The Iran War
The Doomed Road to Tehran
Policymakers have not understood that the Iran War is more akin to Vietnam than Iraq.
(Richard Baker / In Pictures via Getty Images)
The near constant refrain has been that they’ve been at war against us for 47 years, and now we are (finally) hitting back. It isn’t always obvious whether this claim is, in the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s phrase, “boob bait for the bubbas” or believed sincerely. Like most claims in politics, there are some facts to support it. The Iranian regime has been hostile from its beginning. The collapse of the American-allied Shah’s regime, and the triumphant return to Iran of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini with demonstrations in his favor larger than any seen in the history of the world, were undoubtedly a trauma for the United States. They occurred less than four years after the fall of Saigon. Khomeini’s revolution was followed quickly by an Iranian student faction’s seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran (the “nest of spies” they called it) and Jimmy Carter’s inability to negotiate the release of the diplomats held hostage there. Without this humiliation, amplified every night by an entirely novel type of news-centered late night television, it is unlikely Ronald Reagan would have been elected president. So, through the cunning of history, the Iranian students helped produce America’s victory in the Cold War.
What has also existed for two generations has been a back-and-forth debate within the highest reaches of the U.S. government about how, or whether, to seek more normal relations with the revolutionary government of Iran. The Reagan administration was divided on the issue, with Robert McFarlane and William Casey favoring overtures, Colin Powell, Richard Armitage, and Casper Weinberger opposed. Israel still maintained commercial and strategic dealings with Iran, to the irritation of a Washington that had sanctioned Tehran after the hostage seizure. (Trita Parsi has argued that Iran kept the pre-revolution Israel connection going primarily as a route to normalize relations with the U.S.).
The Iran–Contra fiasco, a bizarre combination of an overture to Tehran blended with clandestine funding for anticommunist rebels in Nicaragua, supported by Reagan himself and highly illegal to boot, left Washington wary of Iran “overtures” for a very long time. Iran’s allies in Lebanon continued to take Americans as hostages, which pained Reagan personally. Official Washington understood that Iranian-linked terrorism (in particular the deadly 1983 attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut) was not gratuitous but a seeming consequence of American military intervention in Lebanon‘s civil war. Shortly after the Beirut bombing, Reagan withdrew U.S. forces after ousting the communist regime in a tiny Caribbean island to help mask the retreat. Near the end of Reagan’s second term, Zalmay Khalizad, an ambassador-level appointee who held major posts in the Reagan and both Bush administrations, drafted a memo advocating that the United States lift economic sanctions on Iran. Schultz read it, his face reportedly growing redder and redder as he proceeded. He scrawled a big NO in red magic marker across the front. Finally cooling down, he exclaimed, “Zal, this makes great geopolitical sense but no political sense.”
It bears emphasizing that no one in Washington knew whether overtures to Tehran would lead to a détente and productive normalization. “Moderates” in Iran often won competitive elections—though what their victories actually meant in relation to the ruling mullahs was never fully understood. Extremists sometimes won as well, including most famously Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who called for the erasure of Israel from the map.
With the demise of the Soviet Union, the perceived geopolitical stakes of Iran’s orientation diminished. American oil companies hoped for access to Iran, and after the electoral victory of the moderate Khatami in 1997 seemed poised to get it. But AIPAC was by then a powerful barrier to any sort of normalization. Israel had—with the seeming neutralization of Iraq after the first Gulf War—shifted to treating Iran rather than Iraq as its major strategic rival. Massively one-sided congressional resolutions were organized to forbid American commercial relations with Iran, and the White House, uncertain of its goals in any case, did not oppose them.
The shock of 9/11 and the need to hit back at least at Afghanistan might have changed that. Large crowds of Iranians held candlelight vigils for the murdered Americans—something that occurred nowhere else in the Muslim world. Thousands observed a moment of silence in an Iranian soccer game. Tehran offered Washington assistance in toppling the Taliban in Afghanistan, and American and Iranian diplomats engaged productively in the early months of the American war against the Taliban, including in intelligence cooperation. But these nibblings towards some sort of détente came to an abrupt stop after Iran was included in what Bush called the “axis of evil” in his 2002 State of the Union address. Some administration principals had tried and failed to squelch that phrase. Iran immediately downgraded its diplomatic teams meeting with Americans over Afghanistan.
Neoconservative members of the Bush administration always opposed such overtures anyway. The pro-détente view, expressed in a memoir by the career diplomat James Dobbins, who was involved in the talks, was that Iran “wasn’t Switzerland, but more democratic than Egypt and less fundamentalist than Saudi Arabia” and could be dealt with as a country, not an irrational theocracy. That position lost, as it always did.
What did change in the 2000s was that Iran had mastered the nuclear enrichment cycle and was rapidly becoming a potential nuclear power. The incoming Obama administration was determined to deal with that threat by negotiation; Israel wanted a military solution. President Barack Obama prevailed but in a kind of mixed decision, signing with Iran (and Russia, China and France, Germany, and Britain) an agreement which limited Iranian nuclear enrichment to well below weapon-grade levels and subjected it to close monitoring. But he lacked the votes to pass it as a Senate confirmed treaty and the agreement would have expired in the late 2020s. Israel vociferously opposed the measure and Netanyahu was invited by the Republican House leadership to speak against it. In the end, Obama was able to get the treaty enacted and Iran’s nuclear march stymied, but the deal was consummated under such partisan duress that it never had a chance to become a springboard for a deepening détente. As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump labeled it “the worst deal ever” and jettisoned it in the second year of his first term.
This abbreviated history (culled in particular from the outstanding Enduring Hostility by Dalia Dassa Kaye) illustrates the domestic political constraints on efforts to change the relationship with the Iranian regime. Every administration contained high-ranking officials who advocated efforts to explore détente with Iran. This was always problematic given Teheran’s apparent hostility. Once Israel had turned definitively against the Tehran regime, with a Congress acting as AIPAC wanted, it was impossible.
The absence of détente does not explain the current war. That required a Trump presidency. His most astute supporters realized from the start Trump was a leap into the dark. This view of a Trump presidency was well captured by Michael Anton’s famous 2016 essay “The Flight 93 Election,” which suggested as ann analogy for electing a figure like Trump the plight of passengers whose plane was seized by hijackers on a kamikaze mission. It was better to storm the cockpit and somehow hope you would be able to land the plane yourselves than to sit passively and face certain death. Trump’s election was symbiotic with the already-visible radicalization of the Democratic Party. By Trump’s second victory in 2024, it was unambiguously clear the Democrats stood for open borders, intensification of racial quotas, and the mass transing of children—policies that would have been inconceivable to Bill Clinton in the 1990s or Obama in 2008. Storming the cockpit seemed to make sense.
One attractive point of Trump in all three of his races was his seeming disdain for the credentialed Washington foreign policy establishment, “the blob” in the coinage of the Obama staffer Ben Rhodes. The blob functioned to marginalize any questioning of America’s global commitments and seemingly endless wars as “isolationist” or “extremist.” Trump had famously criticized the Iraq War, calling it “a big, fat mistake”; in his second term his lack of deference towards NATO, three generations after its formation, seemed refreshing, even necessary. Some members of his administration explicitly criticized NATO expansion, the disastrous policy that was the root cause of the bloody Ukraine war. Trump seemed uniquely equipped to reject the whole blob mindset which led to forever wars and bloated defense budgets. He encouraged those who believed such a change was necessary, running unambiguously against Kamala Harris as the more prudent and peace-oriented candidate.
It is now apparent that this was no more than a tactical election move, helpful to win a close race but with little real significance. Trump had always been fond of militaristic chest-thumping. Those who hoped for a more realist foreign policy told themselves this was a necessary camouflage, a way to make a less militaristic policies palatable to hawkish voters. Such rationales were an exercise in self-delusion.
Whom did Trump appoint to key foreign policy positions? One can go into the upper-middle levels of the bureaucracy and find some Trump appointees in the restraint camp, knowledgeable and committed people who have learned lessons from the Iraq War. When push came to shove, they had no influence over key decisions. Who did? That isn’t exactly clear either. Trump has built up a cult of personality around himself; he sits on a kind of throne while those surrounding him either are or pretend to be his intellectual inferiors. There is a reason Democrats make Kim Jong Un jokes about Trump’s cabinet meetings, televised exercises in which cabinet members are apparently required to utter paeans to “President Trump’s leadership” in every third sentence. It creates an atmosphere where serious discussion cannot be held.
Having forged an administration where there is little of the traditional expertise and experience that might have come from “the blob” and where sycophancy is the norm, Trump has also surrounded himself with old business cronies and family members. His Iran negotiations have been led by his son-in-law Jared Kushner and the real estate mogul Steve Witkoff. There are credible reports that neither understood enough about the nuclear fuel cycle to recognize whether or not Tehran was making significant concessions in final talks before Trump and Israel attacked Iran. Their performance raises the question of whether Trump actually wanted the talks to succeed.
During Trump’s first term it was reported that the young Kushner’s father was so close to Bibi Netanyahu that the latter used to stay in Jared’s bedroom on visits to the U.S.—young Jared would move from bedroom to the couch. This unusually personal tie to a foreign power was largely forgotten by most people, who assumed that Jared Kushner’s primary goal in life was to make money. For his part, Witkoff was enough of a Netanyahu fanboy to be gifted a pager by the latter, a memento of Israel’s decapitation of part of Hezbollah’s leadership. Meanwhile, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is a hardcore Christian Zionist who calls for the Third Temple to be reconstructed in Jerusalem. One might conclude that, though an American foreign policy guided exclusively by the blob was problematic, hardcore Netanyahu admirers were probably not the best possible choice for an “America First” alternative.
Floating around the internet is a video of Bibi Netanyahu speaking before a group of West Bank settlers in 2001. The setting is casual; Netanyahu was out of office and not aware he was being filmed. Asked about a peace settlement with the Palestinians, he tells them not to worry, Israel will be able to circumvent it, to do what it wants. He is pushed: What about international condemnation, what about America? “I know America, America is a thing you can move very easily, move in the right direction. They won’t get in the way,” Netanyahu answers, moving on to elaborate on one tactic for obstruction.
An example of supreme confidence, to be sure, but not without basis. A year later Netanyahu was asked to testify in Congress in favor of going to war in Iraq, where he helped to persuade lawmakers there was absolutely no chance that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction. Thirteen years later he was in Congress again, invited to speak by the GOP leadership, to denounce Obama’s nuclear restriction deal with Iran. Netanyahu favored war then too, but Obama was able to say no to him. It is unlikely that, even in his wildest dreams, he imagined an American presidency where Jared Kushner would be the president’s principal Middle East advisor.
As newspapers were beginning to report that Trump was growing bored with the war he started and was looking to change the subject, the administration’s undersecretary of state for arms control, Thomas DiNanno appeared on Capitol Hill to testify before the House Intelligence Committee. Congressman Joaquin Castro, concerned about potential nuclear fallout in a war in which both Iranian and Israeli nuclear sites had been targeted by missiles, asked DiNanno about Israel’s nuclear capabilities, specifically its nuclear weapons. DiNanno replied that he “can’t comment on that,” adding “you’d have to ask the Israelis.” The San Antonio congressman persisted, and DiNanno remained mum. Castro seemed puzzled, as DiNanno was the government’s leading expert on the nuclear proliferation issue that was at the center of Trump’s rationale for starting the war.
The topic was taboo for the Trump administration, but is spoken of occasionally. Writing in Foreign Affairs in 2012, Kenneth Waltz addressed it. Many will recognize Waltz as one of America’s leading international relations theorists; his classic Man, The State and War was often the first book assigned to fledgling international politics majors. In 2012, he was at the end of a long career, a semiretired professor at Columbia. He noted that historically, every time another country has managed to shoulder its way into the nuclear club, other members “changed tack and learned to live with it.” Aging baby-boomers might recall the time when the ascendance of “Red China” into the nuclear club was greatly feared, because Americans understood the Chinese were incorrigible fanatics who did not care about human life—until Nixon went to China and Americans, almost instantly, stopped believing that.
Unlike DiNanno, Waltz was not reluctant to address Israel’s nuclear program and what it meant. “Israel’s nuclear monopoly, which has proved remarkably durable for the past four decades, has long fueled instability in the Middle East” he wrote. “In no other region of the world does a lone, unchecked, nuclear state exist. It is Israel’s nuclear arsenal, not Iran’s desire for one, that has contributed most to the current crisis. Power after all, begs to be balanced.”
Waltz was only one top international relations scholar, and others might argue that Israel’s nuclear monopoly is not only morally just, but the only way to ensure stability in the Middle East (not that there has been much stability). Waltz could reply that there is much history behind the argument that nuclear deterrence basically works, and that a balance of terror is a better vehicle for avoiding war than the absence of one. At the very least one might want to see such theories debated, as the United States is now engaged in its second major war to ensure Israel’s nuclear monopoly in a still-young century. But even acknowledgment of the basic facts underlying the issue seems to be taboo.
Americans soon grew to hate the Iraq War, but few found anything positive to say about Saddam Hussein’s government or, indeed, the Iraqi culture and civil society we were supposedly liberating. I would speculate that if Trump escalates the Iran War, and does not take an off-ramp that would be perceived as at least a partial defeat, the domestic cultural battle around the Iran will escalate as well, but with far more similarity to Vietnam than to the Iraq experience, Americans not only grew to respect the North Vietnamese military (“the greatest light infantry in the world” was the commonplace phrase from American officers who fought them), but some came to admire North Vietnam as a society.
Well before the 1968 Tet offensive forced Washington to recognize the Vietnam War would not be won, prominent American writers were visiting Vietnam, and implicitly or explicitly rooting for a communist victory. Mary McCarthy’s book Vietnam, which I read at 17 and recently reread, is a kind of template: The celebrated novelist was politically mainstream, a fellow traveler in her youth, a staunch anticommunist when she woke up to what Stalinism was, a dear friend of Hannah Arendt, as great a foe of totalitarianism as any American person of letters could be. But her visit to South Vietnam produced a scathing account of the war effort, with much attention paid to the boastful technological superiority of the American way of war. Mocking the liberals who hoped for an honorable exit from Vietnam, she wrote “there is no honorable exit from a shameful course of action”—and called on the antiwar movement to study the Abolitionists, “the nearest thing to a Resistance movement the Republic has ever had.” She thus gave her opposition to the war a moral component; Vietnam was not a worthy cause gone sour, or a waste of resources which could be better used at home. To oppose the war was to resist evil.
Such sentiment, more suggested than shouted in McCarthy’s book, would soon become widespread in the antiwar movement. McCarthy would later go to North Vietnam and write admiringly of the people living under near constant American bombardment, all the while commenting whimsically on the ways their communist ideology sometimes posed barriers to deeper communication. Her call for extreme resistance to the war machine was soon taken up by a radical student left, some of whom openly embraced communist goals, and in the most extreme cases carried out terrorism inside the United States. For anyone who believes nothing like that is possible in the current context, we ought to recognize we are already in a moment where hatred of official Washington is mainstream. The movie One Battle After Another, which in its campy way presents left-wing terrorists sympathetically (America’s most famous leading man plays one), is in some measure a shout-out to the Weather Underground. It swept the Academy Awards. The vote was taken weeks before the U.S. launched a sneak attack on Iran by murdering its government and their families and destroying a girls’ elementary school and the pupils within it. The way the United States wages war, bombing from a safe distance, does not lead to admiration. Those seemingly afraid to fight mano-a-mano are not respected, no matter how much air power they wield—this is one observation the retired General Stanley McChrystal, who led the surge in Iraq, expressed in an interview with David French. Those who struggle to carry on beneath the bombs are admired. This was the case in McCarthy’s narrative, and it is apparent in the first Western reports of what life is like in Tehran under American and Israeli bombing. There will be many more such accounts; the Iranians are eloquent people, with more fluency in American idiom than the Vietnamese communists. Other writers and reporters, from America, Europe, and beyond will eventually make their way to Iran too, and will have a powerful impact. Trump and Netanyahu’s war, if it continues, will produce a moral revulsion against the United States like none of us have ever seen before.
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Pope Leo just FIRED BACK at President Trump:
