Trump Has Made a Fundamental Miscalculation about Iran

By Phil Klay

I have plenty of complaints about the war I served in two decades ago: the Iraq war was ill-conceived, hubristic and marred by poor leadership at the highest level. But I did know why I was there. What exactly do our service members think we’re trying to do in Iran?

The justifications for the war have been stunningly incoherent. Maybe the war is about regime change, about Iran’s nuclear program, about the narrow military objectives of degrading their ballistic missile and drone capabilities, or perhaps it was because Israel was about to attack and we’d be at risk, or because the United States was under imminent threat from Iran, or to achieve peace in the Middle East, and so on.

Maybe it’s not a war at all. Maybe it’s an “excursion that will keep us out of a war” or an incursion or maybe it’s only a “little excursion.” In President Trump’s America, there may be only two genders, but our military adventures can identify however they please.

Maybe we want “unconditional surrender,” but maybe “unconditional surrender” is a thing that happens inside the president’s mind, regardless of whether our enemies have actually surrendered. Maybe the war is “quite contained,” but maybe Americans throughout the region need to leave. Maybe there will be ground troops and maybe not.

And yet, as I watched a video posted by the White House in which a group of angry, rifle-wielding bowling pins labeled “Iranian Regime Officials” are struck by a Stars and Stripes bowling ball that turns into an airplane, followed by actual combat footage of U.S. airstrikes, I realized how one rationale for this war has remained clear and consistent: the administration’s delight in displays of violence and domination.

The bowling video is one of many sizzle reels posted on White House social media accounts celebrating the war by mixing images of death and destruction with footage from video games or sports highlights. The president declared that military officials told him “it’s more fun to sink” ships than to capture them, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth exulted, “We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.” The Trump aide Stephen Miller proclaimed that the Iran war showcased a military “that isn’t fighting with its hands tied behind its back.”

At another news conference, Mr. Hegseth made the macho posturing even clearer: “No stupid rules of engagement, no nation building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars.”

The men who want to Make America Great Again are searching for a clean break from the Global War on Terror. That conflict was launched with lofty rhetoric about democracy and freedom but led to years of civil war, chaos, swollen ranks of terror groups, genocide, a refugee crisis and, in Afghanistan, a complete, humiliating failure. What these men don’t seem to realize, or care about, is that their language of brute force represents a fundamental break with American traditions around war going back to the Revolution.

Boastful talk about slaughter is as old as war itself. “The wheels of my war chariot,” bragged one Assyrian king, “were bespattered with filth and blood. With the bodies of their warriors, I filled the plain, like grass.” But America’s founders asserted universal principles that should make such an attitude unthinkable. If you believe not only that all men are created equal but also that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, then war cannot be justified as a pure display of power and dominance.

In his addresses to the troops, George Washington would bring up the imagery of violence not as a spectacle to be enjoyed but as horrors to be endured — from “mercenary hirelings fighting in the cause of lawless ambition, rapine and devastation” to those who wished to keep revolutionary America in “bondage and misery.” And when news of British atrocities reached him, Washington wrote that “their wanton cruelty injures rather than benefits their cause; that, with our forbearance, justly secures to us the attachment of all good men.”

Likewise, Abraham Lincoln carefully used the bully pulpit of the presidency during the Civil War to articulate a firmness of moral purpose that extended beyond the success of military aims and toward an ultimate reconciliation with the South. Instead of bombastic rhetoric, Lincoln suggests in his Second Inaugural Address that God “gives to both North and South this terrible war” as their mutual punishment for the evil of slavery, and declares that they must continue “with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right.”

At Gettysburg, he cast the war as a trial of our national founding, “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” And so on, through wars good and bad: Whether it’s Woodrow Wilson entering World War I because “the world must be made safe for democracy” or George W. Bush’s invasion “to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger,” American leaders have sought to justify our wars as having objectives in keeping with our founding political philosophy.

This isn’t simply about rhetoric, but about a fundamental view of power and its relationship to violence that filters down to strategy. If war is politics by other means, and if all government rests on opinion, as the Federalist Papers suggest, then the ultimate outcome of wars is going to be a matter not simply of military successes but also of the long-term effect of the use of violence on the warring populations. “The final decision of a whole war is not always to be regarded as absolute,” the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz cautioned two centuries ago. “The conquered state often sees in it only a passing evil, which may be repaired in after times by means of political combinations.”

Washington wanted to justly secure the attachments of all good men because he didn’t simply want to dominate the British — he wanted to form a nation. Lincoln gave the sober Second Inaugural Address instead of a blustery, Hegseth-style speech of raining death upon the rebels because he wanted to heal a nation. Our victory in World War II was secured not only with an atomic bomb but also with the Marshall Plan and the decades-long commitment of men and resources to develop democracies in Japan and Germany.

And even in America’s failed wars launched with idealistic aims, like Vietnam and the Iraq war, our defeats were often related to a failure to fully comprehend that peoples in other countries have their own passions and ideals, that they might not simply be projections of our own desires, wanting what we want them to want, and loathing what we want them to loathe.

When Stephen Miller talked about our troops not fighting with their hands tied behind their backs, he was referring to a popular conservative myth about the Vietnam War, that we might have won had we only exercised less restraint. We dropped millions of tons of bombs and left at least 100,000 civilians dead, but perhaps if we’d really gone scorched earth and killed a million more, the Vietnamese would have loved us and embraced the rulers we foisted upon them. Anyone who took our founding ideals seriously, though, would know that was a particularly vile form of folly.

And yet, that attitude seems to be guiding the current administration. “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Mr. Miller told the CNN news anchor Jake Tapper after the spectacular raid in which we captured Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro. It’s a worldview that seems to inform both his foreign policy and his treatment of domestic political opponents — witness the administration’s ill-fated show of force in Minneapolis that ended in disgrace and the death of American citizens.

That is precisely the kind of world that Franklin Delano Roosevelt told Americans we must arm our allies in Europe to prevent: “A new and terrible era in which the whole world, our hemisphere included, would be run by threats of brute force.”

A reliance on brute force can be blinding. In one of the more telling comments from the defense secretary, Mr. Hegseth claimed that because we’d taken control of Iran’s airways and waterways, “we control their fate,” and “the terms of this war will be set by us at every step.” A veteran of Iraq like Mr. Hegseth should know better. The enemy always gets a vote, and even after a victorious campaign, the effect of war on a population may have complex, unwanted and sometimes catastrophic consequences.

If we view hostile nations not as an accumulated assortment of video game enemies to be cowed into submission by our massive firepower and sick internet memes, but as complex countries filled with human beings, this seems obvious. And it’s that particular failure that explains the otherwise inexplicable failure of the Trump administration to foresee obvious possible consequences of military action in Iran.

In February, the U.S. energy secretary, Chris Wright, suggested that “Trump’s energy dominance agenda” meant that America need not worry about disruptions to the oil market if war broke out with Iran. Now the president is trying to claim that high gas prices are good for America, while urging oil tankers to “show some guts” and sail through the Strait of Hormuz, and Iran, whose ships can get through, is selling more oil than before the war.

After Iran widened the war by striking targets around the Middle East, Mr. Hegseth admitted, “I can’t say that we anticipated necessarily that’s exactly how they would react.”

Robert Pape, an expert on strategic bombing campaigns, has argued that air power without subsequent ground troops has never resulted in a positive regime change. Yet the Trump administration urged the Iranian people to seize their chance at controlling the country, and seemed caught flat-footed when the Iranian regime, instead of wanting “to talk badly,” elected a hard-line new leader while their security chief, who was later killed, threatened to make the Strait of Hormuz a “strait of defeat and suffering for warmongers.”

Without a clear moral or political purpose, we’re left with what the military analyst Franz-Stefan Gady calls the “strike-as-strategy” paradox, in which we substitute tactical prowess for comprehensive strategic design. This tendency, he writes, “is reinforced by a political culture that demands televised displays of military prowess.”

Well, I am not entertained. And though my ideals have been bruised and battered, not least by the war I served in not long after Mr. Hegseth’s first deployment, I still retain a faith in the principles of the Constitution I swore an oath to 20 years ago. They are universal, not nationalistic, principles, and they should serve as a check on the hubristic American tendency to think we can dominate others by sheer force of military might.

As Washington knew well, war is a “plague to mankind,” even when it goes well and the only targets we strike are valid military targets. The average junior Iranian sailor on a ship off the coast of Sri Lanka could be a conscript. He might even dislike the regime that just murdered thousands of his fellow Iranians but which he feels helpless to overthrow. He is, like the average American, endowed by his Creator with inalienable rights.

In some circumstances, this conscript may end up a valid military target, but he will be one that should be targeted only out of military necessity in a war with a clear moral justification, not someone you should kill just because it’s “fun” to blow up ships. And this is hardly an immaculate war.

Mr. Hegseth, who campaigned on behalf of those accused of war crimes and railed against “stupid rules of engagement,” cut about 90 percent of the people at the Pentagon working on ensuring we don’t accidentally harm civilians. We should not be surprised that a preliminary finding by the Pentagon suggests that on the very first day of this war of choice we struck a school, slaughtering children en masse. Nor should we be surprised if such acts help shore up support for an Iranian regime whose greatest weakness has long been the contempt it inspires in its own people.

American military policy has failed us over the past decades, but I don’t think the solution is the radical break with American tradition represented by the Trump administration. I still hold to the conservative belief that the highest ideals we find in our history can guide us. Our greatest wartime leaders thought we should wage war only when it was absolutely necessary, that we should articulate the clear moral and political objectives that we use to guide our strategy and that we should treat the shedding of blood with the seriousness it deserves.

Power does not grow out of the barrel of a gun, cruelty is not the same as strength, and a politics built on such ideas promises ruin, delusion about the limits of our power and a betrayal of the promise of our founding.