The Trump administration is fighting the Iran war as a modern Western war. One state uses military force to force concessions from the other. Their contention blends strategic ambitions with economic motives. Victory is defined as forcing the enemy’s surrender and thereby attaining strategic and economic goals. This kind of war was formalized by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1649, which shifted military competition away from dynasties and warlords and onto a new legal footing, the war between nation-states. The weakening of the Westphalian system is not just the West’s failure. The leveling of economic and technological battlefields has created other ways of waging war.
The Trump administration, or at least President Donald Trump himself, is also fighting the Iran war as two other kinds of war. One is the postmodern Western war of drones, screens, and pinpoint strikes. Since 2003, we have seen this used in wars of containment against non-state actors. The assumption is that an enemy cannot be defeated, only deferred, either because the enemy is implacable or because state-to-state warfare is not the answer. The Israelis, who pioneered this form of warfare against Hezbollah in Lebanon, call it “mowing the lawn.” The United States has the world’s biggest lawnmower.
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The Iran war integrates the new technology with the old goal of knocking over a rival state, and without putting “boots on the ground” or tanks on the lawn. The administration’s goals extend far beyond annulling Iran’s nuclear and missile programs. The Iranian regime has been decapitated, and the state’s nerves and muscles severed. Iran’s military industrial base is smashed. Its navy and air force no longer exist. Its missile capacity is massively reduced. The hope is that a war of digital containment can trigger a Westphalian victory, ideally by the midterm elections. But the Trump administration also agreed on April 7 to a two-week pause for negotiations. Trump announced a “workable basis” for a “definitive Agreement concerning Longterm PEACE with Iran.” It’s not regime change. The regime just needs to change its behavior.
The administration is also fighting its enemy’s war. This, too, is both an old and a new way of fighting. The Middle Eastern way of war modernized without adopting the Westphalian framework. The postcolonial state system is weak. The religious and ethnic enmities that preceded the interlude of European state-making are strong. While digital war can be waged around the clock, Middle Eastern war retains a calendrical rhythm. As Iran and Iraq learned in the 1980s, state-to-state warfare cannot resolve the implacable rivalry of Shias and Sunnis. The Westphalian system does not allow for being simultaneously at war and peace with another state, but the Middle Eastern way of politics is built for it. A strategic pause (hudna) is sanctioned by Mohammed’s record of warfare, and has no equivalent in Western thought. All this makes defeat more likely than victory, and the overthrow of a regime from within more likely than its surrender to external pressure.
Machiavelli, the founding theorist of modern politics as war, advises his Prince to study the winners of the past and “imitate those who have been truly outstanding.” He also counsels what we now call “adversarial modeling.” Computer scientists test their systems against hypothetical hostile or competitive systems. War gamers test their plans against the predicted responses of rival powers. But reality, Machiavelli warns, is more than the blue team against the red. To imitate is to be predictable. The Prince must “know well how to act as a beast,” and to be “both a fox to recognize traps and a lion to frighten off wolves.” He must recombine precedents and innovate.
Machiavelli also advised that a leader should inspire an “imitative desire” in his people by fostering honor and bravery. Since 2003, the U.S. has adapted to the terrain of Middle Eastern warfare and become a technological innovator. It has also learned to fight its enemy’s war. “A ceasefire is a pause,” Gen. Dan “Raisin’” Caine said on April 8. But when Trump stood between the first lady and an Easter Bunny on April 7 and threatened that “an entire civilization will die” if Iran failed to agree to a ceasefire, he showed how constant offshored warfare has degraded public life in the U.S. If you speak to thugs in their language for long enough, you become fluent in thuggery. You are drawn into fighting on their terms without winning on yours.
After the ceasefire, War Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed that “Iran begged for this ceasefire and we all know it.” Yet, Hegseth seemed baffled that despite a “historic and overwhelming victory on the battlefield,” Iran agreed to negotiations while still firing missiles at American allies across the Gulf. Hegseth seems not to understand the kind of war America is fighting, and that if the regime remains in power, it wins on its terms. Everyone else knows this: China, Russia, the Gulf Arabs, the Europeans, the Israelis, the Easter Bunny. Trump knows it, too.
Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on X @drdominicgreen.
