A Very Stable War

After the president of peace, a man who felt deserving of the Nobel Prize, authorized a massive aerial bombardment of Iran last summer, the task of explaining away the contradiction fell to J. D. Vance.

“I certainly empathize with Americans who are exhausted after 25 years of foreign entanglements in the Middle East,” the vice president told NBC—a stark understatement, given that Vance had, up to this point, unsparingly denounced Middle East wars and promised that the Trump administration would avoid them. “I understand the concern, but the difference is that back then, we had dumb presidents, and now we have a president who actually knows how to accomplish America’s national-security objectives.”

The difference was simple: Other wars were bad because they were led by dumb presidents, but a Trump war would be good because Donald Trump is smart.

Yet after the administration’s second wave of air attacks on Iran, the president’s strategy seems more sundown than Sun Tzu.

[Read: From ‘America First’ to ‘Always America Last’ ]

The Wall Street Journal reported on January 30 that Trump was planning a major military campaign, but was still “debating whether the main aim is to go after Iran’s nuclear program, hit its ballistic missile arsenal, bring about the collapse of the government—or some combination of the three.” Generally speaking, military strategists tend to first settle upon their objective, and then devise a tactic to achieve it. The Trump method of first deciding on the tactic, and only getting around to what he wants to accomplish afterward, is unorthodox.

A lack of clarity has continued to define the operation. In his videotaped message announcing the latest attacks, Trump repeated his boast that the previous round of air strikes, in June, had “obliterated the regime’s nuclear program at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan.” But if the obliteration lasted only half a year, what value is there in re-obliterating it? Will biannual bombing campaigns be employed until Iran submits to American demands?

Because Trump appears not to know what he wants from his military strikes, he is also unable to make clear what he is demanding of Iran to stop them. At times, he faults Tehran for refusing to abandon its nuclear ambitions. “They wanted to do it. They didn’t want to do it. Again they wanted to do it. They didn’t want to do it,” he complained in his taped address. This tracked with the rationale that Vance offered last summer: “Simple principle: Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon.”

Yet at other times, Trump has floated more extensive ambitions. “Our objectives are clear,” he announced at the White House yesterday, ticking off a four-point list: eliminating Iran’s conventional missiles, destroying its navy, and ending its ability to fund terrorism, along with the original nuclear-nonproliferation goal.

The simple principle is now four simple principles. And Trump’s complaint that the mullahs were getting too “cute” in the negotiations has been mixed with grievances going back decades. On Sunday he told my colleague Michael Scherer, “They want to talk, and I have agreed to talk, so I will be talking to them.” The next day, he described Iran’s government as “sick and sinister,” language implying a desire for regime change.

Despite planning the war with the keen brainpower that Vance finds so impressive, Trump has conceded his apparent failure to anticipate some of its more predictable consequences. He told Jake Tapper in an interview that Iran striking Arab countries allied with the U.S. was “the biggest surprise.”

In another interview, with ABC’s Jonathan Karl, Trump lamented that he had picked out several candidates to lead a more pliant Iranian government, but the bombing campaign had killed them all. When planning a war to install a puppet regime, a smart president, or even one of average intelligence, would grasp the importance of not killing the puppets beforehand.

The other distinction Vance has drawn between the dumb Middle East wars of history and Trump’s extremely smart one is that the current president would maintain a tight timeline and would not, under any circumstances, entertain a ground presence. “We have no interest in a protracted conflict. We have no interest in boots on the ground,” Vance said.

[George Packer: Hubris without idealism]

Then Trump declined to rule this out. “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground—like every president says, ‘There will be no boots on the ground.’ I don’t say it,” he told the New York Post. Trump has said the campaign could run four to five weeks, but in his White House remarks, he said it could “go far longer than that.”

Trump also tried to disabuse his audience of any concern that his attention would wander from the task. “They said, ‘Oh, well, the president wants to do it really quickly. After that, he’ll get bored,’” he said yesterday. “I don’t get bored. There is nothing boring about this.” Within moments, Trump was riffing about the White House drapes.

In the absence of any clear strategic account of his actions, a raft of less flattering ones suggest themselves. Among them: Trump’s worldview was formed in the 1970s, and he never got past his anger with Iran over the Carter-era hostage crisis. Having lost out on the Nobel Peace Prize, he may be attempting to gain more recognition by reclassifying his presidency from the Nelson Mandela category to the Genghis Khan category. The Venezuela coup has disinhibited him from trying regime change, and now he seems eager to knock off as many hostile governments as he can. Even the Iran operation’s official name, Epic Fury, implies that it is carrying out an emotional reaction rather than a cold-eyed plan.

The usefulness of Vance’s rationale is that it can justify anything. Trump could not be starting a dumb war, because that would mean Trump is a dumb president. And who could possibly think that?