Operation Epic Fury was launched on 28 February amid a blizzard of contradictory aims and justifications, after warnings from the Pentagon that the US was not materially ready for war with Iran (so it proved), which could retaliate regionally and shut the Hormuz Strait (so it did). From the Trump administration we heard that Iran was an imminent threat, or that Trump ‘had a feeling’ that it was about to attack the US, or that it was two weeks away from having a nuclear weapon, or that it was a week away from having bomb-making material, or that it would have thirty or forty bombs in a year, or that it was about to attack US bases in retaliation for a coming Israeli strike, or that it had simply got away with being anti-American for too long.
The objective was once more to destroy Iran’s nuclear programme – Trump insisted that last summer’s bombing had ‘obliterated’ it, but apparently it needed to be ‘totally, again, obliterated’ – or overthrow the Islamic Republic, or trigger a popular uprising, or hand-pick a more amenable head of state, or destroy Iran’s military capabilities from its navy to its ability to manufacture IEDs, in effect negating its existence as a sovereign state. (Israel’s objective, meanwhile, was easier to discern: nothing less than the destruction of the Islamic Republic. As Israeli analyst Danny Citrinowicz put it, Israel’s view is: ‘coup, great … people on the streets, great … civil war, great.’ Israel ‘couldn’t care less about the future’ or ‘stability of Iran’.)
Such was the disarray – so vacuous and deranged were the statements from Trump and his ‘Secretary of War’ Pete Hegseth – that the decision to go to war might better be read in aetiological rather than strategic terms. That is, after the easy win in Venezuela, Trump felt ‘on a roll’, as one administration official put it, and yielded to coordinated lobbying from Netanyahu and Senator Lindsey Graham to bomb Iran because he thought it would be another grand display of American power exercised in his name, ushering in another pliant leadership. He further boxed himself in by publicly disparaging diplomacy, talking up regime change, deploying aircraft carriers, combat ships, refuelling tankers, stealth fighters and guided-missile destroyers to the Persian Gulf, as well as shifting Patriot and THAAD missile defence batteries to Gulf bases. By that point, regardless of negotiations, Trump was committed to war.
Beyond this, the offensive against Iran might be interpreted as a violent displacement activity on the part of a declining empire confronted with a rival centre of capital accumulation in the Pacific, about which it seems able to do nothing rational or constructive. It is a symptom of secular decay – of the political authority of the American bourgeoisie, the political capacities of the permanent state and the intellectual calibre of its overseers. Now the US finds itself in what Robert Pape calls the escalation trap: it cannot achieve its stated goals by air war, but to declare victory and walk away would be a clear strategic defeat.
True to form, the Democrats immediately signalled their readiness to fund the war, on the assurance that there was a ‘plan’. As Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin put it, ‘we’re in it’. They had no disagreement of principle, having been fully complicit themselves in the Gaza genocide – all they offered was cavilling about process and tactics. And why not? The Democrats had long assimilated Trump’s first-term foreign policy lines regarding China and the Middle East. Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jefferies vied to out-hawk Trump on negotiations with Iran: ‘no side deals’ they insisted. The Democrats voted through Trump’s massive military spending bill; they gave a standing ovation for his sabre-rattling against Iran in the State of the Union address; there was also quiet admiration in the Democratic establishment – openly expressed by Hillary Clinton – for the way he bullied European vassals into bumping up their NATO spending.
Whatever reservations America’s vassals may have had about the war, they clearly hoped that unity of purpose against an old foe might temper some of Trump’s disdain for erstwhile allies. NATO chief Mark Rutte, spotting an opportunity, prostrated himself once more before ‘Daddy’, heaping praise on the air campaign – ‘I really commend what is happening here’ – and reminded the White House that NATO is a ‘platform for the United States to project power on the world stage’. Britain, France and Germany issued a statement front-loading condemnation, not of the US-Israeli attack, but of Iran’s self-defence. Canada’s Mark Carney – having won liberal plaudits for declaring the end of American hegemony weeks earlier, on stage at Davos – followed suit, refusing to rule out Canadian involvement. In the UK, the revenants of zombie Atlanticism expressed their amazement that Keir Starmer had hesitated – for less than a day – before allowing the US to use British military bases. Tony Blair once more emerged from the crypt to protest that Starmer ‘should have backed America from the very beginning’. Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of MI5, complained that Starmer had ‘sat on the fence’. Tim Shipman, writing in the Spectator, conveyed the view of ‘security sources’ that Labour peaceniks were sabotaging the special relationship.
The Trump administration had scarcely bothered making a case for the war throughout weeks of build-up. Accordingly, it is supported by only 27% of US voters, most of them Republicans. In general, the war unites the left against it and splits the right. What of the pundit class? The vacuity of the casus belli and lack of any coalition-building or jurisprudential window-dressing alarmed outlets that had been reliably pugnacious over Iraq and, more recently, Ukraine. The Economist, which had lobbied for the 2003 invasion, telling readers ‘Why War Would Be Justified’, labelled the offensive against Iran ‘A War without a Strategy’; the Washington Post, having once warned the George W. Bush administration not to ‘shrink again from decisive action in Iraq’, now raised its eyebrows at a ‘gamble’. Though in agreement with its presumed moral and political predicates, and dutifully demonizing the enemy, they were not confident in the war.
Further to the right, Fox News, the New York Post and Wall Street Journal lined up to chorus Trump’s genius. More telling were those of Trump’s habitual critics who made an exception for the president at war. Warmongering Thomas Friedman of the New York Times argued that even if Trump and Netanyahu didn’t fully overthrow the regime, they might at least produce ‘an Islamic Republic 2.0 that is much less threatening to its people and neighbours’; somehow an air war could achieve what air wars never do. The low-reaching provocateur Bret Stephens had even fewer doubts. Trump was merely ending a war waged by Iran ‘against the United States since 1979’. Iran, Stephens went on, was a ‘core member of the axis of autocracies’ that ‘threaten the democratic world broadly’, so what could be wrong with bombing? David Boies, lead counsel for the Vice President in Bush v. Gore, took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to make a case for bipartisan bellicism against the ‘isolationist wing of the Republican Party and the pacifist wing of the Democratic Party’, both of which ‘apparently hate Israel and Jews so much that they oppose any action to neutralize Israel’s enemies’.
Only a pedant would ask if the Gulf dictatorships from which US strikes are launched also qualify as ‘autocracies’, or point out that if seizing an embassy, arming Lebanese militants or attempting to assassinate John Bolton constitute acts of war, so too must Operation Ajax, the arming of Iraq’s invasion of Iran, the shooting down of Iran Air Flight 655 killing all 290 civilian passengers on board, the assassination of Qasem Soleimani (for which the attempt on Bolton was retribution), the murder of Iranian nuclear scientists and decades of draconian sanctions. Stephens might just as well have said that this is the latest climacteric in a war waged by the US on Iran since 1953.
In Europe, of course Bernard-Henri Lévy was for the war before he knew there was one. He had seen the American armada building up in the Gulf and begged Trump to bomb. All the old hits – just war theory, ‘imminent threat’, exhaustion of diplomacy (exhausted only by the Iranian side), existential danger to Israel (though it is Israel that has repeatedly initiated war with Iran) – were aired. The Springer press likewise pre-emptively approved the attack. Writing in Die Welt, Ahmad Mansour, a Palestinian exile who has styled himself as a leading combatant of antisemitism (based on what appears to be a fictitious back-story) was clamouring for war: ‘Every day that the mullah regime is not attacked is another day that people in Iran are oppressed, disenfranchised, murdered and tortured. America must not hesitate any longer.’ All that had ever stood in the way of the liberation of 93 million Iranians was America’s Hamlet-like procrastination. Why bother with casus belli, let alone considering bloody, smoking wreckage bequeathed by ‘humanitarian intervention’ in the past?
Yet the bellicose soon had reason to backtrack. Within days, Iran had burned through at least $5.6bn of US interceptors and munitions, struck radars essential to its Patriot and THAAD systems, shut the Hormuz strait and caused force majeure to be declared across the Gulf, setting oil and gas prices surging. In addition to its thousands of ballistic missiles, and mobile launchers which the US and Israel are struggling to destroy, Iran had invested in cheap-as-chips yet efficient drones to hit US military bases, energy infrastructure, ships and oil tankers. Those who had supported the war now risked sharing responsibility for regional chaos, soaring energy and food costs, and a debacle that could only weaken the US and its allies, whatever the damage inflicted on the people of Iran and – as per Friedman – their ‘Islamo-fascist rulers’.
Macron now aligned with the Spanish government of Pedro Sánchez, which to its credit had denounced the war as illegal, though France did not go so far as denying the US use of its military bases in the region. Carney began to insist that he only supported the war ‘with regret’ and, acceding to domestic pressure, confirmed that Canada would ‘never participate’ in the strikes. Merz acquired the gravest doubts about there being a ‘joint plan’ to bring the conflict to a swift, convincing end. Starmer, still participating ‘defensively’ in the war – with American heavy bombers flying sorties out of RAF Fairford and Diego Garcia – criticized Trump for having ‘plunged’ the Middle East into ‘chaos’. Having declined to build a coalition for war beforehand, Trump has so far been unable to coax allies into a perilous, expensive and likely ineffectual naval mission to open Hormuz.
Those among the punditry who retained some contact with reality either went quiet or revised their hopes down. For Friedman, suddenly, the risk of escalation was too high. The regime had to break ‘from the top’ which – it now appeared – could happen only after ‘a ceasefire’, though he praised Trump and Netanyahu for having ‘knocked back Iran’s nuclear capabilities and its ability to project power’ – a criterion almost vague enough to declare victory for any side in any war. Stephens, rather than retreat, suggested that seizing Kharg Island, the hub of Iran’s oil exports in the Strait of Hormuz, would be the ‘most realistic path to victory at the lowest plausible price’ rather than a path to a more rapid escalation, a deeper economic shock and a long-term ground battle to retain the island. The NYT editorial board, while praising ‘tactical successes’ and holding out hope that a naval coalition might yet force access to the Strait, deplored the Trump Administration’s undiplomatic recklessness and ‘ego-driven’ caprice.
A striking datum of this war is how few attempts have been made at selling it, rhetorically dignifying it, morally arming it or situating it in some context of shared Western interests. While the belligerati rehearse exhausted arguments about armed liberation, Pete Hegseth waxes lyrical about ‘death and destruction from the sky all day long’; while they talk de-escalation, Trump demands ‘UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER’; where they seek intelligibility, the administration offers barefaced lies, evasions, contradictions and grandstanding. Of course, since the Gaza genocide, in which Washington spearheaded a global coalition behind a far-right extermination campaign while liberal apologists cultivated a studied obliviousness, the belligerati have refined their capacity for cognitive dissonance. But the situation has moved on. They may once, two decades ago, have been useful to a violently adventurist, rightist administration going to war – but no more. The right no longer caters to, nor needs, its liberal outriders. They hang on out of habit.
Read on: Susan Watkins, ‘Trump Abroad’, NLR 157.