Trump says victory may be near, but Tehran is waging war of ‘horizontal escalation’
(Originally published March 10 in “What in the World“) A U.S. warship shot down a second Iranian missile in Turkish airspace.
Just five days ago, a U.S. warship downed an Iranian missile aimed at Incirlik airbase in southeastern Turkey, which hosts U.S. forces. The latest incident was, for some reason, reported by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Turkey as “NATO assets” having shot down the missile. That’s technically true. But a U.S. official confirmed to The Wall Street Journal that it was a ship in Trump’s armada that blocked the missile from enacting retaliation against U.S. forces based in Turkey, which is also a member of NATO.
Reporting the story as NATO having joined in defending the alliance against Iran sure sounds a lot different than the U.S. simply protecting its bases in the region from Iranian retaliation. That’s probably why NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte dismissed suggestions that anyone is talking about invoking NATO’s Article 5 and obliging NATO’s other members to rush forces into the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran to defend Turkey against Iran.
The incident underscores, however, how Trump’s whimsical warmaking has put NATO in a tricky spot. By not consulting with his erstwhile allies, much less building consensus, before launching into undeclared wars on their doorstep, Trump forces NATO members into uncomfortably having to support him in fact without supporting him in spirit. Hence France’s decision to send naval forces to the Middle East to protect shipping. Macron may not support the attacks on Iran, but Trump’s fait accompli has forced France into a supporting role.
In that sense, Iran may be winning what University of Chicago political science professor Robert Pape calls “horizontal escalation.” While Iran can’t hope to beat the U.S. and Israel in a conventional war of air power (whether U.S.-Israeli ground forces will be needed to subdue Iran remains to be seen), it can retaliate by widening “the geographic and political scope of a conflict rather than intensifying it vertically in a single theater,” Pape writes in Foreign Affairs. Like Vietnam and Serbia before it, Iran can thus multiply “arenas of risk—drawing additional states, economic sectors, and domestic publics into the remit of the conflict.”
Whatever Trump may say about how soon he may declare victory and walk away, therefore, the war may not be over until Iran says it is. And from the perspective of Iran’s regime, merely surviving is now victory. As if to drive home the point, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps countered Trump’s latest promise to end the war soon by saying, “It is we who will determine the end of the war…The equations and future status of the region are now in the hands of our armed forces; American forces will not end the war.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems to know this already and thus be on a quest for total victory—the “unconditional surrender” Trump spoke of. Israel’s forces yesterday drove those armored vehicles it was massing on the border farther into southern Lebanon, while its warplanes stepped up their bombardment of Beirut’s southern suburbs.