Liberal Interventions

More joy in heaven, and all that. People who oppose this war after having supported most or all of the others are welcome aboard. But leadership must come from those who have been right all along. That said, this war has lost even The Economist: 

It is rare for one head of government to order the death of another. Yet on February 28th America’s president and Israel’s prime minister did just that, killing Iran’s 86-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The decapitation of the Iranian regime reflects the devastating operational success of “Operation Epic Fury”. But Mr Khamenei’s place was immediately taken by a triumvirate. The next supreme leader could be named soon—perhaps his own son unless he, too, is killed. That augurs something more subtle and worrying: that the operation is failing to achieve its political goals.

It is naive to say, as some of Mr Trump’s cheerleaders do, that because Mr Khamenei was wicked (and he surely was), any sort of war makes sense. When you command a machine as lethal and overwhelming as America’s armed forces, united in this operation with the battle-hardened Israel Defence Forces, you have a special responsibility to define what you want to achieve. That is not only an ethical requirement; it is a practical one, too. War aims direct the campaign; they define the sacrifices the state imposes on its own people and the enemy; and they determine when the fighting should end.

In this war, Israel’s aim is clear: to demolish the threat posed by Iran’s regime. By contrast, Mr Trump and his cabinet have offered a mess of shifting assertions—about Iran’s missiles, nuclear weapons, regime change, following Israel’s lead, a “feeling” Iran was about to attack and settling scores after decades of enmity. Politically, vagueness gives Mr Trump room for manoeuvre. Strategically, his failure to say what Epic Fury is for is its biggest vulnerability.

The result is a split-personality war. One face is operational. America and Israel have destroyed Iran’s navy and grounded its air force. They are wrecking its missile capability and its arms industry and targeting the regime and its brutal enforcers. Dominance of the skies means that America and Israel can fight on at will. Interceptor missiles are meanwhile defending bases and cities in Israel and the Gulf countries, even as Iran strikes at more targets than it did during the conflict last June. So far, at least, there are enough interceptors to keep going.

The other face of this war is political, and it emerges from Iran’s strategy, which is about sowing doubt and confusion. To survive would count as victory for Iran’s regime. So far, it is succeeding. Far from falling apart, it is rushing to escalate horizontally—a fancy way of saying it is lashing out in all directions. This has a number of consequences.. One is that other countries are being sucked in. Iran has attacked the Gulf states, which have bet their future on being havens from the chaos gripping the rest of the Middle East. Fighting has also erupted in Lebanon as Israel smashes Hizbullah, Iran’s main proxy. France and Britain will defend their bases from attack. On March 4th NATO air defences shot down an Iranian missile bound for Turkey.

Another consequence is economic. Iran has tried to shut the Strait of Hormuz, cutting off perhaps 20% of global oil supplies. It has also struck energy infrastructure, including the world’s biggest gas-liquefaction complex and Saudi Arabia’s largest refinery. The price of Brent crude is up by 14% since February 27th, to $83 a barrel. A megawatt-hour of natural gas in Europe costs €54 ($63), over 70% more than last week. As Asian buyers scramble for supplies, prices could go higher. The global economy could yet suffer a hit. If oil reaches $100 a barrel, GDP growth could be lowered by 0.4 percentage points and inflation raised by 1.2 points.

The third potential consequence is chaos inside Iran. Roughly 40% of its 90m people belong to ethnic minorities, including Arabs, Azeris, Baluchis, Kurds and Lurs. The Arab spring showed how countries can fall apart. America and Israel are putting pressure on the regime by backing Kurdish insurgents—a reckless idea that could end up stoking Persian nationalism or civil war. Mr Trump may not care about this, but he could not ignore the effects spilling over Iran’s borders into the Gulf states, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. The risk is that Mr Trump cannot bear to quit so long as the markets and polls deny him the acclamation he craves—and that may last for as long as Iran can release even sporadic missiles and drones. Today barely a third of Americans favour the battle in Iran (90% backed invading Afghanistan in 2001). America may be an energy exporter, but its voters detest costly petrol. He may be tempted to seek an undeniable win by bombing the regime out of existence. But even with America’s military clout, he might not succeed. Meanwhile all those risks would continue to harm the region and the world economy.

Mr Trump would do better to narrow his war aims. His goal should be to degrade Iran’s military capabilities and then stop. He is almost there.

Some will argue that the job would be only half-done. Obviously, leaving the regime as a wounded beast would be heartbreak for the oppressed Iranian people. Even if Mr Trump wants peace, Iran could continue to lash out for a while, at least, revelling in its status as a symbol of anti-American resistance. The surviving regime may reject a nuclear deal—indeed, like North Korea, it may think a bomb is its only protection. If it rebuilds its nuclear programme, Mr Trump may have to strike again in months’ or years’ time. It is a bleak prospect. But it would be better for America to declare victory early than limp out of an unpopular war because of exhaustion.

These are the fruits of Mr Trump’s impulsive approach. Before this war, Iran’s regime was weaker than at any time in its 47-year history: it could have fallen without a single American bomb. Mr Trump may get lucky, but he is more likely to end up having to deal with regional chaos or a new hardliner. Surrounded by sycophantic courtiers, Mr Trump has become rash in his second term. His opportunistic grabs for power whenever he sees weakness are dangerous. America needs a strategy in Iran, just as it needs one in the world.

This war has lost even Bloomberg, where Andreas Kluth writes: 

It was bad enough that Donald Trump hasn’t been able to explain clearly why he yet again felt he had to attack Iran, and why now. His national security advisor and secretary of state, Marco Rubio, then inadvertently made everything worse by implying that the president wasn’t so much leading — in the spirit of America First and Peace through Strength — as following. Worse yet, Trump seemed to be following a foreign power, Israel. Accidentally, Rubio inverted Trump’s entire foreign-policy shtick: America Second, Israel First.

Here’s Rubio’s original statement: “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.” That, Rubio said, was the “imminent threat”: not an Iranian strike out of the blue (which American intelligence wasn’t expecting) but an Israeli strike against Iran, against which Iran would have to retaliate.

In this narrative, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was the one making the primary decisions about war and peace, life and death, while Trump and the American superpower had at best limited agency. Not a good look.

Here is how Senator Angus King, an Independent, put it when grilling a Pentagon official the following day: “Have we now delegated the most solemn decision that can be made in our society, the decision to go to war, to another country?” That, King said, was the “breathtaking” meaning of Rubio’s slip: “We’re going to be taken into a war by the prime minister of another country.”

Unsurprisingly, that narrative got under Trump’s skin. “If anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand,” he insisted to reporters, without elaborating. Rubio, for his part, appeared mortified to have caused embarrassment to his boss and backpedaled as energetically as he could, with a torrent of words that boiled down to: Whatever I said was misunderstood, and what I meant is whatever the president has said, is saying or will say.

But the damage was already done, and in different ways for different audiences.

One audience is Trump’s Republican base, which is generally tired of forever wars and no longer as reliably pro-Israel and Zionist as it once was. The president’s own MAGA movement subsumes Christian Nationalist elements that are downright anti-Israel, if not anti-Semitic, and want to weaken or sever America’s quasi-umbilical link with Israel. Rubio’s quote is grist for their mills.

More generally, conservatives have been drifting away from “dispensationalist” ideologies espoused by some evangelicals that see American support for Israel as biblically ordained, and toward an American nationalism that sees entanglements in the Middle East as no less problematic than anywhere else. Independents are also turning away from Israel, while Democrats have largely done so. Nobody in any of these groups will be reassured by Rubio’s version of a casus belli.

The episode also exposes a larger inconsistency in the Trump administration’s view of America’s alliances. Israel, with its martial prowess, is now considered a “model ally.” (That of course reminds other allies, in Europe and Asia, that they are not; Trump has long disdained most of them as free-riders, even if they are now rearming as fast as their welfare budgets allow.)

Even model alliances, however, suffer from a problem called moral hazard. In this context, the term means that smaller allies tend to take bigger risks if they are convinced that the US has their back, thus pulling both into unnecessary wars.

Try this for a thought experiment: Imagine that instead of Israel, which is right to feel existentially threatened by the Iranian regime, the ally in question is Poland, which is equally justified in fearing Russia, or South Korea, which lives in the nuclear shadow of the North. Would Trump be as enthusiastic in going to war against Russia and North Korea if he thought the Poles or South Koreans felt it necessary to strike preemptively?

The confused and mixed signals coming out of the administration about its latest war of choice send the latest of many terrible messages.

In opening hostilities, the White House ignored international law and the American constitution, which reserves to Congress the right to declare war. The administration didn’t even try to make a clear and compelling case to the public why this war had to happen now, or at all. It is now wasting ammo and resources in the Middle East that will be dangerously scarce in other conflict zones. And into this big mess it may have stumbled rather than deliberately stepped.

The bloodcurdling reality may be, as Senator King put it in that hearing, that Rubio inadvertently told the truth.

And this war has lost even The Atlantic, where Yair Rosenberg writes:

Why did President Trump decide to attack Iran? It depends on what day of the week you ask. On Saturday, the president claimed in a recorded address that he acted because Iran’s rulers refused to “renounce their nuclear ambitions” and were developing long-range missiles that threatened America and its allies. On Sunday, a senior administration official told reporters that Iran and its proxies “posed an imminent threat to U.S. personnel and allies in the region.” On Monday, House Speaker Mike Johnson and Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested that Trump acted preemptively to protect U.S. forces in advance of an unavoidable Israeli attack on Iran that would inevitably lead Iran to retaliate against America. The next day, Trump rejected this framing, telling reporters that “if anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand” because he believed Iran was “going to attack if we didn’t do it.” 

All of these pretexts present problems. Why would America need to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities if, as Trump previously claimed, they’d been “completely and totally obliterated” eight months ago in Operation Midnight Hammer? In 2025, the Defense Intelligence Agency assessed that Iran’s missile program was a decade away from being able to target American shores. That hardly sounds like an imminent threat. As for the Israel excuse, Trump is the senior partner in the U.S.-Israel relationship, and he sets the terms. When he wanted Israel to end its June 2025 war with Iran, he publicly forced the country to recall its fighter jets, even without avenging a closing strike that had left four Israelis dead.

Trump could have dissuaded the Israelis once again. Instead, the president ordered the largest U.S. air-power buildup in the Middle East since the invasion of Iraq. Then, according to The New York Times, his CIA gave Israel the intelligence to locate and kill Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. (Axios reported instead that the intelligence was Israel’s and the CIA confirmed it.) “He was unable to avoid our Intelligence and Highly Sophisticated Tracking Systems,” Trump crowed on Truth Social, announcing Khamenei’s death. The two countries reportedly had planned the ensuing assault for weeks.

The shifting explanations for Trump’s war and the alleged imminent threat that prompted it suggest poor planning and internal confusion about the president’s motives. They are also a smoke screen. Fundamentally, a war ordered by the most powerful man in the world, commanding the most advanced military in the world, is the responsibility of the man who ordered it. Trump is a two-term president with agency, and he has long telegraphed and demonstrated his eagerness to use military force around the world—and in particular, in Iran. 

In 1980, NBC interviewed a young Trump about the ongoing Iran hostage crisis. He did not hold back. “That this country sits back and allows a country such as Iran to hold our hostages, to my way of thinking, is a horror, and I don’t think they’d do it with other countries,” he said. When the interviewer asked if that meant “you’re advocating that we should have gone in there with troops,” Trump replied, “I absolutely feel that, yes,” adding that had America done so, “I think right now we’d be an oil-rich nation.” (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently said that he had dreamed of being able to “smite the terror regime” in Iran for 40 years; it turns out Trump had him beat.)

In 1987, the Times reported that Trump declared in a New Hampshire speech that “the United States should attack Iran and seize some of its oil fields in retaliation for what he called Iran’s bullying of America.” In 1988, Trump told The Guardian that “I’d be harsh on Iran. They’ve been beating us psychologically, making us look a bunch of fools.”

Trump’s instinctive hawkishness and abiding belief in military coercion as a solution to American problems extend well beyond Iran. He supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the 2011 intervention in Libya to topple Muammar Qaddafi, before turning against both. In his first term as president, Trump ordered the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. In his second term, he has fast-tracked arms sales to the Middle East, menaced Canada, threatened to “get Greenland,” and abducted the dictator of Venezuela.

Believing that Trump was somehow a “peace president” devoted to American restraint, as some credulous commentators claimed, required ignoring everything he’d said before he was president and everything he’d done after he became president. As Andrew Kaczynski, a CNN reporter who, during the 2016 presidential campaign, exposed Trump’s early support for the Iraq War, put it: “Important context for Trump’s opposition to regime change wars or interventions is that he never actually opposed them at the time and only did so after they went bad.”

Trump’s officials and allies have fumbled around to find an “imminent threat” to justify the president’s decision to strike Iran. But the real impetus for such action was Trump’s imperial approach to American power, which was decades in the making. The president specializes in exploiting the weaknesses of his opponents; having watched Israel decimate Iran’s proxy armies and air defenses over the past few years, he sought to capitalize on the regime’s moment of maximum vulnerability. Other countries—most notably Israel and Saudi Arabia—potentially stand to benefit from Trump’s war. But the decision to start it was his alone, and no amount of spin from his surrogates should obscure this fact.