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Once started, wars take a dynamic of their own, surprising everyone involved, no matter how certain the outcome seemed at the outset. The Iranian mullahs thought they could withstand any attack and bring “death to America,” and the Trump administration thought it could eliminate Iran’s capabilities and perhaps even change the regime by bombing. So far, the former have been proven wrong, and many of them are dead by now, but the latter has not yet been proven right.
Yet we can make the following four preliminary observations.
First, President Donald Trump continues to remove the large gap between our rhetoric and action. Iran has been adversarial with the United States since 1979, killing hundreds of Americans since then. For the last 24 years, Western powers, including the U.S., have been negotiating with Tehran to end its nuclear program. The objective has always been clearly stated: Iran cannot have nuclear weapons. But only Trump took the objective seriously and acted upon it.
Maintaining such gaps between goals and actions is dangerous in the long run. Neither enemies nor friends took our words seriously because we scolded without punishing and we praised without helping. European leadership is always “concerned” about some hostile rival, whether Iran or Russia, but incapable of mustering a serious response to anything: Its geopolitical irrelevance is correlated to the gap between rhetoric and action.
Second, Trump returned to an old verity proven by history: Security is built by eliminating actual enemies, not by hoping that they would convert to a more liberal understanding of international politics. The modern liberal view that all states would converge into a benign behavior simply by tying them all in an ever-expanding net of rules, procedures, and negotiations was always a risky bet on a theory. It has proven to be utopian. Russia, North Korea, Venezuela, and Iran ended the “rules-based international order” simply by breaking the rules. Reprimanding them, even sanctioning them, would never bring them into compliance.
America’s 47-year conflict with Iran could not be won at the negotiating table. The supreme leader and his clerics, driven by a hateful millenarian worldview, never gave up their goal of defeating the U.S. The proven method of ending conflicts is to eliminate the enemy’s capacity to wage war. This involves degrading their capabilities to a point of effective disarmament and removing leaders whose hostility is irreconcilable. The old Venetian saying homo morto non fa guerra, though brutal, remains true: A dead man can’t wage war.
The attack may result in a significantly weakened Iranian military, a decimated and impotent Iranian revolutionary leadership, and a state teetering on the brink of chaos. But it is misguided to believe that only the political stability of other states is beneficial to the U.S. and its allies. Sometimes the best one can hope for is a rival ensnared in a cycle of domestic unrest. In international politics, friends are very difficult to create, making impotent and fragmented enemies a viable alternative.
While a clear regime change in Iran could be a benefit, it is not necessary for the U.S. to achieve its primary objective: to eliminate Iran as a threat.
Third, contrary to the expectations of many experts, the U.S. is bringing allies along. Bold decisions to use force against enemies attract. Saudi Arabia is eager to see a diminished, and certainly a non-nuclear, Iran. And Iran’s choice to retaliate by striking not just Israel but also Gulf states and a British base in Cyprus made it very clear that this conflict is not just between Tehran and an alliance of Washington and Jerusalem. Tehran’s escalation helps the U.S.
Europe’s reaction is ambivalent. Spain, led by an anti-American socialist, condemned the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran. But other Europeans have been more cautious. It’s hard to condemn an action that seeks to achieve the goal they have long shared: a non-nuclear Iran.
France, the United Kingdom, and Germany have signaled a willingness to join military operations in some capacity. The most consequential development may be Germany’s position. If Berlin participates in actions targeting Iranian military capabilities, it will mark a historic shift in European geopolitical dynamics. For decades, Germany has been Europe’s economic powerhouse, leaving the military domain to the U.K. and France. This division of roles is evolving rapidly. If Germany assumes a more assertive military role alongside its economic leadership, it would emerge as Europe’s predominant power. And it could shape Europe’s future with less reliance on broad political consensus.
Moreover, many experts on the Left and the Right have always feared that U.S. would be entangled in small wars, dragged in by its allies. The isolationists advocated jettisoning allies, while the liberals hoped international institutions would replace alliances. In reality, what is happening now is the opposite: The U.S. is entangling its allies from the Gulf to Europe in the Iran conflict. The difference is important. Allies are not dragging us into local feuds of little importance to us, but we are forcing them to support our own objectives.
Fourth, how will this conflict affect U.S. standing versus the other great rivals, Russia and China? The heavy use of relatively scarce weapons, from Tomahawk missiles to interceptors, is certainly stripping American arsenals in other regions, the Pacific in particular. This may create dangerous windows of opportunity for China, which may think that U.S. operations in Iran degraded American military capabilities, for instance, in the South China Sea. Action on one frontier may temporarily weaken deterrence and defense on another. It is a recurrent problem for great powers throughout history.
Two questions are important to keep in mind. First, how long will the U.S. bomb Iran? The longer this conflict lasts, the greater the opportunities for China and Russia. Trump indicated that it should be over, more or less, in four weeks. This is plausible, but it is too early to judge whether it will happen.
Second, how will it end? If it ends without a clear defeat of the current Iranian regime — defined as elimination of its nuclear and missile capabilities, serious degradation of its other military forces, and at a minimum a chronic weakness of its political control of the country — then it will be likely that the U.S. will have to maintain a sizeable military force ready to intervene again in the Middle East. That’s beneficial to China and Russia. But if it ends with a defeat of the revolutionary mullahs, the U.S. will be able to redirect its attention and resources elsewhere without the lingering threat of a new supreme leader actively seeking “death to America.”
In the end, no political decision is cost-free.
Continued negotiations with Tehran were not going to remove the Iranian threat. The cost of seeking a negotiated settlement was high. Most likely, a nuclear Iran with large numbers of ballistic missiles. The alternative, the ongoing attack, is also costly in terms of casualties, expended weapons and money, and unforeseen consequences of an armed conflict.
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But there are also potential benefits, namely an Iran that is different from the hostile and aggressive power of the last decades.
Only time will tell.
Jakub Grygiel is a professor at the Catholic University of America, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, and a senior adviser at the Marathon Initiative.
