It Really Looks Like the US Is Headed for War With Iran
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By the time you read this, the United States might be at war with Iran. If not, check back in a few hours or a couple of days, as President Donald Trump is giving every indication that he'll join the fighting soon.
True, Trump has gone back and forth on the issue of escalation vs. diplomacy in this war and in others, but his words and actions in the last 24 hours suggest that he's opted for escalation.
As recently as Monday, he was still holding out the possibility of a diplomatic solution to the conflict. On Tuesday, he gave Iran a very different demand—“ unconditional surrender .” That was President Franklin D. Roosevelt's goal against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in World War II: It meant the enemy's total defeat, abject disarmament, and what we now call “regime change.”
Trump also posted on social media, “ We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran .” We? He'd said on Monday that he might get involved in the war but hadn't done so yet. It seems that now he is involved, at least in his mind—and possibly in his orders—if not quite yet on or over the battlefield.
What has changed in 24 hours is that Israel seems to be on the upswing, pounding target after target, while Iran's efforts at striking back are less than stunning and its prospects for regime survival, much less victory, are dimming. Trump likes winners and wants to join their team. Or, as Charlie Stevenson , who teaches American foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University's School for Advanced International Studies put it in his Policy Matters Substack on Tuesday, “I think he has FOMO [fear of missing out] and wants to be able to brag that he ended the Iran nuclear threat.”
Will he end the threat? Iran has two main uranium enrichment sites, Natanz and Fordo. Both are buried underground. Natanz is a bit more accessible; an Israeli barrage of bombs, on the first day of the war, reportedly did damage to the plant. However, Fordo is buried inside a mountain, almost 300 feet beneath the surface. The only “bunker-busting” bomb that could destroy the site is the 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator , which only the US has; and the only plane heavy enough to carry the MOP across any distance is the B-2 bomber, which only the US has. (Yes, the mountain could also be demolished by a nuclear weapon, which the US and Israel possess; but I doubt even Trump or Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would go that far.)
What about regime change? Early on in the war, Netanyahu reportedly told Trump he wanted to kill Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but Trump vetoed the idea . Could he now be reconsidering? In World War II, “unconditional surrender” meant, among other things, killing or at least removing Hitler and Hirohito. Trump said on Tuesday that he knows where “the so-called Supreme Leader” is hiding, adding that he didn't want him killed—“for now.”
Regime change does seem to be on the agenda, given the types of targets Israel is hitting—not just nuclear infrastructure, but Iranian media, economic infrastructure, and top commanders. (Some call this expansion of targets “mission creep,” but actually it seems this has been Netanyahu's mission since the campaign got underway .)
But then what? Who succeeds the Ayatollah? If some western-leaning, secular opposition figures are waiting in the wings, they haven't been identified. It's another question whether some Western intelligence agency is funding such figures, but it's hard to imagine them rising to the fore and commanding the loyalty or even the interest of Iran's masses without having carved out a public image well ahead of time. It's also worth distinguishing regime-change mounted by a native Iranian movement from regime-change launched by a foreign power, especially powers like Israel and the United States, which a fair number of Iranians still regard as the devil.
The current regime is deeply unpopular among many Iranians, especially young people in the cities, many of whom are pro-Western or at least desire to join the Western world. But even among those people, there is distrust of foreign meddlers, intensified by the “Mossadegh complex”—memories of Mohammad Mossadegh, a popular Iranian prime minister, overthrown in 1953 by the CIA and British oil companies, which then installed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (aka “the Shah of Iran”), who ruled as a tyrant until the Islamist revolution in 1979.
Does Israel or the United States have a plan for a post-Ayatollah Iran? The Iranian Republican Guard Corps lost its commander , but the corps itself survives, and it controls much of the country's economy and social structure. Would they sign the “unconditional surrender” papers? If so, to whom would they surrender?
Iran is almost four times the size of Iraq, with a population of 92 million . Does Trump or Netanyahu imagine that the Iranian people will greet the foreign victors—especially American and Israeli victors—as their liberators? Some might, but it's worth recalling that Iraqis didn't roll over, despite the widespread hatred of Saddam Hussein. Iranians aren't likely to do so either. More likely, the aftermath of a coup, assassination, military decimation, or whatever method brings down the Iranian regime is likely to resemble post-Saddam Iraq—chaos, instability, and civil war, possibly infecting the entire region.
“Israel is good at winning battles but not at winning wars,” Stevenson , the Johns Hopkins foreign policy professor, observed in his Substack piece. The same has often been true of the United States. Winning battles is a function of military might. Winning wars—even absolute wars ended through unconditional surrender—requires political, strategic, and diplomatic acumen. The Allies didn't leave Germany and Japan to stew in their squalor; they had a plan not just for defeating the old regimes but helping to build new ones. Does Trump, Netanyahu, or anyone else have a plan for Iran? What, to them, does winning the war mean?
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