The American eschatological impulse to war is to achieve a definite victorious outcome, even when the costly extra effort is not warranted by the political outcome. This is typified by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s demand for “unconditional surrender” of the Axis during the Second World War (even as his ignorant successor Harry Truman then abandoned the fruits of victory by surrendering Eastern Europe to the USSR). This is because Washington’s wars are preventive wars of choice, not preemption, and therefore its taxpayers need the theatre of moral justification.
U.S. President Donald Trump approximates political scientist Hans Morgenthau’s “pragmatic statesman,” most importantly by avoiding the sunk cost fallacy. U.S. leaders are often entrapped by their own justifications for continuing wars, as George W. Bush was by the need to vindicate the sacrifices of U.S. military service personnel in Iraq. This misperception typified the stalemated quagmires of the Korean, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns. Even where previous leaders showed comparable wisdom, as former U.S. President George Bush did in February 1991 by abruptly imposing a cease-fire at the end of the 100 hour land campaign of Operation Desert Storm, younger members of their administrations could not resist seeking a resumption of the attempt to achieve “total victory” a few years later (2003 in the case of Iraq). Frequently, Presidents distracted by higher priority domestic policy goals, like President Lyndon Johnson, unsure how to end international crises, will instead allow them to simmer.
What Trump does well, for which he is often accused of amateurish ignorance by leftish media, is quickly pivot away from bad bargaining positions. He preserves this freedom of action by ensuring the maintenance of his popularity beyond his core MAGA constituency, within the broader Republican base. The swift B-2 delivered GBU-57 pinprick and sudden ceasefire, immediately deflated his MAGA critics opposed to involvement in foreign wars. Trump’s strength is that as an outsider to the legislature, he is independent of the usual power brokers, political factions or corporate interests offering post-tenure seats on governing boards. Trump is not impressed by neo-conservative appreciations of the situation in the Near East, such as by Abram Shulsky’s Office of Special Projects, in a way that amplified their influence in the CIA’s analysis for the 2003 invasion of Iraq under George W. Bush. Israel’s preference would have been for the U.S. to become engaged in a protracted bombing campaign of Iran, akin to the failed and expensive Operation Rolling Thunder operation over Vietnam. While Israeli intelligence has a superlative capacity for target identification and assassination, it rates poorly in its understanding and its ability to predict sociological developments in the Muslim, and particularly Arab, world.
Trump is consequently far more agile and credible in his deal making than former President Joseph Biden, especially in the Middle East: while the prevailing wisdom is that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chain-ganged Trump into the 12-Day War with Iran, its ending on terms and in costs most favourable to Washington rather than Tel Aviv, belie that claim. In fact, during Trump’s First Term (2017-2021), his tariff dispute with China likely saved the globe from a Fourth World War. Usually power transition wars occur when dissatisfied challengers reach 80 percent of the status quo hegemon’s nominal GDP, and Trump’s policies reinforced Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping’s economic micro-mismanagement that has stagnated China’s manufacturing and shrunk its employment. None of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, or Barack Obama could have as easily refused the powerful interests of the American international business establishment. Because Trump better empathizes with President Vladimir Putin’s strategic mind-set in dealing with Russia’s woke crisis of modernity, he was far more successful that Barack Obama in isolating Moscow from supporting Iran or China.
Trump was correct that he had a better intelligence appreciation of the progress and implications of Iran’s nuclear program than the U.S. intelligence community. Since the U.S. no longer runs deeply infiltrated agents and relies instead on intercepting signals intelligence and other forms of remote sensing, it cannot know the private intent of foreign leaders. The technical indicators used to measure intent are also known to the Iranians and can therefore be manipulated by them. Besides, there is the fundamental epistemological issue that the senior Iranian leadership is itself unaware of what it will do at each juncture. The CIA has an excellent grasp of sociology and geopolitics, and so was able to predict the Sino-Soviet split, and the 1971 breakup of Pakistan, the latter over a decade prior. However, the intelligence community has a poor historical record of making predictions off of personality profiles of foreign leaders whose high emotional quotients have been tempered by brutally competitive politics. Trump’s instinct that the Iranians would likely cross the nuclear weaponization threshold given Tehran’s anticipation of an Israeli strike after the collapse of Hezbollah and Syria, was the unverifiably correct one. We can never know the counterfactual since any decision can be countermanded at the last second.
Trump bluffed the ceasefire, but it worked because both Tel Aviv and Tehran realized that their futures were filled with uncertainties. Any unilateral cessation of bombing of Iran by Israel, even if only because it ran out of ordinance, would have looked like defeat to its regional adversaries. Israel generally does poorly in attrition conflicts, because of costs, casualties and political disillusionment at home, and because time grants its adversaries time to overcome their poor governance and organize their greater resources. It consequently relies on decisive military action for its political effect, as in the attacks into Egypt in 1949, 1956, 1967, 1968-1970, and 1973. Israel’s self-interest in compelling the U.S. to protect it by having the latter switch to targeting Iran’s offensive missile capability striking its cities, was outweighed by the fact that Netanyahu was less certain of Trump’s deference to him or Israel, than any previous U.S. president he faced.
Trump’s equivalent treatment of Israel and Iran in his unilateral ceasefire announcement preserved Tehran’s dignity sufficient for it to comply and not lose face. Trump beat down Israeli triumphalism in as wise a fashion as George H.W. Bush’s termination of the 1991 Gulf War, which gave him the appearance of an arbiter rather than a close ally of Israel. The effectiveness of Israeli and U.S. bombing reminded Iran that it is a poorly governed developing country rather than an Islamic bulwark, in the traditional Western manner of demonstrating how easy it is to split a corrupt regime from the people it claims to be serving.
Iran abandoned their optimal escalation strategy of closing the Straits of Hormuz and the attritional missile bombardment of Israel, which could have lasted for several months, because Trump had successfully isolated both Moscow, and especially Beijing over their tariffs dispute. With the latter’s assistance, Tehran would have gradually improved its missile guidance technology, costing the U.S. dearly in missile interceptors for Israel and the Persian Gulf. Although Israel was ready to shift from industrial and regime facilities, to targets affecting the population, it was unclear which population would outlast the other. An extended campaign would have led to a purge of Iran’s incompetent IRGC, and supplanting by, and optimization of its military leadership. Iran actually underestimated the difficulty of a Western re-opening of the Straits of Hormuz, which is completely beyond the capabilities of even a combined European and Pacific Rim fleets, and would have taken six months to assemble and consolidate the landing of a U.S. amphibious force. However, without China, Tehran would have been unable to halt an eventual U.S. landing, and Beijing would have worried about the Straits in the hands of an unfriendly U.S.
Trump found the cost-effective saddle point between domestic, allied, neutral and adversarial points of tolerance and interest. By ending the conflict before Israel and Iran began to inflict and accumulate significant non-combatant losses, he solved their collective action problem of how to achieve war termination. By ending the conflict before Israel began making public threats of using nuclear weapons, and a public demonstration of the political utility of nuclear weapons, he preserved the global consensus against nuclear proliferation. The swiftness of Trump’s ceasefire also preserved the neutrality of nuclear-armed Pakistan, of Iran-friendly India, Turkey and Yemen, and prompted any reactions by much of the under-developed South, which has linked the Iran issue to Israel’s policies in Gaza.
Criticisms of Trump’s ceasefire before follow-on strikes on Fordow and more certain destruction of Iran’s nuclear weapons assembly timeline, now an estimated delay of a few months, are unfounded because they miss the point of his strategy. The B-2 strikes were meant to demystify Iran’s capabilities, demonstrate the versatility of U.S. technology, and legitimize future U.S. bombardment, which is vital for enforcing the ceasefire on Iran. It is notable that Trump touted the ceasefire as between Israel and Iran, not the U.S. Had the U.S. airstrikes continued with the ephemeral and undefinable goal of completely destroying Iran’s proliferation capacity, rising marginal costs would have risen, chasing increasingly marginal, unconfirmed and likely decoyed targets, with an ever-increasing probability of an air defense formula leading to the loss of a stealth aircraft. Trump achieved the B-2 strike within the Constitutional rights of a President, and preserved the compellent power of the U.S. Air Force, with zero U.S. casualties.
As in the case of the neutralization and denuclearization of Iraq from 1991 to 1998, most of the effects of Trump’s strategy will be achieved after the ceasefire. Once established, Tehran will find it difficult to unilaterally breach the ceasefire because of opposition from its domestic population, which despite the bombast of Iranian victory demonstrations in the streets of Tehran, was a deep humiliation for the current theocratic regime. Iran’s allies, particularly Moscow and Beijing, are also likely to counsel restraint given the demonstrated incompetence of Tehran’s IRGC-dominated security apparatus, and because neither is positioned to provide the significant arms inflow required to re-establish Iran’s air defense network.
Washington’s strategy for “normalizing” Tehran’s revolutionary and emancipatory foreign policy, into the restrained and negotiable interests of an acknowledged regional power, depends on containment of Iran while creating the conditions for an entirely natural and domestic political liberalization. Trump is likely to defer and give full force to the human rights branches of international organizations, and to back them up with selective sanctioning of individuals, many of whom in the elite have family members in the West, particularly Canada. This attempt at an inconspicuous regime change will undoubtedly come under the contradictory pressure of ensuring that Iran does not resume nuclear research or manufacturing.
The U.S. is almost certain to back IAEA calls for a resumption of the monitoring regime to include the inspection of suspected dispersal sites, which Tehran will initially resist. With the strong backing of European (alienated because of Iranian arms used against Ukraine) and Pacific Rim allies, and the deference of Moscow and Beijing, the U.S. will demand the right to operate drones unmolested over Iran. Equipped with sniffers for fission decay products, electro-magnetic frequency detectors for centrifuge operations, and even devices attached for soil sampling, this will considerably circumvent the drama experienced by Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction inspectors in 1991 and 1992. Iran’s intimations of leaving the Non-Proliferation Treaty will be used to characterize Tehran in the United Nations as seeking to promote instability, and will be the basis for neutralizing international support for the regime.
This will gradually evolve into regional or temporary No-Fly Zones and occasional and brief actions by the U.S. air assets against offending air defense sensors and launchers. By striking Fordow, Trump set a precedent of the prompt bombing of Iran without warning or providing Congressional or United Nations Security Council notice. This may be expanded to include inspection and tagging of Iran’s ballistic missile, anti-ship missile, and sea mine stocks, and submarine arsenal. Protocols with Beijing, Moscow, and Islamabad on limiting arms transfers to Iran are conceivable.
The success of these ordinance-specific regimes will increase in conjunction with a gradually liberalizing Iranian regime, whose principal political agents must be provided with sufficient positive incentives and advantages that these step-level arrangements become irreversible. The successful case of Iraq, notwithstanding all of the hand-wringing within the U.S. memory of that expensive campaign, demonstrates that stable democracy in the Middle East is an attainable and valuable goal. Very few Iraqis fantasize about a return to a Saddam Hussein-like strongman.
Dr. Julian Spencer-Churchill is associate professor of international relations at Concordia University, and author of Militarization and War (2007) and of Strategic Nuclear Sharing (2014). He has published extensively on Pakistan security issues and arms control and completed research contracts at the Office of Treaty Verification at the Office of the Secretary of the Navy, and the then Ballistic Missile Defense Office (BMDO). He has also conducted fieldwork in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Egypt, and Taiwan, and is a consultant. He is a former Operations Officer, 3 Field Engineer Regiment, from the latter end of the Cold War to shortly after 9/11. He is currently collaborating with the Combat Modelling group at the Trevor Dupuy Institute.
