Hopes for a quick end to the war sink as Trump vows to ‘finish the job’

(Originally published March 12 in “What in the World“) U.S. and Israeli airstrikes continued in Tehran and Beirut.

Israel expanded its airstrikes across the Lebanese capital in its attempt to uproot the Iran-backed militia Hezbollah, and sent an additional infantry brigade to its northern border to support troops already pushing through southern Lebanon. As part of its horizontal escalation, Iran has begun attacking commercial ships traversing the Strait of Hormuz and fired cluster munitions into Israel.

The war is so far costing U.S. taxpayers almost $2 billion a day, Pentagon officials told Congress Tuesday. Trump and everyone around him are starting to realize that, now that he has started Netanyahu’s war to end the Islamic regime in Iran, he can’t stop until it’s done. That doesn’t mean just allowing Iran to run out of missiles and drones to launch attacks. Allowing the Khamenei regime to survive would not only represent a huge victory for Tehran, but would demonstrate to its hardliners that Iran can no longer afford not to develop nuclear weapons to deter future attacks. “We don’t want to leave early, do we?” Trump said Wednesday at a rally in Kentucky. “We got to ​finish the job.”

As noted earlier this week:

“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.’”

Why has Trump fallen into this trap? Partly because Netanyahu lobbied him so effectively. And Trump, like so many presidents before him, has failed to learn that airstrikes—like sanctions—only entrench hardline regimes. But also because he failed to recognize that Iran viewed the prospect of U.S. attack as an existential threat and so finds himself mired in what historian James Stokesbury dubbed the kind of “middle-sized war”—like Vietnam and Iraq—that are the bane of democracies like the United States. As discussed in this space a mere fortnight ago, before the first U.S. bombs fell in Tehran:

“Trump is finding out that military threats only go so far. When they pose what their target perceives as an existential threat, they can provoke a dangerous response, like the proverbial cornered animal. So it is that Trump’s negotiators are reportedly mystified why Iran’s leaders won’t submit to his demands to surrender their nuclear enrichment and ballistic missiles programs or face a U.S. attack aimed at deposing them.

What nation, confronted by the mightiest military power in history, would decide to stand up and fight? University of Tehran political scientist Sasan Karimi explained it to The New York Times this way: “Avoiding war is indeed a high priority, but not at any cost… At times, a political state — especially an ideological one — may weigh its place in history as heavily as, or even more heavily than, its immediate survival.”

Trump isn’t the first American president to make this mistake—not by a long shot. Former President Joe Biden thought mistakenly that his own threats and bluster could dissuade Russia from invading Ukraine in 2022. He was tragically wrong, and instead helped fuel the very paranoia that convinced Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade. Combined with Trump’s retreat from the trans-Atlantic alliance, the result is that Europe faces a long and tense confrontation with Russia that could very easily ignite into full-fledged war.

But that’s Russia: a nuclear power whose military might is second only to America’s… Smaller nations with more to lose have stood up to U.S. bullying, too, even if doing so meant almost certain defeat. North Vietnam comes to mind. North Korea before it. Cuba. Grenada. Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. Panama’s Manuel Noriega. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Serbia. Afghanistan’s Taliban.

And now, and not for the first time, Iran. Trump’s top generals are now warning him that attacking might not be as easy as the operation to abduct Nicolás Maduro from Caracas.

This failure to identify when its threats pose an existential challenge has become a consistent flaw in U.S. policymaking. Maybe it derives from having spent so much time as a virtually unrivaled superpower since the fall of the Soviet Union 35 years ago. Or maybe it’s because the U.S. mainland hasn’t been invaded by foreign troops since 1812. The absence of any existential threat to the U.S. makes it difficult for policymakers in Washington to understand the psychology of responding to existential threats made against their own adversaries.

This isn’t just about lacking the empathy to understand your opponents’ limits. It’s about then over-committing to foreign policies in which the stakes are asymmetric—when you have much less to lose than your opponent. This is a point the late statesman (and war criminal) Henry Kissinger often made. Biden made that mistake in Ukraine: failing to recognize that Ukraine was of little strategic importance to the U.S., but of vital strategic importance to Russia. Putin recognizes this and knows thus that ultimately the U.S.—no matter who sits in the White House—won’t go to the mat for Ukraine.

Will Trump go to the mat to de-fang Iran and protect Israel and its neighbors? Probably not. As he did last year, he’s more likely to settle for air strikes that offer a show of force but ultimately fail to provide the boots-on-the-ground ultimately necessary to dislodge the regime.”