The only thing worse than President Donald Trump starting an unconstitutional war is Trump losing control of that war.
On Wednesday, NBC News reported that Trump “erupted at members of his national security team over the Iran war. According to the report, his advisers can’t agree on a path forward. But how could they? Every path to victory risks dangerous escalation, while continuing the present course risks strategic defeat.
This was always the most likely outcome. The president chose to take on a much more powerful country than, say, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003, while using far less force than we employed to topple the Iraqi government.
What did he expect would happen? Oh, right, we know. He thought he could topple a vicious, deeply embedded authoritarian regime with a few targeted airstrikes and a fantasied popular uprising. As he has said many times, he expected a version of his Venezuela outcome and when the Venezuela strategy failed, if strategy is the word, there was no real Plan B — other than to bomb Iran more and hope for capitulation.
In fact, we’re planning to do that yet again. Or maybe we’re not.
On Friday, Trump said he was ordering a new round of airstrikes. And what was his reasoning? “You know at some point,” Trump said, “they’re going to say, ‘We just can’t take it anymore.’” On Saturday, he’d changed his mind. “We have just been asked by Iran, and other Middle Eastern Countries, to hold off any attack,” Trump said in a Truth Social post.
“I have agreed,” he added, “for the future benefit of the WORLD and, likewise, the survival of a successful and prosperous Iran, to cancel the attack, subject to being able to rapidly make a DEAL.” But the problem we face right now is something well beyond deals. America has been so powerful for so long that we are accustomed to being in control of events. We start wars when we want and — crucially — we believe that we can end them when we want.
When I was in Iraq, as terrible as that war was, we knew it was contained. We were fighting an enemy that had minimal ability to harm Americans outside of Iraq. The same was true in Afghanistan once we and our allies destroyed al-Qaida’s strongholds.
In both conflicts, the fighting was brutal and we can and should debate the wisdom of both wars. But our great-power rivals were largely absent.
There is no such thing as a safe war — any war can spin out of control — but the combination of American power, enemy weakness and Russian and Chinese restraint meant that Americans could sleep secure in the knowledge that the chances of a catastrophic escalation were extremely remote.
Consider these developments. Not only does Iran continue to strike US bases effectively; it has relentlessly attacked US partners across the region. These attacks are doing immense damage to oil and gas facilities and — combined with Iran’s continued control over the Strait of Hormuz — are placing the world economy at risk.
Ansar Allah have entered the conflict, expanding the fighting into the Red Sea and now Saudi Arabia is reportedly planning a large-scale attack on Ansar Allah territory, including, potentially, the use of ground forces to attempt to break the Yemeni fighters' shipping blockade.
Ukraine struck an Iranian ship in the Caspian Sea, the immense body of water that borders Russia and Iran. Ukraine said it did this because the ship was carrying military equipment between the two countries.
Let’s put all this together: The initial US strategy failed, the war with Iran is consuming the entire region, Iran and Ukraine are risking a face-off, there is evidence that both Russia and China are escalating their military commitments, US munitions stocks are dwindling and Trump is raging.
I’m not trying to predict anything and I hold out hope for de-escalation. I know there are still serious people in the US government (whether they have Trump’s ear is a different question) and in allied governments across the world.
But we can analyse the events and trends of the moment and right now all the momentum is toward greater escalation. And we absolutely cannot do what Trump asks, which is to “just sit back and relax” and trust that “it will all work out well in the end.” I do not think that world war is inevitable, nor do I think it is probable. But it is more possible now than it has been at any other time since the end of the Cold War and the US government is led by the worst rulers in the modern history of the United States.
Congress, the only branch of government that possesses the power to intervene, has been prostrate before the president. The threat of a primary loss is all it takes to completely remove the spine from a typical Republican member of Congress.
It’s often said that your average American voter doesn’t really care that much about foreign policy. In general, that’s true — until there’s a catastrophe. When that happens, though, foreign policy isn’t just the main thing; it’s the only thing that truly matters.
Our future may depend in part on American voters deciding to give Congress a spinal transplant. But that requires us to do something that democracies have rarely, if ever, done successfully: see the catastrophe coming and act decisively before a terrible war swallows the world.
David French
The writer is a columnist for The New York Times
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