It seems to me that you misjudged this war for a very similar reason that you voted for Trump: a pathological degree of risk appetite and a failure of imagination, leading to irrational optimism about the odds of a best case scenario.
I do not see Trump changing his position on Israel. Trump is sensitive to public opinion, but he has a rough sense of trade-offs. Let's say that 1% of Democrats, 1% of independents, and 1% of Republicans, maybe 1% of the country, might move toward Trump if he attacked Netanyahu. When I say 1% of Republicans, I mean that there are 1% of Republicans right now who will be voting Democrat or staying home in November, but who if he changed his tune on Netanyahu, would come out and vote. This is potentially what Trump has to gain.
On the other hand, attacking Netanyahu would alienate a huge chunk of his base: Evangelical Christians who love Israel. Again, maybe these people are only 10% of the Republican coalition at this point, but that's bigger than the 1% he has to gain from attacking Netanyahu.
This is a pretty simple calculation, and not super complicated. Yes, there are a lot of people who criticize Trump for his friendship with Netanyahu -- but very few of these people are going to *switch* their votes in November over this singular issue. Democrats who criticize him will remain Democrats; Republicans who criticize him will remain Republicans. He would just come off as weak.
Trump hates admitting he was wrong. If Netanyahu is a bad guy, but we just went to war to help Netanyahu, then Trump is an idiot. He would rather double down and stick to his guns than admit he made a mistake.
Really, no American president is going to divorce from Israel. They're a regional hegemon with interests strongly aligned with our own in a region where our enemies are implacable and our other allies are duplicitous and weak. American power projection in the Middle East would be much harder without Israel. We'd end up in the same situation as China is in right now: it depends on Middle Eastern oil and gas, but it's frozen out of power politics in the region.
To that end, if we did abandon Israel, it would move immediately to China, and China would accept it with open arms. China would be far more permissive with Israel's conduct in Palestine and Lebanon, probably explicitly allying with the Israeli right-wing and helping it undermine elections to stay in power.
I am coming from a different perspective, one you really can't validate, but from experience. For five years my position at the NMCC involved, during my shift, possessing half the Presidential nuclear launch codes. I mean literally. The President (or his authorized survivor) has no ability to launch nukes. That is left to two knuckleheads in the Pentagon (and if we punch in each of our time-limited codes, known only to us, then the authority cascades down to other two man teams.) I will say only this. China is VERY careful, and they will never admit it, to let us know precisely everything they launch into the upper atmosphere. North Korea does not. North Korea wore us out with our monitoring, as we had minutes to inform the President of anything we cannot identify. North Korea has virtually nothing going on it's skies. And it wore us out. (An aside, my Chief actually did wake Hillary up with a 2 am Red Phone call. By mistake, during a routine nightly comm check. She was very professional and polite.) Iran is a modern, giant nation that has a sky full of flying objects. Iran also does not report to us.
It is not Iran I am worried about if they lead us to believe they even might have nukes. The military was surprisingly tolerant of my often voiced dissent over whatever our current mission. Eg, why were we targeting our best Arab ally in our "War on Terror", as we shared the precise same enemies in that moment. Did not effect my increasingly high clearances.
But this operation, I reluctantly support. The recent slaughter of the women and children and men by that regime clinches it, as it does give a possibility of something better eventually arising, but that is not our problem, at least not to the level of committing our own troops in someone else's Civil War. And it does mean we won't have to flatten their cities as we did in Germany and Japan, in order to break the morale of the civilian population. It is already broken.
But even without that, this really is overdue. And it should not have taken a Trump to do it.
what actually do you think should be done though? like are you happy with the outcome of dropping a few bombs, killing a few guys, and leaving the horrible regime basically intact?
Is it not? Iran is a destabilizing force in the region, and aligned with our primary enemies: China and Russia. If Iran were to get nuclear weapons, it would have unlimited latitude to invest in regional proxies and harass American allies and interests. But, deals like the JCPOA gave the IRGC sanctions relief, allowing them to invest more in that regional destabilization.
IMO, the last few years gave us a historic opportunity. In 2024, Israel defanged two pillars of Iran's power: Hamas and Hezbollah. In 2025, the bombing campaign + US strike on Fordow weakened the others: Iran's missile stockpile and nuclear program. This January, the regime nearly toppled after historic protests. Iran was weaker than it had been in a generation.
There was an opportunity right now to finish the job. The execution was indeed lacking, but the principles were sound. I think there was a way to execute this war that benefited American interests. And that might still come around - I think this ceasefire is not going to last, and we'll be fighting again before the two weeks are up.
>I think there was a way to execute this war that benefited American interests. And that might still come around - I think this ceasefire is not going to last, and we'll be fighting again before the two weeks are up.
Trump just doesn't have the cards. If he had the cards to open the Strait, he would've played them already. All he can do is bluff and threaten to bomb power plants (war crime).
Richard very wisely mentions the parallel with the Houthis in Bab al-Mandeb. The current state of military technology apparently makes it easy for a small group of guerillas to terrorize a narrow strait. No amount of Trump bluster is likely to change that structural fact. I doubt it makes a difference if allies get involved either.
Just say "No thanks" if President Leeroy Jenkins tries to drag the US into another military engagement. Much better to make peace, and perhaps maybe work on alternative oil pipelines for Gulf countries. And transition to batteries/solar everywhere.
I surmise that the only proper way to successfully 'execute' this war would be via 'Operation Iranian Freedom', a political non-starter.
Air strikes seem to degenerate into the sort of endless cat-and-mouse game between U.S. fighter CAPs and Iranian BM and drone launchers that we saw over the past couple weeks.
No it wouldn't. Israel isn't in fact the regional hegemon and has little to offer China. Openly aligning with Israel would also alienate popular opinion throughout the Muslim world.
We don't depend on M.E. oil and gas though. So why exactly do we need to project power into the region? How are our interests aligned with those of Israel?
How is China "frozen out of power politics" given the Saudi-Iran deal they helped broker?
I doubt China would want to align with Israel, since China loves to denounce Israel for its conduct in Gaza. Wouldn't China instead prefer to befriend its oil & gas suppliers? But even if China and Israel became friends -- why does that have to be a problem for the US? We have to stop assuming that everything has to be our business, and narrow the scope of our ambitions.
This is true, but one of his favorite tactics for indulging that impulse is to throw others under the bus when failure becomes impossible to deny. Publicly breaking with Bibi to deflect from his own poor judgment here seems like a nontrivial possibility.
Good political arithmetic, I am afraid. At the same time, I guess Trump may suspect that Netanyahu has indeed made him look like an idiot - the 11th February presentation in the Oval Office complete with roll call of potential new leaders for Iran now looks like a scam, the kind of which Trump would play on others - and, not least because he is petty and selfish, he may wish to extract some revenge.
BTW, the same political arithmetic applied to the Democrats suggests that it may be in their electoral interest to throw Israel under the bus. Matthew Iglesias has already made the point.
This is largely true (even though I'm an Evangelical and inclined to be more nuanced about who exactly supports Israel: Dispensationalist-influenced Boomers).
Support for Israel is more controversial among the online cohort than among actual voters and large donors, because both those categories trend old and somewhat less online. True among both Jews and Christians.
"there may yet be negative consequences for the greater Middle East". Understatement much? Also, no mention of negative consequences for Asia and Europe. Somehow that's not important.
This kind of analysis is why arrogant and ignorant Americans with no skin in the game shouldn't go around bombing around the world. As I said in the other post:
This seems to understate the achievements of the war, and overstate Iran's subsequent position, and should have perhaps waited a few more days to see what happens with the strait. Yesterday, among contradicting messages, Iran indicated it would open it today or tomorrow. If it doesn't the war will likely restart, and the assessment of the costs and benefits of the war would need be be reconsidered.
You seem to overstate the regime durability and the inevitability of closure of the strait, as though these resulted in spite of the maximum possible pressure applied by the US. Before the war, many analysts argued that regime change would be impossible without boots on the ground, with many sources confirming that the US was considering putting boots on the ground.
After Iraq and Afghanistan, the public is highly averse to boots on the ground, and that was likely a major consideration for the US, likely monitoring public polling.
In fact, when the US was forced to put boots on the ground to rescue stranded airmen, the US succeeded in setting up an impromptu forward operating base just south of the major Iranian hub of Isfahan, moving over a hundred troops in, extracting the airmen from the area where thousands of enemy troops were hunting for them, and moving them all out, without losing a single life.
You also claim that Iran didn't go all the way up the escalatory ladder, pointing to an article from weeks ago, reporting that Iran threatened Gulf energy and water infrastructure. But in truth, they heavily targeted both.
You also state that Iran had more resolve than expected, but don't really support this. As you note, when faced with regime-change level attacks, you'd expect them to go all out, and that's what they did. What unexpected resolve did we see? Did we expect the leaders of the Islamic Republic and the Revolutionary Guards to agree to step down, or something?
While for now, Iran is holding on, they're far more diplomatically, and thus economically isolated than they were before the war, both from Western countries, and Gulf ones. They're also now in an extremely precarious economic position. It was such conditions that led to the protests in December, and it's far from clear to what extent they'll be able to recover economically, given strikes on their economic targets, including energy and steel production.
Their degraded ability to project force across the Middle East and the world also shouldn't be underestimated, particularly given how vulnerable the regime is liable to be in the future, given the above.
The IAEA reported that Iran had amassed hundreds of kg of 60% enriched uranium, which has no purpose other than in nuclear weapons.
Iran was rapidly building up their conventional ballistic missile arsenal, while the countries they could target were building up their interceptor supply much more slowly.
Interception of missiles is far more costly than missile launches, and the same goes for drones.
Thus, Iran was rapidly approaching a point where their threat of ballistic missiles would give them impunity to develop their enriched uranium into nuclear weapons.
And the ballistic missiles, themselves, would serve a similar purpose, allowing Iran to act with further impunity on multiple fronts, from ramping up support for proxies in Iraq, Yemen, and elsewhere, to ramping up their support for international assassinations and other terror attacks.
This war destroyed about half of their ballistic missiles and a significant percentage of their launchers, and heavily degraded their abilities to produce more. This was reflected in a very sharp decline in the Iranian rate of fire over the first couple of weeks of the war.
While you say that Iran's response was mostly symbolic during the Twelve-Day-War, and while it's true that they didn't target the Gulf countries in that war, during this war, their overall rate of fire seems to have actually been lower than during the 12 day war. During this war, they fired about 16 missiles a day at Israel, compared to about 46 a day, during the 12 day war, and they killed about 20 Israelis over a month of war, compared to over 30, during the 12 day war.
There's also the point of deterrence of mass slaughter. Iran murdered tens of thousands of protesters in January. Should the world have just sat and their hands, voicing the occasional word of protest?
By launching the attack that they did, destroying much of the senior leadership of Iran, and thousands of soldiers, in total, with a focus on those responsible for previous and ongoing repression (Basij, rather than Artesh), the US probably disincentivized Iran, and regimes around the world, from carrying out similar atrocities.
"While for now, Iran is holding on, they're far more diplomatically, and thus economically isolated than they were before the war, both from Western countries, and Gulf ones. They're also now in an extremely precarious economic position. It was such conditions that led to the protests in December, and it's far from clear to what extent they'll be able to recover economically, given strikes on their economic targets, including energy and steel production."
Presumably sanctions relief, plus tolls on Hormuz traffic, will help them rebuild.
"You also state that Iran had more resolve than expected, but don't really support this. As you note, when faced with regime-change level attacks, you'd expect them to go all out, and that's what they did. What unexpected resolve did we see? Did we expect the leaders of the Islamic Republic and the Revolutionary Guards to agree to step down, or something?"
If the Iranian regime showed the expected amount of resistance, and our response is to give them sanctions relief (something we did before the ceasefire was even declared, and may do more of) and to acknowledge Iran's right to collect tolls on passage through the strait, then why did we launch the war at all? You seem to be saying, "It's no surprise that the regime survived without ground troops, and it's no surprise that the US didn't commit ground troops." But in that case, wasn't the war a mistake?
"There's also the point of deterrence of mass slaughter. Iran murdered tens of thousands of protesters in January. Should the world have just sat and their hands, voicing the occasional word of protest?"
Isn't this what happened? We began the attacks about two months after the crackdown against protests started, by which time they had been quashed.
"By launching the attack that they did, destroying much of the senior leadership of Iran, and thousands of soldiers, in total, with a focus on those responsible for previous and ongoing repression (Basij, rather than Artesh), the US probably disincentivized Iran, and regimes around the world, from carrying out similar atrocities."
If we had sent the message that a) we were attacking for this reason, and b) we would attack again if they committed similar atrocities, then perhaps. But to my understanding, "don't kill your own people anymore" isn't even in the list of demands for a peace deal that the US has released, let alone something anyone thinks Iran would agree to. Indeed, our being willing to end the war even before the strait is reopened probably reassures Iran that we will not start hostilities up again over purely domestic atrocities.
Basically your whole response amounts to, "We made Iran feel a bunch of pain, so that means we won." But of course we made North Vietnam feel a bunch of pain, too, but we lost the war. Iran demonstrated that its willingness to withstand pain is greater than ours. That means that we, not Iran, are the ones who will be deterred in the future.
Good on you for revisiting your predictions and pointing out where they may have missed.
Too often pundits make predictions at no cost and never own their mistakes. This is a high character move you’ve made.
Trump is going to have historical egg all over face for this. Showing the Iranians that they in fact have the ….ahem…trump card when it comes to closing the strait is not a good look.
One take I’ve seen is that (a la North Korea) the only thing which keeps people from messing with an insane regime is a nuke. But I’m more along your lines….when you already have a conventional trump card, why risk becoming an international pariah by going after a nuke?
I think you underestimated just how mucj trump's idiocy would effect this war. Trumps tweets arent just jokes to laugh at on x, theyre watched by all world leaders and the unbeleivable deluge of shit he splurged out made him look like a toodler playing with drones and nukes. At thus point, why not escelate as much as possible? Talk about regime change at the start of the war I think doomed it because Iran feared it intensely but the us would obviously not pursue it. Iran calculated that it should raise costs immediately to make sure the us would not change its mind. Thus, the war was doomed because the us faced an enemy on deathgrounds, while not willing to commit a single boot on the ground.
> I’ll admit getting a bit too excited in the first 24 hours on X, but I was impressed that we wiped out much of the leadership of the country right from the beginning, and that indeed was a pretty remarkable accomplishment. But even here, again, I did not claim that the war was obviously a good idea, and said we’d have to see how it turns out. Yes, I know Trump is an idiot, but you cannot get around the fact that Venezuela was a clear victory, and I maintain it wasn’t completely irrational to think that this could’ve worked out too.
I think that an important thing to think about here, is that it is never clear exactly what will happen in war. So, while any individual action may have a high probability of success, sooner or later, you will roll snake eyes. Look at Imperial Japan, for an example: Manchukuo was a comically easy success, their seizure of much of Southeast Asia was shockingly easy too, but they dug themselves into China and a war they seem to have been unable to win (though more like the Iran-US one, where Japan itself was never meaningfully threatened), and then they got in a fight with the USA and a war they were DEFINITELY unable to win.
If you quickly win nine easy wars and then the tenth one just fucks you up like Iran (or Vietnam, or Afghanistan, etc), then you will probably be worse off than if you hadn't fought any of them. And you don't know which one is the poison pill in advance.
Maybe you are and independent writer because no one will hite you, but you are not independent in your thinking. What Trumps thinks, Woulda coulda shoulda, If, Maybe, The Future. How to say you hate Trump by making "independant" assumptions.
Each deal has reasons for compromise. You left out why Iran would comply and why those reasons would be untinable. How about China influencing Iran for much needed oil? Irans need for income? Protect infrastructure?
How to hate on President Trump by saying he's done well, but did it wrong. As for me, I don't want atom bombs on my BINGO card. Good for him.
Great read, would like to add a couple of points here....
1. I don't think Trump is showing any indication to pivot away from Israel, in fact, he's kinda doubling down. He openly targeted the anti-Israel faction of his MAGA base recently, called them low IQ, expelling them from the coalition.
2. I think the failure to force open the Hormuz blockade will have far reaching consequences to even more extent than Richard has already tried to highlight in this article! The world's strongest navy being unable to force a passage against a mid-tier opponent like Iran implies the technological superiority of US Navy is still short of what it's supposed to be! Recently, Medvedev has described the Strait of Hormuz as "Iran's nuke". If this war ends with that conclusion intact, it'll be a massive blow to the global security guarantor role US likes to play & which also supports the Dollar standard across the planet. If the US Navy doesn't live up to what it promises to be, will Dollar have the same value after this failure is apparent to everyone in the world? This military failure will have severe economic implications, for both the US & global economy...
I think you're missing the main point. We gained nothing prolonging the war. It is now over. Donald Trump found a way to get Iran back to the negotiating table after his attempt to topple the regime failed. We go from there.
Make no mistake, the US is in a better position than Iran. The war has made Iran's economy even worse than it was. The government is still as corrupt as ever, and as inept as ever. Iran may well be able to get some money from tolls, but not enough to make a big difference.
Barack Obama was not wrong to test the Iranians by giving them the nuclear agreement we did. But it didn't work out. Donald Trump was not wrong to tear up the old agreement in his first term, and to test the Iranians with this latest war. But it didn't work out.
Now we are where we are, and we have a president who is used to an agile style of diplomacy where you are ready to seize every advantage and to recover from every failure. How will it all turn out? No one knows. No one can know.
Richard, this is a strong piece, and I think the basic conclusion holds. Iran may have changed the political and psychological calculus in Washington more than it changed the military balance on the ground. The biggest takeaway is that future presidents now have a much clearer picture of what a war with Iran would mean economically and politically. The idea of a quick, contained, low-cost operation is far less credible after this. Your point about military force having lasting value only when there is a credible willingness to keep using it gets to the heart of the matter, and it is something a lot of hawks still avoid.
I do think a few parts of the argument go a bit too far. Saying Iran has won “peace of mind” overstates the result. It may have improved its deterrent position, but that does not mean the regime came out of this stronger across the board. It can be more confident that regime-change talk is less believable while still being militarily damaged, economically weakened, and more exposed than before. I also think you are right that future presidents will be much more cautious about taking on Iran, but that lesson should probably be stated with a little more restraint. American presidents have a habit of forgetting the costs of past wars, and conflicts are often produced by drift, miscalculation, allied pressure, or a breakdown in deterrence rather than by some calm, deliberate choice. The line that “Trump blinked” works as rhetoric, but it also smooths over a more complicated reality. Iran showed that it can impose severe costs and make American decision-making much harder. That is a real achievement. But the situation is more complicated than a simple contest of nerve.
Still, those are qualifications, not a rejection of the main argument. The central point remains solid: Iran has likely shown that another major war would be so costly and so disruptive that future American leaders will be much less eager to attempt one. That may not amount to some clean triumph, but it is a serious strategic gain, and your piece does a better job than most of identifying where the real shift took place.
I judge interventions on a scale of Rwanda to Afghanastan war
1. how likely is it that we can replace the current regime with something better
2. how much will it cost in terms of lives, money, etc.
3. how many lives/money will be made or saved.
Rwanda we could have stopped a genocide cheaply and easily, with only 10k troops. We could have just made sure the genocide ppl were cursed pretty cheaply.
Afghanistan is a country where it’s notoriously difficult to build up good institutions, and was doomed from the start.
All in all I think replacing the worst governments in the world are similar to global warming carbon taxes.
High up front cost. Totally worth it. Nobody will pay the up front cost though.
Imagine a parallel universe where once the Americans crushed Iran Air navy they immediately did a ground invasion to secure the straight of Hormuz.
Iran would have no leverage. We wouldn’t even need to invade the country though we could.
Someone, I think on Breaking Points, made the point that Iran could just shift to hitting ships in the Gulf with drones. Could we secure all that coastline too?
I guess the best bet would be to wait 10 years when lasors can counter drones, then invade and create a perimeter around the straight of Hormuz
In any case the Iran war specifically for regime change seems a lot closer to the Afghanistan war than a hypothetical Rwandan war. If the Americans must go to war then I guess go all the way and do a ground invasion that destroys the drone production capability? Obviously that would messy and a bad idea though.
This whole thing is very suspicious, why would trump go against his DOW doctrine in this way? Is he just that impulsive and stupid or does isreal have something on him?
It seems to me that you misjudged this war for a very similar reason that you voted for Trump: a pathological degree of risk appetite and a failure of imagination, leading to irrational optimism about the odds of a best case scenario.
I do not see Trump changing his position on Israel. Trump is sensitive to public opinion, but he has a rough sense of trade-offs. Let's say that 1% of Democrats, 1% of independents, and 1% of Republicans, maybe 1% of the country, might move toward Trump if he attacked Netanyahu. When I say 1% of Republicans, I mean that there are 1% of Republicans right now who will be voting Democrat or staying home in November, but who if he changed his tune on Netanyahu, would come out and vote. This is potentially what Trump has to gain.
On the other hand, attacking Netanyahu would alienate a huge chunk of his base: Evangelical Christians who love Israel. Again, maybe these people are only 10% of the Republican coalition at this point, but that's bigger than the 1% he has to gain from attacking Netanyahu.
This is a pretty simple calculation, and not super complicated. Yes, there are a lot of people who criticize Trump for his friendship with Netanyahu -- but very few of these people are going to *switch* their votes in November over this singular issue. Democrats who criticize him will remain Democrats; Republicans who criticize him will remain Republicans. He would just come off as weak.
Trump hates admitting he was wrong. If Netanyahu is a bad guy, but we just went to war to help Netanyahu, then Trump is an idiot. He would rather double down and stick to his guns than admit he made a mistake.
Really, no American president is going to divorce from Israel. They're a regional hegemon with interests strongly aligned with our own in a region where our enemies are implacable and our other allies are duplicitous and weak. American power projection in the Middle East would be much harder without Israel. We'd end up in the same situation as China is in right now: it depends on Middle Eastern oil and gas, but it's frozen out of power politics in the region.
To that end, if we did abandon Israel, it would move immediately to China, and China would accept it with open arms. China would be far more permissive with Israel's conduct in Palestine and Lebanon, probably explicitly allying with the Israeli right-wing and helping it undermine elections to stay in power.
I don't think this War in Iran is strongly aligned with our interests.
I am coming from a different perspective, one you really can't validate, but from experience. For five years my position at the NMCC involved, during my shift, possessing half the Presidential nuclear launch codes. I mean literally. The President (or his authorized survivor) has no ability to launch nukes. That is left to two knuckleheads in the Pentagon (and if we punch in each of our time-limited codes, known only to us, then the authority cascades down to other two man teams.) I will say only this. China is VERY careful, and they will never admit it, to let us know precisely everything they launch into the upper atmosphere. North Korea does not. North Korea wore us out with our monitoring, as we had minutes to inform the President of anything we cannot identify. North Korea has virtually nothing going on it's skies. And it wore us out. (An aside, my Chief actually did wake Hillary up with a 2 am Red Phone call. By mistake, during a routine nightly comm check. She was very professional and polite.) Iran is a modern, giant nation that has a sky full of flying objects. Iran also does not report to us.
It is not Iran I am worried about if they lead us to believe they even might have nukes. The military was surprisingly tolerant of my often voiced dissent over whatever our current mission. Eg, why were we targeting our best Arab ally in our "War on Terror", as we shared the precise same enemies in that moment. Did not effect my increasingly high clearances.
But this operation, I reluctantly support. The recent slaughter of the women and children and men by that regime clinches it, as it does give a possibility of something better eventually arising, but that is not our problem, at least not to the level of committing our own troops in someone else's Civil War. And it does mean we won't have to flatten their cities as we did in Germany and Japan, in order to break the morale of the civilian population. It is already broken.
But even without that, this really is overdue. And it should not have taken a Trump to do it.
what actually do you think should be done though? like are you happy with the outcome of dropping a few bombs, killing a few guys, and leaving the horrible regime basically intact?
Politician's fallacy: "Something must be done. This is something. Therefore, we must do this."
Good question.
Is it not? Iran is a destabilizing force in the region, and aligned with our primary enemies: China and Russia. If Iran were to get nuclear weapons, it would have unlimited latitude to invest in regional proxies and harass American allies and interests. But, deals like the JCPOA gave the IRGC sanctions relief, allowing them to invest more in that regional destabilization.
IMO, the last few years gave us a historic opportunity. In 2024, Israel defanged two pillars of Iran's power: Hamas and Hezbollah. In 2025, the bombing campaign + US strike on Fordow weakened the others: Iran's missile stockpile and nuclear program. This January, the regime nearly toppled after historic protests. Iran was weaker than it had been in a generation.
There was an opportunity right now to finish the job. The execution was indeed lacking, but the principles were sound. I think there was a way to execute this war that benefited American interests. And that might still come around - I think this ceasefire is not going to last, and we'll be fighting again before the two weeks are up.
>I think there was a way to execute this war that benefited American interests. And that might still come around - I think this ceasefire is not going to last, and we'll be fighting again before the two weeks are up.
Trump just doesn't have the cards. If he had the cards to open the Strait, he would've played them already. All he can do is bluff and threaten to bomb power plants (war crime).
Richard very wisely mentions the parallel with the Houthis in Bab al-Mandeb. The current state of military technology apparently makes it easy for a small group of guerillas to terrorize a narrow strait. No amount of Trump bluster is likely to change that structural fact. I doubt it makes a difference if allies get involved either.
Just say "No thanks" if President Leeroy Jenkins tries to drag the US into another military engagement. Much better to make peace, and perhaps maybe work on alternative oil pipelines for Gulf countries. And transition to batteries/solar everywhere.
I surmise that the only proper way to successfully 'execute' this war would be via 'Operation Iranian Freedom', a political non-starter.
Air strikes seem to degenerate into the sort of endless cat-and-mouse game between U.S. fighter CAPs and Iranian BM and drone launchers that we saw over the past couple weeks.
No it wouldn't. Israel isn't in fact the regional hegemon and has little to offer China. Openly aligning with Israel would also alienate popular opinion throughout the Muslim world.
The U.S. alliance with Israel is not primarily driven by U.S. interests, but rather by interest groups. Richard even wrote a book detailing such dynamics: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/new-book-public-choice-theory-and
We don't depend on M.E. oil and gas though. So why exactly do we need to project power into the region? How are our interests aligned with those of Israel?
How is China "frozen out of power politics" given the Saudi-Iran deal they helped broker?
I doubt China would want to align with Israel, since China loves to denounce Israel for its conduct in Gaza. Wouldn't China instead prefer to befriend its oil & gas suppliers? But even if China and Israel became friends -- why does that have to be a problem for the US? We have to stop assuming that everything has to be our business, and narrow the scope of our ambitions.
"Trump hates admitting he was wrong."
This is true, but one of his favorite tactics for indulging that impulse is to throw others under the bus when failure becomes impossible to deny. Publicly breaking with Bibi to deflect from his own poor judgment here seems like a nontrivial possibility.
Good political arithmetic, I am afraid. At the same time, I guess Trump may suspect that Netanyahu has indeed made him look like an idiot - the 11th February presentation in the Oval Office complete with roll call of potential new leaders for Iran now looks like a scam, the kind of which Trump would play on others - and, not least because he is petty and selfish, he may wish to extract some revenge.
BTW, the same political arithmetic applied to the Democrats suggests that it may be in their electoral interest to throw Israel under the bus. Matthew Iglesias has already made the point.
This is largely true (even though I'm an Evangelical and inclined to be more nuanced about who exactly supports Israel: Dispensationalist-influenced Boomers).
Support for Israel is more controversial among the online cohort than among actual voters and large donors, because both those categories trend old and somewhat less online. True among both Jews and Christians.
"Most of this holds up", Richard says.
Let's look at some phrases from the analysis:
"there may yet be negative consequences for the greater Middle East". Understatement much? Also, no mention of negative consequences for Asia and Europe. Somehow that's not important.
This kind of analysis is why arrogant and ignorant Americans with no skin in the game shouldn't go around bombing around the world. As I said in the other post:
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/judge-foreign-policy-decisions-by/comment/228680389
Richard also had a ton of bad takes about the economic consequences of the war:
https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/2031423780598460589
https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/2031430324127936672
This seems to understate the achievements of the war, and overstate Iran's subsequent position, and should have perhaps waited a few more days to see what happens with the strait. Yesterday, among contradicting messages, Iran indicated it would open it today or tomorrow. If it doesn't the war will likely restart, and the assessment of the costs and benefits of the war would need be be reconsidered.
You seem to overstate the regime durability and the inevitability of closure of the strait, as though these resulted in spite of the maximum possible pressure applied by the US. Before the war, many analysts argued that regime change would be impossible without boots on the ground, with many sources confirming that the US was considering putting boots on the ground.
After Iraq and Afghanistan, the public is highly averse to boots on the ground, and that was likely a major consideration for the US, likely monitoring public polling.
In fact, when the US was forced to put boots on the ground to rescue stranded airmen, the US succeeded in setting up an impromptu forward operating base just south of the major Iranian hub of Isfahan, moving over a hundred troops in, extracting the airmen from the area where thousands of enemy troops were hunting for them, and moving them all out, without losing a single life.
You also claim that Iran didn't go all the way up the escalatory ladder, pointing to an article from weeks ago, reporting that Iran threatened Gulf energy and water infrastructure. But in truth, they heavily targeted both.
You also state that Iran had more resolve than expected, but don't really support this. As you note, when faced with regime-change level attacks, you'd expect them to go all out, and that's what they did. What unexpected resolve did we see? Did we expect the leaders of the Islamic Republic and the Revolutionary Guards to agree to step down, or something?
While for now, Iran is holding on, they're far more diplomatically, and thus economically isolated than they were before the war, both from Western countries, and Gulf ones. They're also now in an extremely precarious economic position. It was such conditions that led to the protests in December, and it's far from clear to what extent they'll be able to recover economically, given strikes on their economic targets, including energy and steel production.
Their degraded ability to project force across the Middle East and the world also shouldn't be underestimated, particularly given how vulnerable the regime is liable to be in the future, given the above.
The IAEA reported that Iran had amassed hundreds of kg of 60% enriched uranium, which has no purpose other than in nuclear weapons.
Iran was rapidly building up their conventional ballistic missile arsenal, while the countries they could target were building up their interceptor supply much more slowly.
Interception of missiles is far more costly than missile launches, and the same goes for drones.
Thus, Iran was rapidly approaching a point where their threat of ballistic missiles would give them impunity to develop their enriched uranium into nuclear weapons.
And the ballistic missiles, themselves, would serve a similar purpose, allowing Iran to act with further impunity on multiple fronts, from ramping up support for proxies in Iraq, Yemen, and elsewhere, to ramping up their support for international assassinations and other terror attacks.
This war destroyed about half of their ballistic missiles and a significant percentage of their launchers, and heavily degraded their abilities to produce more. This was reflected in a very sharp decline in the Iranian rate of fire over the first couple of weeks of the war.
While you say that Iran's response was mostly symbolic during the Twelve-Day-War, and while it's true that they didn't target the Gulf countries in that war, during this war, their overall rate of fire seems to have actually been lower than during the 12 day war. During this war, they fired about 16 missiles a day at Israel, compared to about 46 a day, during the 12 day war, and they killed about 20 Israelis over a month of war, compared to over 30, during the 12 day war.
There's also the point of deterrence of mass slaughter. Iran murdered tens of thousands of protesters in January. Should the world have just sat and their hands, voicing the occasional word of protest?
By launching the attack that they did, destroying much of the senior leadership of Iran, and thousands of soldiers, in total, with a focus on those responsible for previous and ongoing repression (Basij, rather than Artesh), the US probably disincentivized Iran, and regimes around the world, from carrying out similar atrocities.
"While for now, Iran is holding on, they're far more diplomatically, and thus economically isolated than they were before the war, both from Western countries, and Gulf ones. They're also now in an extremely precarious economic position. It was such conditions that led to the protests in December, and it's far from clear to what extent they'll be able to recover economically, given strikes on their economic targets, including energy and steel production."
Presumably sanctions relief, plus tolls on Hormuz traffic, will help them rebuild.
"You also state that Iran had more resolve than expected, but don't really support this. As you note, when faced with regime-change level attacks, you'd expect them to go all out, and that's what they did. What unexpected resolve did we see? Did we expect the leaders of the Islamic Republic and the Revolutionary Guards to agree to step down, or something?"
If the Iranian regime showed the expected amount of resistance, and our response is to give them sanctions relief (something we did before the ceasefire was even declared, and may do more of) and to acknowledge Iran's right to collect tolls on passage through the strait, then why did we launch the war at all? You seem to be saying, "It's no surprise that the regime survived without ground troops, and it's no surprise that the US didn't commit ground troops." But in that case, wasn't the war a mistake?
"There's also the point of deterrence of mass slaughter. Iran murdered tens of thousands of protesters in January. Should the world have just sat and their hands, voicing the occasional word of protest?"
Isn't this what happened? We began the attacks about two months after the crackdown against protests started, by which time they had been quashed.
"By launching the attack that they did, destroying much of the senior leadership of Iran, and thousands of soldiers, in total, with a focus on those responsible for previous and ongoing repression (Basij, rather than Artesh), the US probably disincentivized Iran, and regimes around the world, from carrying out similar atrocities."
If we had sent the message that a) we were attacking for this reason, and b) we would attack again if they committed similar atrocities, then perhaps. But to my understanding, "don't kill your own people anymore" isn't even in the list of demands for a peace deal that the US has released, let alone something anyone thinks Iran would agree to. Indeed, our being willing to end the war even before the strait is reopened probably reassures Iran that we will not start hostilities up again over purely domestic atrocities.
Basically your whole response amounts to, "We made Iran feel a bunch of pain, so that means we won." But of course we made North Vietnam feel a bunch of pain, too, but we lost the war. Iran demonstrated that its willingness to withstand pain is greater than ours. That means that we, not Iran, are the ones who will be deterred in the future.
Good on you for revisiting your predictions and pointing out where they may have missed.
Too often pundits make predictions at no cost and never own their mistakes. This is a high character move you’ve made.
Trump is going to have historical egg all over face for this. Showing the Iranians that they in fact have the ….ahem…trump card when it comes to closing the strait is not a good look.
One take I’ve seen is that (a la North Korea) the only thing which keeps people from messing with an insane regime is a nuke. But I’m more along your lines….when you already have a conventional trump card, why risk becoming an international pariah by going after a nuke?
"I expect Trump to pivot away from fully supporting Israel" ahhahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahhahhahahahahahhahahahhahahahahahah
Great read Richard. I have not read something with a more realist and factual take than this article in a long time.
I really think it’s too early for an analysis like this. I don’t expect the ceasefire to hold.
I think you underestimated just how mucj trump's idiocy would effect this war. Trumps tweets arent just jokes to laugh at on x, theyre watched by all world leaders and the unbeleivable deluge of shit he splurged out made him look like a toodler playing with drones and nukes. At thus point, why not escelate as much as possible? Talk about regime change at the start of the war I think doomed it because Iran feared it intensely but the us would obviously not pursue it. Iran calculated that it should raise costs immediately to make sure the us would not change its mind. Thus, the war was doomed because the us faced an enemy on deathgrounds, while not willing to commit a single boot on the ground.
> I’ll admit getting a bit too excited in the first 24 hours on X, but I was impressed that we wiped out much of the leadership of the country right from the beginning, and that indeed was a pretty remarkable accomplishment. But even here, again, I did not claim that the war was obviously a good idea, and said we’d have to see how it turns out. Yes, I know Trump is an idiot, but you cannot get around the fact that Venezuela was a clear victory, and I maintain it wasn’t completely irrational to think that this could’ve worked out too.
I think that an important thing to think about here, is that it is never clear exactly what will happen in war. So, while any individual action may have a high probability of success, sooner or later, you will roll snake eyes. Look at Imperial Japan, for an example: Manchukuo was a comically easy success, their seizure of much of Southeast Asia was shockingly easy too, but they dug themselves into China and a war they seem to have been unable to win (though more like the Iran-US one, where Japan itself was never meaningfully threatened), and then they got in a fight with the USA and a war they were DEFINITELY unable to win.
If you quickly win nine easy wars and then the tenth one just fucks you up like Iran (or Vietnam, or Afghanistan, etc), then you will probably be worse off than if you hadn't fought any of them. And you don't know which one is the poison pill in advance.
This will age like milk.
Maybe you are and independent writer because no one will hite you, but you are not independent in your thinking. What Trumps thinks, Woulda coulda shoulda, If, Maybe, The Future. How to say you hate Trump by making "independant" assumptions.
Each deal has reasons for compromise. You left out why Iran would comply and why those reasons would be untinable. How about China influencing Iran for much needed oil? Irans need for income? Protect infrastructure?
How to hate on President Trump by saying he's done well, but did it wrong. As for me, I don't want atom bombs on my BINGO card. Good for him.
You're are literally one of the biggest morons I've ever seen in a comment section.
Your response is a a typical one sided, name calling response. You forgot Facist. Too shallow for comment.
You wouldn't know a moron, if she ran for President.
Great read, would like to add a couple of points here....
1. I don't think Trump is showing any indication to pivot away from Israel, in fact, he's kinda doubling down. He openly targeted the anti-Israel faction of his MAGA base recently, called them low IQ, expelling them from the coalition.
2. I think the failure to force open the Hormuz blockade will have far reaching consequences to even more extent than Richard has already tried to highlight in this article! The world's strongest navy being unable to force a passage against a mid-tier opponent like Iran implies the technological superiority of US Navy is still short of what it's supposed to be! Recently, Medvedev has described the Strait of Hormuz as "Iran's nuke". If this war ends with that conclusion intact, it'll be a massive blow to the global security guarantor role US likes to play & which also supports the Dollar standard across the planet. If the US Navy doesn't live up to what it promises to be, will Dollar have the same value after this failure is apparent to everyone in the world? This military failure will have severe economic implications, for both the US & global economy...
I think you're missing the main point. We gained nothing prolonging the war. It is now over. Donald Trump found a way to get Iran back to the negotiating table after his attempt to topple the regime failed. We go from there.
Make no mistake, the US is in a better position than Iran. The war has made Iran's economy even worse than it was. The government is still as corrupt as ever, and as inept as ever. Iran may well be able to get some money from tolls, but not enough to make a big difference.
Barack Obama was not wrong to test the Iranians by giving them the nuclear agreement we did. But it didn't work out. Donald Trump was not wrong to tear up the old agreement in his first term, and to test the Iranians with this latest war. But it didn't work out.
Now we are where we are, and we have a president who is used to an agile style of diplomacy where you are ready to seize every advantage and to recover from every failure. How will it all turn out? No one knows. No one can know.
Richard, this is a strong piece, and I think the basic conclusion holds. Iran may have changed the political and psychological calculus in Washington more than it changed the military balance on the ground. The biggest takeaway is that future presidents now have a much clearer picture of what a war with Iran would mean economically and politically. The idea of a quick, contained, low-cost operation is far less credible after this. Your point about military force having lasting value only when there is a credible willingness to keep using it gets to the heart of the matter, and it is something a lot of hawks still avoid.
I do think a few parts of the argument go a bit too far. Saying Iran has won “peace of mind” overstates the result. It may have improved its deterrent position, but that does not mean the regime came out of this stronger across the board. It can be more confident that regime-change talk is less believable while still being militarily damaged, economically weakened, and more exposed than before. I also think you are right that future presidents will be much more cautious about taking on Iran, but that lesson should probably be stated with a little more restraint. American presidents have a habit of forgetting the costs of past wars, and conflicts are often produced by drift, miscalculation, allied pressure, or a breakdown in deterrence rather than by some calm, deliberate choice. The line that “Trump blinked” works as rhetoric, but it also smooths over a more complicated reality. Iran showed that it can impose severe costs and make American decision-making much harder. That is a real achievement. But the situation is more complicated than a simple contest of nerve.
Still, those are qualifications, not a rejection of the main argument. The central point remains solid: Iran has likely shown that another major war would be so costly and so disruptive that future American leaders will be much less eager to attempt one. That may not amount to some clean triumph, but it is a serious strategic gain, and your piece does a better job than most of identifying where the real shift took place.
I judge interventions on a scale of Rwanda to Afghanastan war
1. how likely is it that we can replace the current regime with something better
2. how much will it cost in terms of lives, money, etc.
3. how many lives/money will be made or saved.
Rwanda we could have stopped a genocide cheaply and easily, with only 10k troops. We could have just made sure the genocide ppl were cursed pretty cheaply.
Afghanistan is a country where it’s notoriously difficult to build up good institutions, and was doomed from the start.
All in all I think replacing the worst governments in the world are similar to global warming carbon taxes.
High up front cost. Totally worth it. Nobody will pay the up front cost though.
Imagine a parallel universe where once the Americans crushed Iran Air navy they immediately did a ground invasion to secure the straight of Hormuz.
Iran would have no leverage. We wouldn’t even need to invade the country though we could.
Someone, I think on Breaking Points, made the point that Iran could just shift to hitting ships in the Gulf with drones. Could we secure all that coastline too?
Oh, yes, I forgot about that.
I guess the best bet would be to wait 10 years when lasors can counter drones, then invade and create a perimeter around the straight of Hormuz
In any case the Iran war specifically for regime change seems a lot closer to the Afghanistan war than a hypothetical Rwandan war. If the Americans must go to war then I guess go all the way and do a ground invasion that destroys the drone production capability? Obviously that would messy and a bad idea though.
This whole thing is very suspicious, why would trump go against his DOW doctrine in this way? Is he just that impulsive and stupid or does isreal have something on him?
I could see it go either way.
Maybe this is consistent with the way Trump is willing to disregard our own intelligence in order to maintain Putin's "friendship."