As the Israelis and Iranians enter a wobbly ceasefire agreement, we know one thing for sure: President Donald Trump has moved the United States past the traumas of the Iraq War, even as his foreign policy critics are still mired in them.
With the bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities in Fordow, Isfahan, and Natanz, the U.S. made the world a safer place in the long run. But the attack also reset American foreign policy as the president rejected both the naivety of neoconservatism and the shortsightedness of isolationism.
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Trump, to the dismay of “non-interventionists,” came to terms with the serious limitations of diplomacy with Islamists. Iran was given decades to strike an agreement. It was more interested in a nuclear weapon. Even after Israel had severely degraded its military capabilities and nuclear program, seizing supremacy of the air, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wouldn’t surrender his program. The idea that diplomats were on the cusp of forging a deal is dubious. The war only stopped after Israel and the U.S. had achieved their military aims.
Trump, it is clear, also realized that diplomacy is useless without enforced red lines. For decades, the Iranian leadership, hard-liners and “moderates” alike, ignored its commitments without any repercussions. Most people will, of course, ostensibly concede it’s in our national interests to stop rogue terroristic regimes from obtaining nuclear weapons. Simply because we were misled about the extent of Iraq’s WMD program doesn’t mean that no other country is pursuing them. Iran didn’t make much of a secret about its intent, after all.
Also, let’s not forget that the Islamic Republic has been assailing Americans for 45 years. Some of us are old enough to remember hostages being paraded by revolutionaries, the bloody Beirut bombing, and servicemen being killed and maimed by Iranian IEDs. All of this should have been unacceptable. Yet, every president since Bill Clinton has been made a fool of by the Iranians on the nuclear issue.
Trump accepted that Iran was not Iraq. Few argue that our experiment of imposing a democratic government on Islamic nations failed. Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq evolved into anything resembling a free nation. Iran, though, was never going to be another social engineering project. The Trump administration’s goal was to deny the regime nuclear weapons. There could not have been a clearer objective. Our long-standing ally did the heavy lifting, severely degrading Iran’s military capabilities. We, hopefully, finished the job without a single American casualty.
Yet, the failures of a foreign technocratic nation-building project have turned many Americans into cynics and panic-mongers. Last weekend, after Trump posted that though it wasn’t “politically correct” to use the term regime change, “if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a regime change??? MIGA!!!”
Attempting to divine the president’s heavily punctuated thinking is a precarious undertaking. Still, it’s extraordinarily unlikely Trump ever meant the U.S. was mulling a way to install a new Iranian government by force. The president was likely attempting to frighten the mullahs into a ceasefire. An invasion of that nation would have taken a major buildup of troops and movement of military assets. There was never any sign that such a plan was in motion. Nor has anyone suggested such an undertaking. Nor is there any popular will to do it.
Yes, the Israelis talked up “regime change.” Stirring up paranoia and anxiety is a psychological component of warfare. Israel, moreover, is fighting an enemy that’s incessantly threatening its existence. It, quite rationally, wants to destroy its foe.
It’s also quite rational for the U.S. to desire a less fundamentalist and bellicose government in Iran. Simply because Iraqis rejected our ideas doesn’t mean those ideas aren’t worthwhile or that we shouldn’t help those who organically embrace them. Our primary concern is American interests. But engaging in a foreign policy wholly stripped of any idealism also leads to ugly places. There have been five uprisings in Iran over the past decade. If the Iranian people had the means and ability to overthrow an autocratic regime and cobble together a less destabilizing government, which is unlikely, we certainly shouldn’t stand in their way.
Perhaps most importantly, Trump understands that a superpower doesn’t act terrified when threatened. Others should be terrified of us. We seem to have forgotten this after the failures of the Iraq War, which convinced a generation that every limited conflict would spiral us into World War III. The last Iranian “attack” on a U.S. base in Qatar had all the earmarks of a face-saving symbolic maneuver designed for a domestic audience. Soon enough, the New York Times reported that Iran coordinated the strike with Qatari officials by providing advance notice to help minimize casualties. Then came the ceasefire.
We have no clue how all this ends. What we do know is that the U.S. is no longer paralyzed by the past.