Iran War: Sometimes It is Just Cheaper to Lose and Get Out

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We lost in Iran. No, we weren’t militarily defeated, but we did lost the larger political contest the fighting reflected. This post re-ups an essay I wrote to that effect at the National Security Journal.

Iran has left the contest stronger than it entered, mostly notably in taking positive control of the Strait of Hormuz. This threat was always lurking in the background of the US-Iran stand-off, but Iran has actually done it in this conflict – learned how to do it, how its neighbors will respond, how faraway oil importers will respond, and so on. The war is ‘proof of concept’ that Iran can control, in fact, control the strait without excessive punishment.

As I have argued for awhile, Trump’s only option to really win – to compel Iran to capitulate and accept harsh American terms – is a ground invasion to remove the clerical regime in Tehran. I do believe the US could do this, and there is an internal resistance which might help us and take-over after a US victory.

But it’s also probable that the war takes months, if not a year, with large casualties. It could also easily turn into a quagmire like Afghanistan and Iraq did.

Which brings us back to my post’s title – sometime it is just cheaper to lose and go home. I think that is the case here. Trump wanted a major victory from a limited war, did not get it, and now does not know what to do. He will try blockading the strait for awhile, but Iran has proven it can wait out the US and absorb its punishment. Trump, meanwhile, faces high gas prices, a low approval rating, and an election in the fall. Trump can’t wait; Iran can

The best option now is to just take the loss and negotiate some kind of embarrassing peace which puts some restraints on Iran’s nuclear program and keeps the tolls reasonably low. That is probably the best the US can get at this point.

Most importantly, is the larger strategic lesson of yet ANOTHER failed US war in the Middle East is that we should – FINALLY – leave the region. We’re overstretched there. China is far more important. Israeli security can be still be vouchsafed with a smaller US commitment. After 35 years trying to police the Middle East’s political and theological divides, it is time to admit that we cannot do that and get out. That is what I argue in the NSJ piece too.

A US Blockade of the Gulf of Oman is a Desperation Move to Avoid Invading Iran

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The US Blockade of Iran’s Strait of Hormz’ Blockade will Occur in the Gulf of Oman

So Trump is now going to ‘blockade a blockade’? Seriously? Does anyone think that is going to work? I don’t think so is what I wrote at 1945 this week. Please go there for my full argument.

I am not sure Trump even knows how this blockade will work. I guess this idea is that what little traffic does come through the Strait of Hormuz will now be blocked into the Gulf of Oman by the US Navy waiting in front of the India Ocean. Won’t this just lead to exploding gas prices, again? Shortages of helium and fertilizer, again? The stock market crashing, again?

I guess Trump could cut deals with individual countries or even individual ships to let them through our blockade line. That’s the kind of grift Trump excels at. But that is exactly what the Iranians are doing – imposing tolls. We are decrying that as a violation of free navigation. So we can’t do that without looking absurd and hypocritical.

And the questions keep coming: What happens if a country tries to run the blockade? Do we shoot at it? What if it is a big country like China or India? Are we going to imprison their crews? What if it is friendly country? How long would the US Navy have to stay on station to enforce this blockade? Stuff like embargoes and sanctions take a long time to generate big effects, so I could see us staying there for months. Do we have the infrastructure regionally to sustain all that? Isn’t the US Navy already overstretched?

I see this as Trump trying to find some off-ramp which lets him declare victory without invading Iran. The idea is that the US blockade will cause huge global pain which the world will blame on Iran, and that will force Tehran to the table.

I doubt this will work. Iran cares about ideology a lot, and facing down the Great Satan, as they have over the last 6 weeks, is worth the pain. Besides, the whole world already blames Trump for this conflict as an unncessary war of choice. They are more likely to blame this newest American belligerence on Trump yet again.

In the end, Trump can’t win – re-open the strait, definitively denuclearize Iran, and change the regime – without invading on the ground to definitively defeat Iran. I have been arguing that since this war started (here, here, here), and I still think that claim is correct. Airpower, and now seapower, are not enough. So this blockade is yet another desperation manuever to avoid an invasion but not embarassingly TACO.

Iran: I Thought Trump would Try a Limited Ground Assault Rather than TACO

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El Vaquero tacos, the best tacos in Columbus, Ohio (where I live in the US)

I am pretty surprised Trump just capitaulated in Iran this week. Wow. I figured the embarrassment of losing a war would be too much for him and that he would escalate at least to a limited ground invasion on the Iranian side of the strait of Hormuz before throwing in the towel.

That’s what I wrote about in 1945 this week. I figured a limited incursion would not stay limited. We would almost certainly get sucked in deeper, because the Iranians would attack any enclaves we took, which would require us to go further into the country to suppress those attacks. Mission creep loomed. Small missions growing into big ones supplemented by escalating airpower sounds an awful lot like Vietnam.

That post got overaken by events, but I still think its analysis of a ground war is correct. Lots of other analysts were saying the same thing. So I would like to think that all that pushback helped dissuage Trump.

Trump will declare victory, but this was obviously not one. We came off clownish, reckless, and ultimately dangerous, which is pretty much the defintion of Trumpian foreign policy. The Iranian clerical regime is still in power. It knows now that it can close the strait at will and demand cash. Its nuclear material is still in-country, and it will likely sprint for nukes once the war is truly over. The only way to really prevent Iran from dominating the strait and going for nukes was a ground invasion to insure regime change. That likely would have been a disaster on the scale of Vietnam.

So we should be happy that Trump did not make the mistake LBJ did in 1965 and which Bush made in 2003. But a limited error which does not spiral into a larger error is still an error. And that’s what this war was.

What Lesson will China Learn from the Iran War? That the US is Overstretched

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The USS Gerald Ford in Greece for repairs

I don’t really like ‘lessons of war’ arguments. It’s really easy to just project your own biases and favorite variables onto conflicts for self-validation. But everyone is starting to note that China is watching how the US war in Iran is flying off the rails. It is pretty clear that the war is bigger than Trump expected, and he doesn’t know what to. It is now pulling US combat power into the Gulf, and this is just to defeat a middle power. And if we actually invade Iran on the ground, it’s gonna be an overextension disaster…

All this should make you wonder if we can tackle China. Phillips O’Brien had some thoughts on this which I pivoted off of for an essay at 1945 magazine. My basic argument is that the US is overstretched. It has too few platforms, however ‘exquisite’ they may be. Specifically, I think it is pretty clear now that:

  • the US Navy is doing too much (even before Trump made it worse)
  • the US Navy too small
  • US missile defense is too costly per unit
  • the US air force needs more cheap UAVs instead of high-priced super-fighters

(The big recent story on that last point is that two ultra-expensive US F-35s appear to have been hit in this war. If that’s true, imagine what a proper peer competitor like China will be able to do.)

So my big take-away, at the end of the 1945 essay, is that China is learning that it can overwhelm the US with masses of cheap, mid-quality airpower. I am teaching a junior-level conflict & security class this semester, and my informal ‘thesis’ for the term is that both the Ukraine war and the Iran war are teaching us that swarms of cheap unmanned platforms are the future.

So going forward, the US can then either:

  • massively expand defense spending to continue fighting lots of wars with exquisite weapons (worst answer)
  • pull back, fight less, and concentrate on China (best answer)
  • switch to cheaper, easier-to-produce platforms – the kind of stuff South Korea is really good at making – within current budget constraints

Try the 1945 essay for the full argument.

Iran War: Can We Open Hormuz or Denuclearize Iran Without a Ground War? Probably Not

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The Strait of Hormuz, including Qeshm which the US probably has to neutralize

I increasingly don’t think that Trump can win this war without going in on the ground. I wrote this up at 1945 magazine this week. Specifically:

1. Opening Hormuz will probably require at least taking a strip of coast on the strait’s Iranian side. Qeshm island is emerging as a key, heavily-fortified location from which Iran threatens Hormuz shipping. So we are now bombing along the Iranian side of the strait to destroy the capabilities which frighten off shipping.

But the Iranians have been preparing for this for decades. They’re dug in. There seems to be a general consensus that we can’t bomb our way into getting the strait opened. So US ground troops are probably necessary to dislodge Iranian coastal power projection. But once you actually land troops – especially if they land on the coast and not just strait islands – the potential for mission creep and an escalating ground war is obvious.

2. If the Iranian clerical regime surives the war, it will sprint for a nuke. They won’t trust negotiations with the US or Israel again for a long time. They will see North Korea as the model: once you have a nuke, you are in a position of strength to bargain, plus you won’t get bombed. The war will strengthen the hardliners who want a nuke for protection.

So now, the only way to keep Iran from getting a nuke is to push the current regime out of power. Ideally, the air strikes would open a window for a domestic revolution to push out the clerics – which might have been possible in January when the dissident movement was on the streets fighting. But they were crushed violently, and there’s been no uprising since we started bomnbing.

Thus the US has to go in, on the ground. Bombing alone won’t provoke regime change. The Iranian people don’t look like they are gonna do it. If the clerics survive, they’re definitely going for a nuke. So the only way to stop that is regime-change which requires a ground war, and we are the only force capable of doing that.

* And yes, I am aware of current idea that we can use special forces to snatch Iran’s nuclear program. That strikes me as unbelievably dangerous. Those facilities will be guarded by Iran’s best troops, and there is no element of surprise to such an operation now, because it’s all over the media. I’d guess that such an operation would fail.

** Yes, Trump could just withdraw and drop the whole thing. He could ‘TACO,’ which markets still seem to expect. I doubt this, primarily for psychological reasons, as I have been arguing on Twitter for a week now. Trump can’t admit defeat. He can’t process it. He will almost certainly escalate to at least a limited ground incursion, and there are no Congressional checks-and-balances to stop him.

Iran War: Will the US Ever Pivot to Asia? It Sure Doesn’t Look Like It

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Hillary Clinton’s original, 2011 article in Foreign Policy announcing the pivot

I wrote a couple op-eds this week on this question of the ‘pivot’ in the wake of yet another US Mideast war – one at Channel News Asia, another at 1945. Here’s the arguement flow:

  • the strategic case (China) for the pivot to Asia is stronger than ever
  • the Iran War is probably going to be bigger and longer than we thought
  • so we can’t pivot more to East Asia for while
  • in fact, we are ‘de-pivoting’ – i.e., moving resources from East Asia to the Persian Gulf
  • also, a lot of Americans don’t want the US to pivot out of the Middle East for religious reasons
  • at least we are pivoting out of Europe. It’s long overdue that Europe do far more for its own defense and take the lead
  • Trump’s interest in Western Hemispheric hegemony will pull away resources better sent to East Asia
  • So the pivot is probably dead
  • So Japan and South Korea better start spending more on defense and cooperating more

I wrote an academic article on the pivot twelve years ago (here), where I argued that American Protestant fundamentalism is the big domestic reason the US can’t quit the Middle East for East Asia. 40+% of Americans believe that Israel plays a major role in the End Times and/or sees Israel as a Western, civilizational bulwark against Islam which they hate/fear. So you’ve got both eschatology and the ‘clash of civilzations’ motivating a deep, religious conservative commitment to America’s presence in the Middle East.

China does not move Americans like that. To most Americans, China is some place farway which makes cheap stuff you buy at Walmart. Does grandma care that much about Taiwan? Probably not. Yes, the American foreign policy community is really worried about China, but the voters don’t care about foreign policy much, and the GOP detests America’s intellectual class. So nobody is listening to us. If they did, we wouldn’t be fighting Iran right now.

So here we are, in yet another Middle Eastern war with yet another president talking about regime change and fighting evil, with the pivot pushed off into the future yet again.

The Trump Doctrine: Rogue State Elite Replacement

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Delcy Rodríguez, the new, sorta pro-American despot of Venezuela

I put up some thoughts on Trump ending the war in Iran at 1945 magazine. We’re moving toward putting a pro-US stooge in the place of now-deceased Iranian leader Khamenei so that we can withdraw quickly. It seems like this is what Trump wants – basically a replay of the Venezuelan drive-by decapitation we did in early January.

The idea, as Steven Taylor similarly notes, is to replace the anti-American elite of a rogue state, through swift, surprising violence, with a new, pro-Amerincan despot while the rest of the regime is left intact. That way, there is no messy nation-building, reconstruction, democratization, and so on. Trump pretty obviously doesn’t care about democracy, and the US public opposes LDC nation-building. So just bumping off a leadership we dislike and replacing it with a stooge seems pretty easy by comparison. We swing a troublesome state into our column by replacing its elites, not its regime.

At 1945, I call this emergent method ‘rogue state elite replacement‘ – in contradistinction to regime change, democratization, tranition, and so on.

Here, at last, we have a ‘Trump Doctrine’ (or Method), and it fits Trump perfectly. It ignores democracy, development, international law, and so on for raw, short-term American interest from individial gangster leaders Trump can bully for pay-offs. Get rid of anti-American leaders; put in pro-American leaders; put the screws to them; get the hell out: ‘He may be a son of a b*tch, but he’s our son of b*tch.’

If Trump can get this to work in Iran, as it seems to be working in Venezuela, I figure Cuba is next on the hit list.

Iran War: Trump Goes Full Neocon in the Biggest Gamble of His Presidency

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I posted my first thoughts on the Iran war over at 1945; please go there. But my short take is that this thing is going to require a ground war to do right. And Trump seemed to admit that when he told Iranians to rise up in his first war speech on Saturday.

By now everyone knows that airpower isn’t enough for regime change. Robert Pape has banging away at that all week. So you need some force on the ground to actually snatch power from those who have it now.

The obvious choice is the Iranian dissident movement. But they were crushed in January. Indeed, thatwas the time to launch this operation. We could have targeted strikes to help the protestors, destroying security forces and their weapons to give the revolt on the streets a fighting chance. But Trump had moved the needed naval assets to the Carribean so that he could kidnap Maduro. So we missed our chance.

Maybe we will get lucky, and whatever is left of the resistance will hit the streets again to fight on the ground as we pound Iran from the air. But the risk is obvious; the resistance is weakened because of the January massacre; and Trump cannot make credible commitments (to support them). Who knows if he will actually support an uprising. He sold out the democratic opposition in Venezuela to get a ‘deal’ with Maduro’s regime successor. I’d bet he would sell out any Iranian uprising to get a deal with Khamenei’s successor.

So if we want regime change, we have to go in on the ground. Trump likely won’t do that. So instead of regime change, we are getting elite replacement: some vaguely pro-American, or at least less fanatical islamist, ruler in the place of Khamenei.

Given that we did this in Venezuela and will probably do it in Cuba soon, a ‘Trump Doctrine’ is emerging: knock off anti-American elites in rogue states, put in a stooge who will do what we till him/her, and then get out. So we are back to ‘he is a son of a b****, but he’s our son of a b****.’

Who Will Control North Korean Nuclear Weapons in a Conflict?

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North Korea is building tactical nuclear weapons – for use on the battlefield – and that raises tricky command-and-control problems for actually using them in combat. I put some thoughts on this at 1945 magazine.

Basically, if Kim Jong Un wants to use nukes as a warfighting tool, then he has to let his battlefield commanders have authority to use them. He must delegate release authority. But North Korea is a monolithic autocracy, and there’s no way Kim wants to share power over the something as symbolic as its nukes. That NK has produced almost nothing else of note in decades besides nukes makes assertive control over them even more political salient.

Assertive control is fine if Kim wants a stable balance of terror with the Americans based on mutually assured destruction. But if he intends to ‘conventionalize’ nukes to be used like artillery on the battlefield – which makes sense given how unbalanced the conventional contest with SK and the US is – then he has to delgate to local commanders with better information. Kim himself with be trapped in the fog of war once a conflict starts and won’t be able to use nukes dynamically and responsively.

I am not sure anyone can figure out how Kim can square this circle. Try 1945 for the full argument.

Trump is Incentivizing Allied Nuclearization

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Trump’s threats against US allies and partners encourage them to consider nuclear weapons. This strikes me as painfully obvious, even though we keep saying we don’t want allies to nuke up. I just wrote about this at 1945 magazine. Please got there for the full argument.

Post-Greenland, I don’t know why US allies would trust us. For two months, we were openly discussing the possibility of using force against a long-standing partner. It is hard to over-emphasize how crazy and self-defeating that it is. Trump has threatened Canada, Mexico, and Panama. When MAGA got drunk on US power right after we kidnapped Maduro, I saw Jesse Waters on Fox say we take Bermuda.

We seem to expect that even as we break the rules of the liberal community of states, other liberal states will not. We get to tariff and bully our allies, and they are just supposed to take it smiling.

That can work for a little while. US allies are asymmetrically dependent on US security guarantees and market access. They are vulnerable to our bullying, because they never thought we would bully them.

But they won’t put up with that forever. Late last year, pre-Greenland, my friend Paul Poast and I argued in Foreign Affairs that US allies would eventually defect. If anything, events suggest our analysis was too easy on Trump. Neither of us expected that the US would actually openly menace an ally.

But here we are. If you are a US ally today, it is hard now to believe – as I say on Twitter – that the US would fight for you, and impossible to believe we would use nuclear weapons for you. In fact, we might attack you instead. So it makes sense to consider your own coverage, because they American nuclear umbrella is gone.

I argued this a year ago for South Korea – that it should nuke. If anything, the ensuing year has made that argument even stronger.