5 hours ago
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From the moment the United States and Israel attacked Iran, the news seemed incongruous with the year 2026. A war to kill the Ayatollah and overthrow the government – this was the fantasy of neoconservatives after September 11, before today’s college students were born. Hadn’t every president since, Donald Trump most boisterously of all, repudiated regime-change wars in the Middle East?
When he announced the strikes in an overnight video, decked out in a USA ballcap, Trump evoked an even more distant era. The president barely bothered to claim that Tehran posed some kind of imminent threat. Instead, he recited the litany of misdeeds perpetrated by the Islamic Republic since it took power in 1979.
The chants of “death to America”, the storming of the US Embassy: as Trump verbalized the highlight reel, he made plain that his war was about settling old scores, not facing the needs of today and tomorrow. He has almost implied as much, dubbing the war a “little excursion”.
The conflict’s anachronistic quality appears not just in the aging leaders who initiated it, but across the American body politic as well. The “Boomer war” approaches majority support only among Americans over 60. From there, its popularity falls with each younger cohort, until bottoming out around a mere one-in-five adults under 30.
Perversely, this very antiwar trend might have factored into the decision for war. As sympathy for Israel plunges among millennials and gen Z, it might have looked like now or never for Trump and IBenjamin Netanyahu to try to take out the Iranian regime.
To see this war as archaic, the last squawk of the Middle East hawks, is at once maddening and hopeful. The former, because the attack should not have happened, flying in the face of so many lessons painfully learned. The latter, because a war like this one might not be launched for much longer. The Iran war could end up being for America what the Suez crisis was for Britain and France in 1956 – the belated end of a long series of efforts to police the Middle East.
No superpower today can coerce Trump to stop fighting, as President Dwight Eisenhower did to his European allies. But the Iran war exposes just how militarily overstretched and strategically undisciplined America has become. Within weeks, the United States has poured massive quantities of scarce high-end munitions into a region that its own National Security Strategy deemed a low priority just four months ago.
“The days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy in both long-term planning and day-to-day execution are thankfully over,” wrote the aides who penned the document for Trump. “We should encourage and applaud reform when and where it emerges organically, without trying to impose it from without.”
Still, the United States will remain extremely powerful after this war. Even alienated allies cannot walk away from Washington. And no matter how passé this conflict may appear, and how unpopular it may get, war has a way of creating new and worse realities and imposing them on everyone desperate to make the mayhem stop. This dynamic will affect both the rest of the war and the choices made in its aftermath.
Already, Trump appears to be preparing to order ground troops into Iran, possibly to dig for canisters of highly enriched uranium gas in Isfahan or to seize Kharg Island, from which most of the country’s oil is shipped. Either mission would expose American soldiers to a high risk of casualties and the region to Iranian escalation. Who knows whether Trump would have launched this war had he anticipated the grim choices he confronts now.
In one respect, moreover, Trump has been innovative. He has shown that if a president makes no public case for a major war and simply foists it upon the nation, he can get away with it, at least for one month and counting.
Trump has, to be fair, built on ample precedent of presidential wars not declared by Congress. Claims today that Iran has constituted an “imminent threat to Americans for 47 years”, to quote Republican senator Tom Cotton, echo the theory of “elongated imminence” propounded by the Obama administration to bomb Libya without Congressional authorization.
Through stealth, however, Trump has taken undemocratic warmaking to new heights. He has given his successors something to think about, unless Congress or the voting public acts to make future presidents think twice.
Once the latest round of fighting ends, the United States might well plunge further into Middle East conflicts, even if the American public roundly repudiates the current war. Any ceasefire is likely to remain tenuous. Having attacked Iran to decimate its military capabilities and prevent progress toward a nuclear weapon, the United States and Israel will be tempted to strike again for the same reasons – to “mow the lawn”, as the wretched Israeli saying goes – much as they’re doing now following their 12-day war last June. If Trump regrets anything this time, it could turn out to be failing to dislodge the regime for good.
Moreover, US partners in the Gulf may soon push for stronger defense commitments from an all-too-willing Washington. Even during the Biden administration, top officials hoped to issue a Nato-like pledge to Riyadh. It didn’t happen then but could now. Although American belligerence has predictably triggered Iran’s current attacks against them, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and others will also fear a vengeful, radicalized Iran and may clamor for formal US guarantees to fight for them should they be attacked again.
Weary Americans will be told that promising to wage war will be the best way to prevent war. That offering more on paper will allow the United States to do less in practice. That peace will finally come through ever more professions of strength, because only US military power can bring stability, never mind when it doesn’t.
They should run the other way. If the United States reluctantly binds itself closer to its Middle East allies, then today’s seemingly anachronistic violence may in fact become the wave of the future. The United States will keep chasing enemies old and new, taking on a troubled region’s problems as its own, and contributing plenty more.
So another failed war, an unpopular war, won’t be enough to prevent future ones. If Americans want next time to be different, they will have to act, in large numbers, to make the warmakers pay a steep political price. Then, the harder part: the country will have to stop tying itself to the Middle East in hopes of peace, the illusion that ensures the next war.
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Stephen Wertheim is a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School
