Generals always prepare to fight the last war. So do armchair generals. Most commentators on the American-Israeli war with Iran see the conflict through the prism of the War on Terror. We are told that the war is “neoconservative,” but also that it is the end of neoconservatism. We are told that this is Israel’s war, with Israel and American Jews leading President Donald Trump by the nose, but also that it is President Donald Trump’s war, a grudge match born from vanity and animus. We are told that the war means the end of Trumpism, but also that it confirms Trumpism as America’s default foreign policy. Even the administration speculates aloud, as though it too is a passive spectator.
When Georges Clemenceau, the French prime minister in World War I, cited that adage about the generals, he added: “especially if they won it.” The same goes for the armchair generals who lost it after 2001. The waste and failure of the War on Terror should make anyone think twice about “boots on the ground.” But Iran’s war on America began in 1979, long before the 9/11 attacks and the War on Terror. And if neoconservatism means nation-building and exporting liberal democracy rather than “American Jews in public life,” then neoconservatism is long gone. It withered in the face of reality between 2007, when the second Bush administration launched the surge in Iraq, and 2015, when the Obama administration failed to launch an intervention in Syria.
In information theory, the Shannon-Hartley theorem calculates how much information can be transmitted via a specific bandwidth in the presence of noise. There is so much noise now that we cannot hear the signals. The Know-Nothings of the Progressive era at least knew something. We are Know-Everythings in an excessive era, so we struggle to know anything. But the signals are there anyway. To define war aims, we need to tune out the noise.
There is no Trumpism, only Trump. There is no single movement to Make America Great Again, only a congeries of factions whose competition is becoming ever more explicit and vicious as the Trump era enters the home stretch. Nor is there a single conception of what might put America First. These are intellectual abstractions, attempts to simplify political signals from the noise. They can clarify problems, but they cannot answer them. The problems are: Can America be made great without asserting its interests in the world? And is it possible to prioritize domestic priorities without securing America’s place in the global system?
A horseshoe alliance of communists, Islamists, and white identitarian isolationists still invokes neoconservatism to give an intellectual gloss to their paranoid delusions about eight million Jews of Israel magically controlling American foreign policy. The realities are more complex.
The United States is history’s first and presumably only non-Eurasian world power. Geography means that power projection is not a strategy so much as the premise of having a strategy. If America forfeits its stake in the Persian Gulf, it excludes itself from energy politics and China wins. This geography also makes client states more critical than they usually are. Little Israel is a military and technological giant. That makes it the most efficient projector of American interests in an essential region.
The reality is also that, as far back as the 1980s, Iranian expansionism pushed American, Arab, and Israeli interests into an alignment that has deepened in response to Iran’s aggression. The Iranian regime is committed to destroying Israel, subordinating the Arabs, and expelling American influence from West Asia. The Israeli, Arab, and American responses overlap in recognizing that Iran cannot retain the terrorist veto over the region. This is “Israel’s war” as it is Saudi Arabia’s war and Qatar’s war, and America’s war too.
This alignment will crack if the war goes too badly or too well. For Israel and the Sunni Arab monarchies of the Gulf, the minimal definition of victory is disabling Iran so that it cannot attack or intimidate Israel with nukes, hypersonic missiles, or terrorism. Beyond that, their interests diverge.
Iran and Israel were close allies before 1979. If the Iranian regime collapses, Israelis hope that a successor regime, democratic or not, will revive that alliance. But the Sunni Gulf monarchies distrust Persians and Shiites, dislike democracy, and fear a revived Iran as a competitor that could achieve by economic and cultural heft what it failed to do with nukes and terrorism.
This difference may explain why the Trump administration has been precise about its minimal goals (neutralizing Iran’s nuclear program and ballistic missiles) but unclear about how it will attain its maximal goals (regime change, popular uprisings, “freedom”). Trump’s musings on these themes amount to one of military history’s greatest disinformation programs, but the signal in his noise is that he wants to win. It’s past time for him to tell us what that means.
Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on X @drdominicgreen.
