Trump won’t be dragged into a regime-change war

The handsome pages of The Spectator World’s July issue readers will find an essay of mine arguing that the United States doesn’t win wars anymore because we don’t even understand what a modern war is. From the French Revolution to the Cold War, and in the long, warm afterglow—thankfully, non-nuclear—of Cold War success, Western elites have tended to think about wars in terms of regimes and ideologies. Winning a war is all about changing the opponent’s regime so that it endorses one’s own ideology: turning a “dictatorship” into a “liberal democracy” through the magic of bombs and bullets. This conception has failed time and again, not only for the West but for the Soviets who engaged in decades of nation-building and regime-engineering and re-education in Eastern Europe, only for the Eastern Europeans to shrug the whole thing off the minute Moscow lost the nerve to roll over its slaves with tanks.

How, then, should the West, if it wants to avoid the mental mistakes of the past, view the Israel-Iran war?

Some ideologues and idealists are already committed to the usual error—they say this is a war all about the Iranian regime, and if that regime can be changed, peace will reign. America’s experience in the neighboring states of Iraq and Afghanistan argues strongly to the contrary: what took the place of Saddam Hussein’s nasty regime (labeled “Islamofascist” by those who insist everything relates to ideology) was an even nastier civil and neighborhood war. Forcible regime change in Afghanistan, courtesy of Uncle Sam, failed over 20 years to establish a viable liberal democracy, or a viable substitute for the Taliban of any kind. Civil war, regional war, a different kind of tyranny, and exactly the same kind of tyranny are all more plausible outcomes of regime-change in Iran than a new order that’s philo-Semitic, liberal, or democratic.

The biblical view of war is ground not in ideas but peoples and territory. But Israel is not looking to lay claim to Iran’s land, and Iran’s hostility to Israel is not territorial, either. Iran in fact is an old, Cold War-era ideological regime, and it’s paying the price for its outdatedness. The Sunni Arab world was once as Israel-obsessed as Tehran remains, but younger leaders in places like Saudi Arabia prefer a profitable peace to wars in the name of the Prophet. For a long time, Sunni radicalism was in fact a fearful reaction to the Iranian Revolution of 1979 – the crowned heads and elites of the Arab world feared that what happened to the Shah could happen to them, too, if they didn’t point the loaded weapon of religious extremism in another direction, namely in the direction of Israel and the West. But today the Arab world doesn’t fear that Iranian-style theocracy will catch on at home. That’s out with other late-70s fashions.

Because the Iranian regime is still ideological, it has continued to cherish its enmity with countries that shouldn’t logically be its top concerns: there are natural territorial and ethno-religious population reasons for Iran to worry a great deal about Iraq, and such strong and potentially dangerous neighbors as Turkey and Pakistan, as well as the danger of Afghan lawlessness troubling the border. If Iran were pursuing a nuclear program in the context of establishing deterrence in a rough neighborhood—after all, one of those neighbors has nuclear weapons already—the United States and Israel might still be urging against proliferation, but Israel would probably not feel existentially threatened by the prospect of a nuclear Iran.

Yet that doesn’t suffice to make regime-change in Tehran a satisfactory answer. Chaos and conventional war would pose many other dangers for Israel, less existential in theory perhaps but far more likely to become a day-to-day burden. And regime change is no vaccine against regime restoration, or for that matter survival. Iran is a huge country, twice the size of Afghanistan. An air war has never, so far as I can recall, succeeded in bringing about regime change anywhere. And 10 million Israelis are not going to administer 85 million Iranians, when the general law of war today is that all peoples resist rule by foreigners.

What might bring about a stable peace is endogenous change within Iran, a change parallel to the changes in the Arab world that have brought about the Abraham Accords. But there’s no way for Israel or the United States to bring about such a transmutation from the outside, and what may be most likely to create the conditions for such a metamorphosis is what Israeli and American hawks oppose most strongly—a reduction in sanctions, greater economic engagement, and treating Iran more like Saudi Arabia. That, however, is a very hopeful scenario. (Though not necessarily an idealistic one: Israel’s security would be best served if its neighbors were friendly to the Jewish state but not so friendly with one another, such that Arab, Persian, and Turk were a check upon one another.)

He isn’t going to repeat his predecessors’ folly, and the country isn’t going to follow a leader who tries.

Neither Israel nor Iran can bring about regime change in its opponent through its current methods of war. Airpower is historically impotent in this regard, and while the Israelis are adept at assassinating enemy leaders—including Iranians—the hydra will regrow its head. Israel, meanwhile, can withstand Iran’s ballistic missiles, as long as they don’t have nuclear warheads. The blackest irony of the war is that it justifies each side’s reason for the conflict. Israelis seeing the missiles crash down upon them know that if they had nuclear payloads, their nation would not survive. Iranians, seeing their defenses easily penetrated by Israel and their offensive capability inadequate to deter their enemy, have reason to think only nuclear weapons would buy them security against this kind of attack.

America, meanwhile, has only an ideological stake in the conflict. Americans are ideologically pro-Israel. Our land and our population, however, are not augmented by getting into another Middle East war. Quite the contrary: our people suffer in these wars, not only because they wind up doing the fighting but because our leaders neglect their needs while focusing on foreign struggles. Even a successful war for Israel’s sake, not our own, will contribute to the decay of American institutions, whose root cause is the disconnect between the people’s needs and the interests of the elite. Involving Israel in this domestic national entropy by involving ourselves in Israel’s war will only infect the Israel-US relationship with what is destroying the old authorities here at home. Americans will feel used by Israel, and by our own elites on behalf of a foreign interest. That feeling will not redound to Israel’s benefit in the long run.

The “regime change” that counts is internal, and we’re in the midst of it ourselves. Israel can’t afford to get mixed up in that internal upheaval. It would be a high price to pay for American bunker-busters.

A wide spectrum of elite Americans, opponents as well as supporters of involving ourselves in Israel’s war, believe that the United States will have no choice but to occupy Iran and replace its regime to bring the conflict to a conclusion (and/or to keep order in the region). This isn’t true: while President Trump may or may not be willing to add American air power to Israel’s already more-than-adequate air superiority, this is nothing like 2001 or 2003, when the shock of 9/11 gave President Bush the political capital to launch land wars and occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Trump saw how those wars turned out for Bush and for America.

He isn’t going to repeat his predecessors’ folly, and the country isn’t going to follow a leader who tries. An American occupation of Iran would be another futile endeavor—occupying someone else’s land for merely abstract, ideological aims, which is precisely what leads us to lose wars over and over again. The alternative, in the worst case, might be a regional war, potentially one with Russian and even Chinese involvement (though I doubt it—the Chinese usually steer clear of such traps), but the horror of such a mess wouldn’t make it any more meaningful for ordinary Americans, who now rightly prioritize our people and our land. The ideological utopias and nightmares that consume the minds of our too-well-educated elites, antiwar as well as interventionist, are simply irrelevant to the public’s experience. And that experience in almost all our wars, and every recent one, has been demoralizing and destabilizing.

As I wrote in another Spectator World column, it’s tantamount to a self-inflicted version of the Bolsheviks’ “revolutionary defeatism” because for our people, every war that’s not for their land is a defeat. World War II proves rather than defies the rule since it took an attack on our territory to draw us fully in, and as the American people were then composed, Europe and especially Britain were also their land. For some Americans today, Israel is their land, too—but that’s not true for most.