Trump has a way out of the war

If it wasn’t clear before, it is undeniable now. President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel started a war with Iran assuming that they would trigger quick and easy regime change. They vastly underestimated the staying power of Iran’s surviving leadership and its military capacity not only to inflict damage on Israel and America’s Arab allies but also to close off the most important oil and gas shipping lane in the world.

This is imposing serious harm on the global economy, including the U.S. stock market, and Trump has no clue how to get out of the mess that he has created by starting a war without thinking through the implications.

It is actually embarrassing to watch the American president flip-flopping around, from telling us that the surviving Iranian leaders have pretty much agreed to his every demand, that the war is close to being over and Trump won, to admitting that he has no idea how to get the Strait of Hormuz shipping lane out of Iran’s grip. If America’s Western allies, whom Trump never consulted before the war, won’t send their armies and navies to do the job for Trump, then it’s too bad for them, he says: We have all the oil we need. That is, unless Trump decides to “obliterate” — his favourite word — Iran’s industrial base and desalination plants until Iran says uncle.

Trump is a man-child playing with matches — the world’s most powerful military — in a gas-filled room.

What to do? Trump should set aside his 15-point peace plan — which would be ridiculously complicated to implement — and reduce it to two points: Iran gives up its more than 950 pounds of nearly bomb-grade highly enriched uranium, and in return the United States gives up on regime change. Both sides would then agree to end all hostilities. That is, no more American and Israeli bombing, no more Iranian and Hezbollah rockets, no more Strait of Hormuz blockade and, for darn sure, no U.S. ground troops landing in Iran.

“We have to realise that what the Iranian regime wants most is to stay in power, and what the United States and Israel want most is for Iran not to have a bomb,” said John Arquilla, a former professor of defence analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School and the author of the forthcoming book “The Troubled American Way of War.” “Both sides can get what they want most if they are ready to give up what they want second most.” For America and Israel, second prize after eliminating Iran’s highly enriched uranium would be regime change. That doesn’t appear to be in the offing anymore, and Trump has begun laying the groundwork for abandoning that objective. He told reporters on Sunday that given how the United States and Israel have now killed several dozen of Iran’s senior leaders, “it truly is regime change.” Iran’s leaders were “a whole different group of people,” who he said have “been very reasonable.” Of course, this is ludicrous and a cover for the fact that the United States and Israel vastly overestimated their ability to topple Iran’s regime using air power alone.

The Trump team has reportedly been negotiating through Pakistan with the speaker of Iran’s parliament, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, who has strong ties to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, which appears to be the real power behind the scenes. The rump Iranian regime may well be ready to consider giving up its uranium in return for its survival.

Yes, a million problems would remain unresolved, but that’s what happens when you try to use force without any long-term planning to solve a wicked problem.

Broadly speaking, a wicked problem is defined as a problem that resists quick fixes or permanent solutions. It involves numerous interdependent variables. Outcomes are never final, just better or worse, or good enough. Every wicked problem is essentially one of a kind, meaning there is no perfect, preexisting template for solving one. And solutions often have irreversible consequences, meaning that you cannot easily undo a decision.

That is about the best definition of the Iran problem that I can think of.

While he may have never spelled it out in so many words, if you look at President Barack Obama’s actions vis-à-vis Iran, he clearly understood that it was a wicked problem and therefore the wisest course of action was to focus on the core American interest, try to secure that and learn to live with the other features of the problem, mitigating them as best as possible.

That was the logic of Obama’s 2015 deal with Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which put internationally verifiable limits on the country’s uranium enrichment programme, and his decision to live with its growing ballistic missile arsenal and its cultivation of proxy militias in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iraq — which did not threaten America.

Obama’s Iran deal worked as designed. When Obama left office, the curbs on Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacities — verified by international inspectors — meant that Iran, if it broke out of the deal, would require at least a year to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear warhead, providing plenty of time for the world to react.

It’s why we need to keep this as simple as possible. America should extend assurances that we will end the war, leave the regime in place, stop destroying Iran’s infrastructure and even offer some relief from oil sanctions, if Iran turns over all its near weapons-grade fissile material and halts all hostilities from its side. Everything else gets postponed for another day. (Meanwhile, a much-weakened Iranian regime would have to be more responsive to its people.) Trump will be a very lucky man if the surviving leaders of the Iranian regime say yes. It’s a measure of Trump’s incompetence that they now hold his fate in their hands. — The New York Times