The Iran war and other recent misadventures by the Trump administration can seem like a radical departure from the U.S. foreign policy consensus. To be sure, the Trump administration has spurned the most sanctimonious aspects of U.S. foreign policy, which arguably reached their crescendo under the Biden administration. The gleeful gangsterism in Latin America and the Caribbean, the territorial threats against Canada and Denmark, the planned luxury condos on the mass graves of Gaza—all are indeed shocks to both the mind and the conscience.
Yet the Iran war is actually the culmination of Washington’s long-standing foreign policy pathologies, not a break with them.
The first example is Washington’s seemingly endless appetite for military interventions without any clear definition of success when the stakes for the U.S. are low to nil. This virtually ensures the war will be, at best, not worth the cost, and at worst, an open-ended disaster. The United States cannot mobilize appropriate means in the absence of achievable ends, nor can it be willing to do so if its core interests are not meaningfully involved. This has been a common thread throughout U.S. foreign policy failures, from Vietnam to Iraq to Libya.
The same is true now. The goals of the Iran operation have been defined schizophrenically: regime change (or not), destruction of Iran’s nuclear program (supposedly obliterated last summer), degradation of Iran’s navy and missiles, elimination of Iran’s proxies, etc. There does not appear to be any obvious alternative to the regime within Iran, nor can its capabilities be permanently suppressed. The means have so far been limited to air and naval power, though the administration is reportedly considering sending ground troops. When the ends are open-ended, the war is likely to be as well.
Author
More on Middle East
