There is no clear victory looming in Iran. There are outcomes that could be better or worse.
There is no victory to be had in Iran because this is an unlawful war that will push our already strained constitutional system further out of balance for a generation, with the president’s war-making power now completely untethered from Congress.
There is no upside to that. Restoring the damage would require a generation’s worth of effort by people more capable than those currently serving in Washington.
Moreover, the Trump administration has effectively ceded sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz to Iran, a privilege Iran had not previously enjoyed concerning the international waterway that sits partly within Oman’s territorial waters. The administration has made opening the strait a central—perhaps the sole—aim of talks with Tehran. Yet the Strait is not Tehran’s to open or close, or at least it wasn’t until recently. In this conflict, the United States may win every engagement, but Iran has, in effect, acquired territory.
Wishful thinking is the magic that converts fool’s gold into silver linings. But what would a more favorable outcome actually look like for Iran?
Regime change through a popular domestic uprising would rank among the most favorable possible outcomes. Yet it is not likely to occur. And such an uprising would not guarantee improvement. A popular movement could just as easily yield something as bad or worse than what Iranians endure today. An irony of this conflict is that the ayatollahs’ regime and the Trump administration are political kin: both the revolutionary government in Iran and the contemporary Republican Party in the United States lean heavily on support from devout religious zealots in socially and economically backward rural areas, and they view their internal foes mainly as urban elites. Just as American populists moved from George Wallace to Donald Trump, their Iranian counterparts could plausibly drift from Ruhollah Khomeini to someone more modern and far worse, as hard to credit as that sounds.
For similar reasons, a more probable outcome—regime change by a factional coup, if war pressure exposes the regime’s latent fissures—might well yield something no better than what Iran began with. In such regimes, factional warfare rarely produces victories for liberal democrats or even for more moderate Islamists, though there are precedents in the Muslim world for a more secular autocracy, as in the 20th century Turkey, or a Western-leaning military-backed junta with some liberal veneer, as in Pakistan under Benazir Bhutto. It is worth noting that both Turkey and Pakistan have since moved toward greater Islamist currents, not toward liberalism or even accountability. In Iran, one could reasonably expect the most vicious faction to ascend, over the more humane factions, if any remain in the race at all, about which American intelligence seems somewhat uncertain.
Donald Trump carries many flaws—moral, intellectual, perhaps even psychiatric—and one persistent issue is that no one seems to have told him he is a weak man, though the blunt Germanic term would be ill-suited here. Pursuing a strongman foreign policy from a position of weakness simply fails. Trump has been begging—“like a dog,” as he might phrase it—the Iranians to withdraw from the Strait of Hormuz and permit global shipping to resume normal operations. (Whether such normalcy is actually possible remains uncertain.) Because Trump sits at the center of a circle of flatterers, you can be sure that when the administration insists there will be no “toll booth” by which Tehran can enrich itself through its de facto sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, such a financial device is quite likely the concession they are preparing to accept in the end.
As always, the Trump administration lacks a robust plan for reaching its objectives because it lacks explicit goals—it may have preferences, but measurable, objectively assessable goals are something this administration leaves vague on Iran and nearly everything else. The psychology is straightforward: you can’t be labeled a loser if winning is never defined.
What we have are dead Americans and diesel edging toward $6 a gallon. I fail to see how a “Mission Accomplished” banner could be hung on that, yet there is little point in trying to reason with those whose ability to hear is hampered by a spectrum of impediments—from political to cognitive.
