There is a particular rhythm to America’s wars in the Middle East that has become almost liturgical: the strikes, the declaration of victory, the memorandum of understanding signed with great ceremony, and then, within weeks, the recognition that a piece of paper signed in a palace in France does not abrogate the basic logic of the conflict it was intended to end.
Iran and the United States have now run through this cycle twice in a single year, and Washington’s foreign policy class is once again mistaken for a pause in the struggle to resolve it.
President Donald Trump’s recent declaration that the ceasefire is “over,” followed a day later by his insistence that no “long-term” military action is intended, is less a contradiction than a symptom.
It reflects an approach to Iran that for two decades now has oscillated between maximalist rhetoric and tactical restraint, never settling on what Washington actually wants the endgame to look like.
Is regime change the objective? Denuclearization? Freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz? Each shot seems to answer a different question, which is another way of saying that no one in Washington has really decided.
That’s worth dwelling on, because the genesis of the war in February — the attacks that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader and a level of the regime’s leadership — was sold as a beheading operation that would break the Islamic Republic’s ability to create trouble.
What followed instead was a strengthening of the very logic of the security state that decapitation strikes are supposed to curtail. Iran’s hard-liners, instead of being disappointed, have used the humiliation of a slain leadership to justify the very kind of asymmetric harassment of ships in the Straits that now serves as a pretext for renewed US attacks.
This is a pattern familiar to anyone who has watched Washington’s post-9/11 wars unfold: the application of force against a state actor does not produce the intended capitulation, but rather a diffusion of the threat into forms that are harder to contain and easier to escalate.
Note, too, who is absorbing the costs of this limit. It’s not primarily Washington. It’s Bahrain, home to the Fifth Fleet and now living under repeated air raid sirens.
It’s Kuwait and Qatar, engaged in a war over a waterway they didn’t start. It’s the global economy, which is still reeling from the biggest oil market disruption in modern history, months after the “truce” was supposed to have ended.
The Gulf Arab states that Washington has spent decades cultivating as partners are discovering that proximity to American power in the region is not the same as protection from it—a lesson Iraq’s neighbors might have told them in 2003, and Lebanon’s might have told them more recently.
There is also the question, so rarely posed clearly in Washington, of what a de facto Israeli veto over US Iran policy costs the US.
Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu’s public jabs at Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan this week, delivered from within a NATO summit meant to showcase Western unity, and his lobbying against selling the F-35 to a NATO ally, are a reminder that Jerusalem’s regional priorities and Washington’s alliance architecture don’t always let the US president point in the same direction. two, even when strategic interests are clearly distinguished.
A foreign policy truly oriented around American interests, rather than maintaining a permanent security guarantee for a regional protector, would ask tougher questions about that arrangement than either side in Washington currently seems willing to ask.
None of this is an argument that Iran’s behavior in the Strait of Hormuz – attacking commercial tankers, threatening the arteries of global trade – is defensible. It clearly isn’t, and a regime willing to strangle the economies of its neighbors to assert control over a waterway carries the consequences it is now suffering.
But admitting that Tehran’s behavior is provocative is different from concluding that Washington’s response to it — a war without a defined objective, prosecuted in a country where the past two decades of US military intervention in the region offers little evidence that force alone produces stable settlements — is wise.
The strategic question American policymakers must ask is not simply “how do we respond to the latest attack,” but “what does it look like five years from now, and can we afford it?” On current evidence, no one in Washington has stopped long enough to respond.
it ITEM was originally published in Leon Hadar’s Global Zeitgeist and is reprinted with kind permission. Become a subscriber here.
