Iran Is Trying to Defeat America in the Living Room

Among the first lessons that Iran’s Islamic revolutionaries learned after coming to power in 1979 was that their best ally against American power was American democracy. Their first test case was the seizing of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, in which 52 Americans were held hostage for 444 days, an act that devastated Iran’s economy and international reputation but succeeded in humiliating Jimmy Carter and ending his chances of reelection. Over the decades, Iran gained repeated proof that it didn’t need to defeat America on the battlefield; it just had to make the American people feel the war in their living room. And now, in a war for its survival, Tehran is attempting the same play.

In April 1983, Iran—via its newly created Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah—carried out a suicide bombing against the U.S. embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people, including 17 Americans. It was the deadliest attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission in history. “First word is that Iranian Shiites did it,” Ronald Reagan wrote in his diary, “d__n them.” Although Reagan remained outwardly steadfast, he was briefed that his approval ratings were beginning to sour because of Lebanon. “The people just don’t know why we’re there,” he wrote in his diary. “There is a deeply buried isolationist sentiment in our land.”

Months later, in October, Hezbollah struck again, this time with two simultaneous truck bombs that killed 241 American service members and 58 French soldiers as they slept. Four days after the attack, Reagan addressed the nation and asked: “If we were to leave Lebanon now, what message would that send to those who foment instability and terrorism?” He answered himself four months later, when, under pressure from Congress, he ordered the complete withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Lebanon.  

[Eliot A. Cohen: The strategic follies of the Islamic Republic]

Tehran also tried the living-room strategy in Iraq. When George W. Bush invaded in 2003, Tehran feared that a stable, democratic Iraq could become an American platform to threaten or subvert the Islamic Republic. Rather than confront the United States directly, Iran did what it had learned to do in Lebanon: create enough chaos to make the war unwinnable. According to declassified interrogation records, the Iran-backed Shiite-militia leader Qais al-Khazali told his American captors that Iran supported virtually every faction capable of fueling the disorder and making Iraq ungovernable. Iran-supplied weapons, including improvised explosive devices, were responsible for as many as 1,000 American deaths. The United States was spending billions of dollars unsuccessfully trying to stabilize Iraq; Iran was spending millions successfully destabilizing it.

Iran’s path to victory was not on the Iraqi battlefield but at the American ballot box. Bush understood this, telling the American public in July 2007 that “the same regime in Iran that is pursuing nuclear weapons and threatening to wipe Israel off the map is also providing sophisticated IEDs to extremists in Iraq who are using them to kill American soldiers.” By then, however, nearly six in 10 Americans already said that the war had been a mistake. Bush, thanks greatly to Iran, had lost the support he needed at home.

Today, with its existence at stake, Tehran is once again trying to make war too unpopular with the American public for America’s president to continue. The weapons being employed are no longer truck bombs and IEDs; instead they are missiles, drones, and geography.

Unable to compete militarily with the United States and Israel, Tehran has fallen back on its most important strategic card: the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian threats have collapsed the number of ships transiting the world’s most crucial energy corridor each day from an average of 138 to single digits—on some days, just one. At least 20 commercial vessels have been attacked, sending insurance costs soaring to as much as $5 million a ship. Tehran’s $20,000 drones are disrupting hundreds of millions of dollars in cargo for each attack. Oil prices have surged more than 40 percent since February 28; Brent crude oil peaked near $120 a barrel. Americans are paying a dollar more a gallon than they were when the war began.

Donald Trump has threatened to destroy Iran if it refuses to reopen the strait, but the resulting chaos would undermine his own objective: His goal was to turn Iran into a pliant state, not a failed state.  

Trump’s war on Iran has not unified Americans like previous Middle Eastern conflicts did; nearly eight in 10 Americans supported both the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq immediately after each of those hostilities began. Today, nine in 10 Democrats oppose the Iran strikes, as do most independents, and an average of polls taken from February 27 to March 11 found that 50 percent of Americans are opposed and only 40 percent are in support. Even within the Republican Party, the divide is striking: About 90 percent of MAGA-aligned Republicans back the war, but non-MAGA Republicans are split; about 54 percent are supportive. Although Trump’s MAGA base has remained remarkably loyal to him, these Americans are acutely vulnerable to the war’s economic costs, paying more for gasoline, diesel, and groceries, whose prices have been swollen by a fertilizer shortage that the Strait of Hormuz’s closure has helped create.

Islamic Republic officials have actively sought to fracture Trump’s base by evoking anti-Zionist conspiracies. “Trump has turned ‘America First’ into ‘Israel First,’” the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, posted, adding, “which always means ‘America last.’” Mohammed Baqer Qalibaf, a former Revolutionary Guard commander who is close with Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, referred to Trump’s relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as an “Epstein Axis” and posted that “American families deserve to know why Trump is sacrificing their sons and daughters to advance Netanyahu’s expansionist delusions.”

Iranian state TV has also amplified the commentary of Tucker Carlson—an outspoken conservative critic of the war—including a recent interview with Joe Kent, Trump’s director of the National Counterterrorism Center who resigned after blaming “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media” for the conflict. Tehran doesn’t want to turn Americans against just the war. It wants to turn Americans against one another.

[Rogé Karma: Iran might use its economic-doomsday option]

Although opinion polls, oil prices, and the number of projectiles remaining are measurable, the fate of the war will be determined in part by the resolve of both parties, something far more difficult to measure. A democratic president’s will to fight is constrained by elections, polls, gas prices, and the news cycle. An authoritarian regime fighting for its survival answers to none of those pressures. Reagan had resolve until Congress didn’t. Bush had resolve until six in 10 Americans called his war a mistake. This asymmetry of resolve is Iran’s greatest structural advantage. Tehran wins by not losing; Trump loses by not winning.  

The Islamic Republic’s decision to build its political identity around “death to America” has been a 47-year war of choice. Trump’s decision to try to end Tehran’s malign capabilities, rather than merely contain or counter them like past administrations did, has also been a war of choice.

If Iran’s strategy depends on Peoria, Trump’s presidency depends on the Strait of Hormuz. Trump cannot withdraw so long as Iran controls it, but securing it risks the kind of mass American casualties that ended Reagan’s and Bush’s resolve. If Trump reopens it, his appetite for regime change may grow. If he doesn’t, the economic pressure on his base will mount. This is ultimately a war between a democracy’s impatience and a theocracy’s ruthless endurance. The question is whether, for the first time since 1979, Tehran has finally met a U.S. president more committed to destroying the regime than the regime is to destroying him.