announced his war, the Wall Street Journal quoted several who said just that. 

"The Trump administration has fired TLAMS (Tomahawks) at an extraordinary rate in operations around the globe, in the Middle East against Iran and the Houthis as well as in Nigeria on Christmas Day," said Becca Wasser, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. "When we wargame, TLAMS are some of the first munitions to go within that first week of a U.S.-China conflict."

While tons of money has gone into the industry to start rebuilding the stockpiles we know that will take years to happen, especially for the more "high end" stuff, as Trump refers to it.

"We have a peacetime defense industrial base, and we've had that for decades…we're not really set up to quickly produce things," Fredenburg told RS back in October. "We don’t know how much more capacity they can squeeze out of existing facilities."

Having Israel as a "partner" in the war is no help either. The WSJ quotes officials who say they are low on supply too, particularly Arrow 3 air-defense interceptors, and air-launched ballistic missiles — "a weapon it used to take out Iranian missile launchers this summer and to attack Hamas leaders in Qatar last year."

Suggesting the U.S. has enough weapons for a "forever" war is wrong and Trump must know he is gaslighting everyone who ever voted for him because he said he would never get America into another forever war. But what he is doing is ultimately destructive to our military and national defense too. He is signaling that he would be willing to bleed the stockpiles dry to prove a point. He might just end up doing it.