We awakened this morning to find that the United States has begun an unlimited war against the Iranian regime. I use "unlimited" in the sense that I learned to use it in the Strategy and Policy Department of the Naval War College: a war, in Clausewitz's words, "to overthrow the enemy--to render him politically helpless or militarily impotent, thus forcing him to accept any peace we please." Woodenly reading his speech while wearing a baseball cap and forsaking a tie, the president promised death to any member of the Iranian security forces that resists the United States. American forces reportedly already attempted to kill the regime's leaders. This operation obviously will redefine the Trump presidency and may easily reshape the whole world, but like so much of what has happened under Trump, it has deep generational roots. It vindicates his exact contemporary George W. Bush, resuming the policy and strategy which Bush announced and implemented in 2002-3, and which his successors never actually redefined or abandoned.
The Bush Administration featured neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, John Bolton, and Dick Cheney, who had drawn particular conclusions from the fall of communism and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nothing, Wolfowitz had argued in an infamous memo during the first administration, should now stand in the way of the worldwide hegemony of the United States. The USSR's fall had left hostile states like Iraq and North Korea without a patron, and the United States must now take the opportunity to remove their governments by force before a new peer competitor emerged to support them. Wolfowitz's view never prevailed under Bush I, which wisely ended the first Gulf War without going to Baghdad, but the Bush II administration immediately embodied it in their National Security Strategy. That document reserved a US right to overthrow any hostile regime that in our view threatened to acquire nuclear weapons. The administration immediately implemented it when it went to war with Iraq, and a friend of mine once heard Bolton declare that it would deal similarly with Iran and North Korea when the Iraq war was over. When that war turned out to be a fiasco, such plans went onto the back burner. They have now been revived. If my contemporary and friend Bill Strauss had lived to see this, I am sure that he would have said that this was where our Boom generation had always been heading.
The Obama Administration never really decided whether it was adopting a different national security strategy or not. It did temporarily end our involvement in Iraq, although it intervened there once again when ISIS took control of much of the country. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton adopted the neocon playbook when a Libyan revolt threatened Muhammar Qadaffi, using military force to remove him as well, and plunging yet another Middle Eastern nation into chaos. Her successor John Kerry, however--like me, the son of a professional diplomat--took a different path on Iran, reaching an agreement that would keep its nuclear program within peaceful bounds. Kerry and Obama did not however try to re-establish formal diplomatic relations with Iran or really sell the American people on a new policy. Prodded by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the entire Republican Party lined up against the agreement, and Donald Trump denounced it during his first term.
Trump has now concluded an informal offensive and defensive alliance with the Israeli government and is waging joint war on Iran a second time, this time with the explicit goal of bringing down the government, just as the Bush II administration had hoped to do. Trump's foreign policy consists of using every economic, political and military asset at his disposal either to destroy regimes he deems hostile or make them submit to his will. In Venezuela he believes that he has successfully intimidated a new political leader by kidnapping the old one and bringing him to the United States. In Iran--a nation of 93 million people--he believes that a combination of bombs and an Iranian revolt can topple a well-organized totalitarian regime. I don't think anyone really has any idea of what the outcome of this operation will be in Iran.
Trump meanwhile has transformed the presidency into a foreign policy dictatorship. He made no pretense of seeking authority for this big new war, and implicitly claimed a right to begin war against any nation that in his view threatens the United States. Such a broad grant of authority was in fact built into the resolution the Congress passed after 9/11, that fateful day, which has never been repealed. Trump is also indulging a fantasy that the US Air Force has been promoting for at least three decades, that targeted air strikes can bring down a whole modern regime. He is discounting Iran's ability to retaliate against US assets in the Middle East, against our allies there, and even, possibly, within the United States itself.
Most importantly of all, Trump is following in the footsteps of Vladimir Putin, overthrowing what is left of the twentieth century dream of a world ruled by law rather than force. In the Atlantic Charter of August 14, 1941, Roosevelt and Churchill proclaimed on behalf of their governments, " they respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them." Like some provisions of the US constitution, those noble words immediately began struggling with human ambition and greed, and the United States has honored them in both the observance and the breech many times in the last eight decades. Now an American president claims the right to dispose of the government or sovereignty of any nation that he chooses. And hanging over us now is the possibility of a Chinese attack on Taiwan. According to press reports, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Caine, warned the president that a war against Iran would leave us without the resources to meet our commitments elsewhere. Our chances of saving Taiwan have been questionable for a long time, and now a very large portion of our navy is tied up in the Middle East. Leaving behind the post-Second World War dream of a more peaceful world--a dream also nurtured by presidents like Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush--we are now on the verge of the world Orwell described in 1984, when three authoritarian regimes, Oceana, Eurasia, and East Asia, rule their own spheres. That, apparently, is where history has been heading since the fall of Communism in 1989.
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