Maybe, For Once, Trump Did The Right Thing

Diplomacy isn't always the answer

What would a President Kamala Harris–or Joe Biden–have done if presented with the situation in Iran that confronted our actual president? That is, if Israel had defied American wishes for further diplomacy and gone ahead and decapitated Iran’s military and intelligence command and radically degraded–but not eliminated–its nuclear program? And if Israel had, as well, humbled Iran’s proxies and eliminated its air-defense capacity, thus greatly lowering the potential costs of American intervention? I find it far from certain that she–or he–would have said, “You’re on your own, Bibi.”

I have been vastly relieved every time I have read that an American president has warned Netanyahu not to attack Iran. I thought the nuclear deal that President Obama signed with Iran–the JCPOA–bought the world crucial time, and I thought it was madness for Trump to have unilaterally abrogated it. Yet here we are. And Biden made absolutely no headway in his efforts to revitalize a broader form of the deal. Was more diplomacy the best move, even as Iran continued to enrich uranium and perhaps move towards building a bomb–a point of contention? UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres declared, “There is no military solution. The only path forward is diplomacy.” But he may have been wrong on both counts.

Another Iraq—Or Another Gulf War?

At this early moment, when we do not know either how effective the American strikes were or how Iran will respond, our reactions are governed by the lens through which we see these events. The first reaction for many of us will be, “Donald Trump is a reckless bully who’s been itching to use those big beautiful bombs.” He is that, and for that reason he may, as he said, inflict far greater harm if Iran doesn’t knuckle under in the next few days. But Trump’s behavior so far has been governed far more by his reluctance to wage war than by his penchant for brutality.

The Gulf War: sometimes force works

It is also true that Netanyahu, unlike the UN Secretary General, seems to believe that all Israel’s problems have a military solution. He is plainly wrong–and I think criminally so–in the case of Gaza and the West Bank. The only lasting solution to Palestinian aspirations for statehood is a political one. But he may have been right about Hezbollah, and he may turn out to be right about Iran. Some problems don’t have diplomatic solutions.

The framework that most of us reflexively apply to any new act of intervention in the Middle East, or perhaps anywhere, is Iraq. The Bush Administration launched its war in Iraq without giving any serious thought to how and by whom the country would be put back together afterwards. The result was catastrophic both for Iraq and the United States. Some of the same hawks who blithely championed regime change in Iraq are now calling for the same in Iran, although, they concede, “there is not a great track record of success when it comes to implementing regime change from the air.” Or from the ground.

But not everything is “another Iraq.” Barack Obama refused to train or arm Syrian rebels because he feared just such a quagmire–with the result that half a million Syrians died, Al Qaeda created a state of its own in the resulting vacuum and Europe was flooded with refugees, destabilizing the continent’s politics. That may have been a lesson overlearned.

Military force does not avail to solve political problems like establishing a legitimate regime in a country that has never had one or reconciling the demands of two peoples in one land. It can, however, successfully roll back acts of aggression. Among post-Cold War interventions, that was preeminently the case in the Gulf War. George Bush the Elder set the explicit goal of expelling the Iraqi army from Kuwait. He was criticized for not continuing on to Baghdad to overthrow Saddam Hussein; the Iraq War later proved the virtue of his restraint. Similarly, Nato made no attempt to extend the air war over Kosovo to regime change in Belgrade. At times, it’s true, these two objectives have become hopelessly knotted together. Because the Taliban refused to eject Al Qaeda in the aftermath of 9/11, Bush the Younger concluded that Al Qaeda could not be dislodged without overthrowing the host regime. The Americans found themselves owning Afghanistan and never figured out what to do with it.

You Can Still Hate Him Anyway

We cannot know right now whether Donald Trump’s invasion of Iran will look more like the Gulf War or the Iraq War. Donald Trump does not have George H. W. Bush’s prudence, not to mention his commitment to consulting with allies; on the other hand, he also lacks completely the misguided idealism that made W think that he could remake the Middle East in the American image. What Trump surely wants is to make Iran cry uncle and surrender its nuclear program so that he could accomplish what none of his predecessors have, thus lighting the path to his coveted Nobel Peace Prize. But Tehran is very unlikely to gratify Trump’s fantasies. If, instead, the Iranians succeed in launching missile or drone strikes that kill American soldiers in the Gulf, a vindictive Trump may well rain down holy hell, leading to the wider war everyone fears. We have to hope that Iranian capacities are as crippled as the Israelis claim they are, or that we get lucky.

Just as it’s a mistake to assume that all acts of intervention have calamitous outcomes, so it’s a mistake to believe that whatever Donald Trump does must be wrong because he did it. Good people often do bad things; bad people sometimes do good things. We can go on hating Trump just as much even if Iran works out; he’ll give us new reasons every day. But if the American strikes significantly retard Iran’s nuclear program and further weaken the regime’s hold on an increasingly restive people, we should be grateful.