The Countdown to a Ground War
Our take
The recent announcement from Donald Trump regarding negotiations with Iran is a precarious balancing act that raises more questions than it answers. While Trump claims progress, Tehran flatly denies the existence of any talks, effectively rendering the so-called negotiations a countdown to potential conflict rather than a genuine diplomatic effort. This situation is reminiscent of previous Trump Is Flailing on Iran analyses, highlighting a pattern where aggressive rhetoric and military posturing may serve as a smokescreen for underlying strategic chaos. The U.S. is currently deploying thousands of troops to the Middle East, suggesting that any deadline for negotiations may merely be a strategic cover for military escalation already in motion.
The stark gap between the demands of the U.S. and Iran creates a scenario where the likelihood of a diplomatic collapse is high. The Trump administration’s 15-point proposal essentially demands Iran's capitulation, including the dismantling of its uranium-enrichment infrastructure and severing ties with regional proxies. In contrast, Iran's demands—guarantees against further U.S. or Israeli strikes and reparations for past damages—demonstrate a regime that perceives itself as resilient rather than desperate. This has been observed in the broader context of U.S.-Iran relations, where the strategic landscape continues to shift. The ongoing war has not weakened Iran but has instead solidified its resolve and influence, as highlighted in the related piece, Why Trump Thinks He Can Walk Away From the Strait of Hormuz.
What’s particularly alarming is the potential for miscalculation in military operations. Plans for ground raids on strategic sites like Isfahan or Kharg Island carry significant risks that the administration seems to underestimate. Securing highly enriched uranium under fire, for instance, is not a simple task and could lead to catastrophic consequences. The operational complexities involved in such raids could easily spiral into a protracted conflict, contradicting Trump's apparent desire for a swift resolution. Ironically, the military engagements that Trump may believe will secure a definitive advantage could instead entrench the U.S. in an unwinnable situation, as evidenced by historical precedents of military interventions in the region. This dynamic has been echoed in discussions around the concept of Mutually Assured Energy Destruction, where the stakes are not merely about military dominance but also about energy security and global economic stability.
As we observe these developments, it is crucial to consider the broader implications of failing negotiations. If talks collapse, the question shifts from whether military actions will be taken to what the U.S. intends to achieve through them. Will Trump attempt to declare a victory based on perceived gains while ignoring the complex realities on the ground? Or will the administration confront the uncomfortable truths of escalating conflicts that do not yield the desired outcomes? The road ahead is fraught with uncertainty, and the potential for a ground war looms larger than ever. As we watch this situation unfold, it is essential to remain vigilant and critically engaged with the choices being made, as they will undoubtedly shape the future of U.S.-Iran relations and the geopolitical landscape for years to come.
Donald Trump announced this week that the United States and Iran had made significant progress in negotiations, and he was allowing five days to reach a deal. Tehran denied that it was talking with Washington at all. This is not, in any meaningful sense, a negotiation: It is a countdown.
The timing is not coincidental. Thousands of Marines and much of the 1st Brigade of the 82nd Airborne are en route to the Middle East. Trump may intend the talks to act as cover for an escalation decision already made. Even if he doesn’t, the structural reality is the same: When the deadline expires, he will be close to having significant ground-combat capability in the region and a collapsing diplomatic process to justify using it.
The gap between the two sides makes the collapse of talks likely. The American framework is, in essence, a demand for Iran’s surrender. The administration’s 15-point proposal, delivered to Iran via Pakistan, requires Tehran to dismantle its entire uranium-enrichment infrastructure, surrender its stockpiles of highly enriched uranium, sever all ties with proxy forces across the region, and accept strict limits on its conventional military. In exchange, Washington is offering sanctions relief and support for a civilian nuclear-energy program. The proposal is very similar to the deal that the United States put on the table before the bombing campaign began.
Iran’s counter-framework reflects a regime that does not believe it is losing. Tehran is demanding binding guarantees that neither the United States nor Israel will strike again, reparations for the damage already inflicted, and formal recognition of its control over the Strait of Hormuz. On enrichment and proxies, Iranian negotiators have shown no willingness to move.
The war has not moderated the Iranian regime. It has hardened it. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps now dominates Iran’s internal deliberations to a degree unprecedented even under Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iran effectively controls the strait, and it knows that this control affords Tehran real leverage. Iran appears to have concluded that it is better positioned for a war of endurance than for a negotiated capitulation.
Trump could still choose to declare victory, or even accept terms closer to Iran’s position, if he concludes that the alternative is a longer and more uncertain war.
Last year’s trade confrontation with China ended with significant American concessions obscured by wins against U.S. allies and dressed in the language of reciprocal success. A similar reframing is conceivable here. He could point to Iran’s degraded navy, its shattered air force, the deaths of senior regime officials, and the setback to its nuclear program and argue that the threat has been sufficiently reduced to warrant a softer settlement.
[Eliot A. Cohen: The war with Iran is exposing big problems for the military]
But the Iran case will be harder to obscure than the China one was. Trade balances are abstract; the Strait of Hormuz is not. A deal that leaves the IRGC in effective control of the world’s most crucial shipping lane, imposes no enforceable limits on Iran’s missile or enrichment programs, and offers the regime international legitimacy cannot easily be framed as victory, especially when America’s closest regional partners will be lining up to say otherwise.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman reportedly told Trump that the United States should continue fighting to destroy the Iranian regime and remake the region. The United Arab Emirates’ ambassador to the United States rejected the idea of a “simple cease-fire,” calling instead for “a conclusive outcome that addresses Iran’s full range of threats.” The UAE and Saudi Arabia may not have fully welcomed the war in the first place, but now that it is under way, they will not want to see Iran emerge stronger from it. Meanwhile, Israel remains committed to regime change or, failing that, maximum degradation, and it worries about a deal that meets Tehran halfway or a cease-fire. These governments can be expected to push Trump to continue the war once the talks collapse, although they seem to have concerns about ground operations.
But Trump wants to avoid a messy, long war, which could lead to sustained high oil prices and a possible recession. Ground troops would seem likely to bring this outcome about—but Trump appears to believe that their introduction will instead deliver a decisive knockout blow, which will either compel Tehran to accept his terms or make a U.S. declaration of victory credible. Trump announced yesterday that he had rescheduled a visit to China for May 14 and 15, which suggests that he expects the war to be over by then.
According to media reports about internal Trump-administration deliberations, three ground operations are most likely: a raid on Iran’s nuclear facilities at Isfahan to seize its stockpile of highly enriched uranium; the seizure of Kharg Island, Iran’s principal oil-export hub; and the deployment of troops to Iran’s shoreline to suppress its attacks on shipping through the strait.
Each carries risks that the administration appears to be underestimating. Austin Long, a senior nuclear fellow at MIT, told me that Iran’s highly enriched uranium is a white, crystalline solid, uranium hexafluoride, stored in thick, steel cylinders, and cannot be reliably and permanently destroyed with explosives. If the cylinders are pierced, they emit a severely hazardous gas. A successful seizure from Isfahan would require U.S. troops to secure a wide perimeter, locate and excavate up to 970 pounds of the uranium buried under an unknown depth of rubble, protect it from counterattack, load it onto aircraft, and depart under fire. The operation would be arguably the most complex raid ever carried out by U.S. forces. The 970 pounds of uranium could also be spread among Isfahan and two other sites, raising the possibility of multiple raids.
[Nancy A. Youssef and Missy Ryan: The U.S. and Iran are fighting a massively asymmetrical war]
Kharg Island and the coastal positions present different but equally serious problems. Forces on Kharg would immediately be within range of sustained Iranian fire; Iran could respond by attacking energy infrastructure and desalination plants across the Persian Gulf or destroying the island’s oil facilities to deny them to the Americans. Coastal positions are reportedly located near population centers, which would complicate both the military mission and the international response. In each scenario, the most plausible outcome is not a clean victory but a situation that demands more troops, more time, and more exposure to avert failure.
The deeper problem is that military operations, however successful tactically, cannot substitute for what the war is trying to achieve strategically. Trump launched this conflict believing that Iran was weak, and that a short, sharp campaign would force a new leader to terms. The regime has proved more resilient and more capable of inflicting sustained damage on the region than the president expected.
The question worth asking now is not whether the U.S.-Iran talks will fail, but what the United States will do on the other side of that failure. Trump has a long history of claiming victory in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This may be the rare moment when that instinct serves the country—because the alternative appears to be doubling down on a losing strategy by launching a ground war.
Read on the original site
Open the publisher's page for the full experience
Related Articles
- Trump Is Flailing on IranDonald Trump’s way of talking about war has always swung between extremes. He threatens “fire and fury” one day and extols his dictator buddies for their kind and thoughtful gestures the next. Since the conflict with Iran began, however, the cycle between aggression and conciliation has spun more rapidly. The president issues new and more terrible threats against Tehran, then backs off with soothing praise. He has now begun to do these things simultaneously. The reason may be that world markets, especially for oil, want the war to end, so that shipping can presumably resume through the Strait of Hormuz. Trump has learned that he can encourage the markets to expect a speedy end to the war by promising that talks are proceeding toward a settlement, or at least that he intends to quit the conflict and frame it as a victory. However, the Iranians can also read these messages. Every time Trump signals that he wants the war to end, they recognize his desperation. So, to counter this effect, Trump attempts to threaten Iran with new punishments should it fail to make a satisfactory deal. But of course, the markets can also read the threats. So Trump must counteract the impression caused by his saber-rattling with promises of peace. [Read: Six days of war, 10 rationales] A little more than a week ago, Trump warned, “If Iran doesn’t FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT, the Strait of Hormuz, within 48 HOURS from this exact point in time, the United States of America will hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST!” Then he extended the deadline twice, explaining that he was holding promising talks with the Iranians. The Iranians have responded that no such discussions have occurred. It is difficult to assess which of these notably unreliable parties is accurately conveying the state, or non-state, of negotiations. Even so, a discouraging sign emerged yesterday in the form of a morning Trump post on Truth Social. It begins by reiterating his most dovish claims that the Iranian regime has changed, thereby fulfilling his prewar objective, and is now negotiating with him: “The United States of America is in serious discussions with A NEW, AND MORE REASONABLE, REGIME to end our Military Operations in Iran.” Regime change, in fact, refers specifically to ending a country’s system of government, not merely changing the individual people running it. The revolution that deposed the shah and replaced him with an Islamic theocracy was regime change. Replacing one leader with his son does not constitute “regime change” any more than electing a Republican president to succeed a Democratic one does. At least this fiction is consistent with Trump’s apparent attempt to find a way out by spinning his adventure in Iran as a success. Praising the “new” regime as reasonable likewise advances this goal. Yesterday’s Truth Social post reiterates that the U.S.-Iran negotiations—which, again, may or may not be happening—are making progress, and will probably succeed. But Trump also vows that failure will be met with terrible violence: “Great progress has been made but, if for any reason a deal is not shortly reached, which it probably will be, and if the Hormuz Strait is not immediately ‘Open for Business,’ we will conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!), which we have purposefully not yet ‘touched.’” Threatening to commit war crimes—and destroying civilian infrastructure such as desalination plants would certainly qualify—is generally an uncomfortable rhetorical pivot in any presidential text. It is even more awkward when the threat immediately follows praise of the prospective target’s leadership for its reasonableness. Trump does try to supply a moral justification, of sorts, for such a crime: “This will be in retribution for our many soldiers, and others, that Iran has butchered and killed over the old Regime’s 47 year ‘Reign of Terror.’” If the president is planting a defense for a future war-crimes trial at The Hague, he has not given his prospective legal team much to work with. As a motive for committing atrocities, “retribution” is more of a confession than an alibi. What’s more, whatever moral force Trump generates by citing the regime’s “Reign of Terror” as a rationale for harming its citizens is undercut by his casually noting that those offenses were committed by the old regime, the one that Trump claims has changed. The Allies bombing Dresden in 1945 was notorious, but bombing it in 1946 would have been altogether worse. [Watch: Trump’s mixed messages about Iran] A normal politician would attempt to convey that he is being reasonable and negotiating in good faith, whereas his adversaries are violent war criminals. Trump is arguing the reverse. Perhaps he is calculating that Iran has blundered by surrendering its well-honed “unstable aggressive fanatic” identity, and now he has a chance to own that brand. Or, more likely, he is desperately flailing for a message that will reassure the stock market and scare the Iranians—rather than the other way around. To be sure, there is another group that is alarmed both by Trump’s wild threats of escalation and by his intimations of peace: the rest of the world, which is coping with an economic crisis caused by Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Trump proposes in a new post this morning that, having changed the regime, he will leave the wee problem of the strait for our former allies to deal with. Not our problem; they should have thought of it before we started the war.
- Why Trump Thinks He Can Walk Away From the Strait of HormuzThe oil shocks of the 1970s forced traumatic austerity on Americans. Some gas stations had miles-long lines; fuel was rationed based on whether a car’s license-plate number was even or odd; the White House Christmas tree went unlit; daylight savings was imposed year-round. The fuel crisis that America’s war on Iran has unleashed is far larger—the biggest oil-supply shock in history, an estimated three times the disruption caused by the Arab oil embargo. Iran has effectively cut off the Strait of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) flowed until recently. And yet, unlike in the ’70s, America is now an energy superpower, largely insulated from the economic pain caused by its actions, which instead are now being borne by Asia and will soon reach Europe. The dynamic is like a psychology experiment played out on a global scale: America can administer shocks to other countries without feeling much pain itself. The man at the control panel is Donald Trump. The president, a lover of leverage, not only understands that American allies are bearing the brunt of his actions—he is reveling in it. In his prime-time speech from the White House on Wednesday, Trump said that the strait’s closure was not America’s problem: “The United States imports almost no oil through the Hormuz Strait and won’t be taking any in the future.” As far as he was concerned, all of the suffering countries could simply fix the problem themselves. “Build up some delayed courage,” the president said. “Go to the strait and just take it, protect it, use it for yourselves.” He went on, “When this conflict is over, the strait will open up naturally. It will just open up naturally.” In other words: Best of luck! The next day, the clear lack of an American-led plan to open the strait caused stock-market declines and oil prices to shoot up nearly 8 percent. Many of America’s allies in Asia—where the price of LNG has roughly doubled since the start of the war—are already taking extreme measures. The Philippines, whose power plants run predominantly on imported fuel, has declared a state of emergency; it may order a grounding of civilian aircraft. In Japan, ferry services are being cut back and bathhouses are shutting down. South Korea is restricting the export of jet fuel. In Pakistan and Bangladesh, which are heavily dependent on Middle Eastern oil and have small stockpiles, violence is breaking out at gas stations. For American consumers, the cost to fill up a car has increased since the war began by $1 a gallon—because oil prices are set on the global market. Yet this is counterbalanced by the $60 billion windfall that American oil producers could earn if prices remain high. The U.S. price of LNG, by contrast, is set in a more localized market, and has gone almost unchanged. [David Frum: Why Trump didn’t predict the gas-price spike] In Europe, LNG prices are about 60 percent higher than before the war. The last tankers that departed Qatar before Iran bombed its Ras Laffan facility have been arriving in European ports. Thereafter, supplies will diminish quickly. European reservoirs of LNG were already low because of a colder-than-expected winter. Britain and Italy, where electricity comes disproportionately from gas-fired power plants, will be hit the hardest. Unlike the Persian Gulf oil supply, some of which can be routed overland, LNG is well and truly stuck until the Hormuz crisis is resolved. If and when a cease-fire occurs, restarting production will take weeks—and Iran’s attacks have destroyed 17 percent of Qatar’s LNG-exporting capacity, which will require years to repair. The United States will not have such monumental problems, but it will have some—all of which cut against Trump’s previously pledged goals. Having campaigned in 2024 against Biden-era inflation, Trump will be directly responsible not just for higher prices at the pump, but for higher general inflation, because fuel is an intermediate input in the production of most goods. Trump pledged to make buying a house easier for Americans: The average interest rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage has shot up by half a percentage point since the start of the war, as markets anticipate that the Federal Reserve will now be more hesitant to pursue expansionary monetary policy. Trump pledged to do right by farmers, who had already been buffeted by his erratic tariff regime and Chinese retaliation. But because one-third of the world’s fertilizer flows also transit through the Strait of Hormuz, farmers face much greater costs as the spring planting season begins. The Hormuz crisis has some beneficiaries: America’s adversaries. To prevent even higher oil prices, the Trump administration has lifted sanctions on Russian exports and even some of Iran’s. “Things that Iran and Russia had sought to achieve through negotiations with the United States, they’ve managed to achieve without having to negotiate,” Michael Froman, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, told me. “This is bailing out the Russian economy, which had been on the ropes, and, at least temporarily, it is giving a windfall to Iran.” Russia could recoup an additional $40 billion or more in oil exports this year, which it can plow into its war effort against Ukraine. Iranian oil production may be as high as before the war. Although China is a heavy net importer of Middle Eastern gas and oil, it is recouping different dividends. China has learned that “if there is a crisis of any kind over Taiwan, we are not prepared for the ensuing economic fallout. We have not coordinated with allies about how we’re going to deal with the supply-chain disruptions,” Eyck Freymann, a fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of a forthcoming book, Defending Taiwan, told me. China does not need military superiority to triumph in a conflict over Taiwan; it may simply need to outlast the West. “China has built a fortress economy that is designed to withstand severe or even total disruptions in key commodity supply chains for several months,” Freymann said. The country has huge stockpiles of oil it can tap, and it has considerably diversified its energy sources, relying on coal, nuclear, and renewables. [Robert Kagan: America is now a rogue superpower] For America, the war effort will incur different costs—ones that are less tangible and less immediate. Pax Americana has never looked like a shakier proposition. America’s allies in Europe and Asia took the indignity of unilateral tariff increases with relatively little retaliation. Trump’s handling of his war on Iran—attacking without consultation, expecting unwavering support, forcing higher prices on others—has dealt another blow to these relationships. Spain and Italy have both denied America use of military bases in their territory; Britain, the erstwhile steadfast ally of America, wavered on the issue, too. Trump is once again toying with the idea of leaving NATO out of anger. Most countries would prefer American hegemony to a multipolar world where they are consigned to one of China’s or Russia’s spheres of influence. But the distinctions between these visions of the world are diminishing. The alienation of longtime U.S. allies will continue for as long as Washington exercises its military and economic clout selfishly and capriciously. Criticisms of the U.S. president that would once have been made in private diplomatic cables are now spilling out into the open. Asked about Trump’s management of the crisis on Thursday, Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, had this to say: “When we’re serious, we don’t say the opposite of what we said the day before every day, and maybe one shouldn’t speak every day.”
- Mutually Assured Energy DestructionA few years ago in Dhahran, the Saudi state oil company, Aramco, gave me a tour of its headquarters, a facility so sparkling and orderly that one could forget that its whole purpose was to extract from the ground one of the filthiest substances on Earth. The most impressive stop on the tour was the Aramco emergency command center, which I imagine is paying its workers a lot of overtime right now. It looked like the control room for a mission to Alpha Centauri. Men and women sat at their stations. The walls were aglow with constellations of green lights—each one, my host said, representing a functioning object in the Aramco galaxy of pipelines, valves, ships, buses, heat exchangers, and drill bits. If a light flashed red, it meant one of these objects was broken, and the people at those stations would vault into action to support the crew restoring it. One major question in the current war is why Iran has so far failed, or perhaps declined, to make life miserable for the people in that room. The vow to annihilate energy infrastructure is one of two threats—American and Iranian—that remain, as of this writing, unfulfilled. On March 17, after Israel attacked Iran’s South Pars gas field, Iran threatened five key oil-and-gas facilities in Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. Last weekend, Donald Trump wrote that if Iran failed to open the Strait of Hormuz in exactly 48 hours, “the United States of America will hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST!” (American air superiority over Iran is matched only by its overwhelming advantage in CAPITAL LETTERS, which Persian lacks.) So far, Trump has not attacked the power plants—in fact, on Thursday he extended the deadline to April 6—and most of the oil infrastructure in the region remains intact. [Rogé Karma: Iran might use its economic-doomsday option] Trump’s targeting of power plants would be a remarkable and possibly illegal step, if those plants are civilian, and it is difficult to imagine any other president openly threatening their obliteration. Iran’s targeting of oil-and-gas infrastructure, however, is predictable, and is one of the reasons every president before Trump declined to attack Iran at all. It is by far the most painful action Iran could take against the United States and its allies. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar all pay their bills through oil and gas, and if these stop flowing, they will rapidly turn from petrocrats to paupers. Wrecking oil infrastructure is easy. It has no legs; it cannot run away or be hidden underground until danger passes. It is filled with materials at high temperatures and pressures, and some of them can be set on fire. In a 2019 attack that presaged the current war, a fleet of drones and a barrage of cruise missiles hit Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq and Khurais oil fields. Abqaiq is the world’s most important oil field. Direct strikes on crude-stabilization columns and gas-oil-separation tanks reduced Saudi oil output by half. Saudi Arabia accused Iran of launching the attacks, and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told me in 2022 that the U.S. was ready to punish Iran for the attack, but had held back to avoid “escalation.” Rebuilding that same infrastructure is hard. A single well-aimed strike can set back a whole operation for a very long time. On March 18, Iran attacked Ras Laffan, Qatar’s main site for liquefied-natural-gas production, and Qatar estimated that repairs would take three to five years. Taylor Coleman, an oil-and-gas operations expert at CapturePoint, told me that pipelines are relatively easy to fix, but refinery equipment is another matter. Hydrocrackers—which heat up and pressurize heavy oils, to convert them to lighter fuel products—are made of metal that is a foot thick, and are built to withstand temperatures reaching thousands of degrees. “There are only two or three foundries that can even make castings and forgings for some of those vessels, and delivery times can be two, three, even four years,” he said. This equipment is too expensive to stock spares. “We don’t keep an entire plant laid down in a yard somewhere, just in case one blows up.” The insatiable electricity needs of AI mean that if an oil-processing plant—which is also hungry for electricity—loses its transformers, it has to bid against, and get in line behind, technology companies that have already been waiting years for fulfillment. Iran has attacked not only Qatar but also Saudi facilities at Ras Tanura and even Yanbu, all the way in the west, on the Red Sea. Perhaps these were Iran’s best attempts at obliteration, and they were mostly thwarted. (Ras Laffan was the most ruinous hit. Both Ras Tanura and Yanbu were hit by debris from downed drones, and not fatally damaged.) But there is also a strategic consideration that might keep Iran from using maximum force. The logic of a devastating attack on oil-and-gas infrastructure is uncomfortably similar to mutually assured destruction: If Iran wipes out Saudi oil production, the immediate annihilation of its own infrastructure is nearly certain. The two countries rely about equally on oil and gas as shares of their exports, so such an attack by Iran would be tantamount to economic murder-suicide. It would also end all polite remonstrance from Iran’s neighbors, who have suggested that Iran’s regime might survive the war, if it forswears attacks, blockades, and terrorism. A direct attack on the oil fields would force the conclusion that the regime must fall. Destroying energy production in the Persian Gulf would also deal a grievous blow to Iran’s ally China, which devours both Arab and Iranian oil and would be left energy-hungry for years. [Shane Harris: A turning point in the Iran war] The final reason these attacks have not yet happened is probably the most important. Although Iran and the Gulf Arabs can mutually assure each other’s destruction, only the Arab oil-and-gas fields are assured to be reconstructed. Decades of sanctions and isolation have left Iran’s facilities ragged and corroded. If the Iranian regime somehow survives the war, no relief for this decrepitude will be forthcoming—whereas the Kuwaitis, Qataris, and Saudis will be overrun with technical experts, and showered with financing. And that reconstruction will be combined with redoubled efforts to cripple Iran’s ability to attack the fields again. The Ras Laffan attacks show that some constraints are physical and metallurgical, and even ultra-rich Qatar will have to spend years rebuilding. But cooperation of rich allies can work wonders. After the 2019 Abqaiq attack, Saudi oil was flowing at pre-attack levels within a matter of weeks, in part because when the U.S. and China both want your oil, they will defy economic and physical laws to obtain it. The purpose of the Iranian military was never to win a war—there is no “winning” a war against a military as advanced as America’s—but to deter and punish anyone who started a war with it. This logic of deterrence bought Iran decades, which is why it can boast a glorious past of successful resistance against American power. The same logic now would lead to escalation beyond Iran’s ability to manage, and could cost it an equally boastworthy future.
- Trump’s Mixed Messages About IranEditor’s Note: Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss growing opposition to President Trump’s attacks on Iran and what winning a war with unclear objectives could like. President Trump continues to offer different answers to what victory in Iran may look like. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined last night to discuss this, and more. “In a tactical sense, there’s no question that overwhelming military power is brought to bear and Iran is being degraded,” David Ignatius, a foreign-affairs columnist at The Washington Post, said last night. But “the more I watch this process of a weak enemy being pounded and pounded, I’m reminded of the Gaza war.” After two years of fighting, “Hamas still controls most of the Palestinians in Gaza,” Ignatius argued. “Even with all that power, Israel wasn’t able to win—and I think that’s what we’re all worrying about.” Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times; Susan Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker; Ignatius; and Missy Ryan, a staff writer at The Atlantic. Watch the full episode here.