There Is No U.S. Plan on Iran
Maybe, just maybe, the Trump Administration does not know what it is doing in Iran
Has anyone understood why we are doing this? Has anyone understood when the objectives (whatever they are) will be accomplished? Does anyone understand how this war will end?
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Over the weekend the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World expressed just a smidgen of skepticism that there was a coherent strategy behind the Trump administration’s decision to join Israel in bombing Iran. As the scope of the conflict widens , however, it is always tempting to give the administration the benefit of the doubt. After all, deciding to launch an aerial assault on Iran is a high-stakes gamble. One would like to believe that any administration, in deciding to go to war, would think long and hard about the downside risks and prepare for such contingencies.
The more we learn about Trump’s decision-making process to bomb Iran, however, the clearer it becomes that there is no real strategy or end goal.
Want some evidence? Consider the talking points that the Trump White House provided to congressional Republicans on Monday. Here are the highlights:
The objectives are clear:
1. Destroy their missiles, and raze their missile industry to the ground.
2. Annihilate their Navy.
3. Ensure the regime’s terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region or the world and attack our forces, and no longer use their IEDs or roadside bombs, which have gravely wounded and killed thousands and thousands of people, including many Americans.
4. Ensure that Iran can NEVER obtain a nuclear weapon. While Operation Midnight Hammer obliterated Iran’s three major nuclear sites, the regime was committed to enriching and rebuilding their nuclear program, and they REFUSED to make a deal, despite months of extensive talks and good faith efforts by President Trump’s top negotiators.
It is noteworthy that “regime change” is not listed in those objectives despite Trump talking about regime change constantly over the last 72 hours. 1
But it is also noteworthy that these are pretty maximalist goals! Destroying all of Iran’s missile production, naval assets, terrorist proxies, and its ability to EVER obtain a nuclear weapon is a tall order. It almost begs a “ nuke the sight from orbit ” kind of responses.
Beyond that, the talking points are not terribly persuasive about, you know, why attack Iran and why attack right now. On why the United States is attacking Iran, one bullet point response is, “Iran poses an imminent threat to our troops and bases in the Middle East. This is a terrorist regime that chants ‘Death to America.’” That causal logic is pretty weak and could be used to justify attacking pretty much every country with high levels of anti-Americanism.
The media coverage suggests that the decision to attack was more about Israel than the United States. The New York Times reporting team makes that clear in their tick-tock:
Behind the scenes, [Trump’s] move toward war grew inexorably, fueled by allies like Mr. Netanyahu who pushed the president to strike a decisive blow against Iran’s theocratic government; and by Mr. Trump’s own confidence after the successful U.S. operation that toppled the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in January…. The U.S. decision to strike Iran was a victory for Mr. Netanyahu, who had been pushing Mr. Trump for months on the need to hit what he argued was a weakened regime. During a meeting at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in December, Mr. Netanyahu had asked for the president’s approval for Israel to hit Iran’s missile sites in the coming months.
Marco Rubio basically confirmed Israel’s role in forcing Trump’s hand in a closed-door briefing to Congress on Monday and in his remarks to reporters afterwards, as the Guardian’ s Chris Stein reported :
Israel’s determination to attack Iran and the certainty that US troops would be targeted in response forced the Trump administration to take pre-emptive strikes, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said, in a new explanation for Washington’s surprise entry into the conflict….
“It was abundantly clear that if Iran came under attack by anyone – the United States or Israel or anyone – they were going to respond, and respond against the United States,” Rubio told reporters at the Capitol.
“We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”
So the imminent threat was the Iranian response to an Israeli attack?! Here’s a crazy thought: why not tell Israel to not attack or make it clear that the U.S. won’t join? I mean, that’s been done before and it helped de-escalate the conflict. The Trump administration’s thinking seems like the textbook definition of entrapment , in which an ally drags a great power into a conflict.
To get back to the Times story, it actually contains something even more disturbing than entrapment: obvious wishcasting on the part of Trump’s advisors.
The C.I.A. had produced a series of scenarios that might play out if Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader, were killed in an offensive. They laid out multiple possible outcomes, as the numbers of variables made it difficult for the agency to assess with confidence what might happen.
One envisioned a hard-line cleric replacing Ayatollah Khamenei — perhaps even a leader more bent on acquiring a nuclear weapon. Another scenario predicted an uprising against the government, a possibility many intelligence officials thought was remote, given the weakness of Iran’s opposition.
A number of senior Trump administration officials seized on a third scenario: that a faction of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps more pragmatic than the hard-line clerics might take power. Even though a cleric was likely to still be nominally in charge, that group of I.R.G.C. leaders would actually lead the country.
Such a move would be a dramatic turn for an officer corps that had been staunchly anti-American for four decades and deeply intertwined with Iran’s clerical leadership.
But the C.I.A. analysis suggested that as long as the United States did not interfere with the economic activities of this faction, such as its influence in the oil industry, a group of officers might be conciliatory toward the United States. They might even give up Iran’s nuclear program or prevent Iran’s proxy forces from attacking the United States.
Look, maybe this could happen, but it seems very, very , very unlikely. Even a purely venal Revolutionary Guard leader would not want to relinquish a nuclear program that could have the potential to act as an insurance policy against a wider U.S. intervention. And for the purely venal IRGC leader to stay alive, he would have to at least mollify the true believers who would otherwise be happy to kill him for being an American toady. I just don’t see how this scenario can play out.
The disturbing thing in the Times story, however, is how much Trump’s team gravitated to this scenario because they wanted it to be true. In the process they failed to properly consider other, less favorable outcomes. That is piss-poor crisis decision-making.
Unfortunately, Politico’s Eli Stokols and Sophia Cai have reporting that pretty much confirms the lack of any Trump administration deep thoughts about these issues:
As the war in Iran expands, it is increasingly clear that defining and achieving success in this conflict is far more complex, lengthy and costly to American lives than the Venezuela operation.
“There’s no coordinated or breakaway group inside the regime that the Americans view as a new government they would welcome, or any real organized opposition,” one of the people familiar said. Trump, in one of numerous phone interviews since the Iran operation began, suggested to ABC News that several of the individuals he’d thought could take over the country’s government had been killed in the missile strikes. “It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead,” the president said. “Second or third place is dead.”
A third person close to the president’s national security team described the internal thinking about the current state of play in Iran as “all over the map.”….
Trump’s hopes that the Iranian people will overthrow the Iranian regime are also unlikely to come to fruition anytime soon.
Iran’s security and paramilitary capabilities, for now, remain mostly intact, the first person familiar said, “so there’s little reason to believe the regime won’t be able to quash any public protests or demonstrations with force.”
I don’t know how this conflict plays out over the next few weeks. The one thing I am certain about is that the Trump administration does not know either.
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here's trump's plan. since close to 2/3's of americans are opposed to the war trump started, public protests will escalate as the weather gets better. trump will then use that civil unrest to obstruct, control, or alter the midterm elections to his benefit. then the war against theocracies will spread from iran to israel and then to america. it will be important to know where the pro trump churches are located close to your home, since that's likely where the most intense fighting will start in the next civil war.
Gee... that's such a rosy picture...