Last week Politico’s Nahal Toosi correctly observed that “no one seems to have a solid strategy to win the war in Iran.”
The thing is, though, that Toosi’s assertion is actually an understatement: not only does the Trump administration lack a solid strategy to win the war in Iran, they have no capacity to handle any of the second or third-order effects of the war. And the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World really does not think anyone — not U.S. allies, not U.S. adversaries, not U.S. foreign policy commentators — appreciate the scope of Trump’s clusterfuck.
Let’s start with the situation in Iran. Toosi ably summarizes the state of despair within the administration about where things currently stand:
When I asked current and former U.S. officials what had to be done to win, the most common first response was a primal scream of sorts that translated into, “We never should have started this war.” That was followed by: “What do you mean by ‘win’?”
It’s a fair question, and one the White House has failed to answer as it keeps shifting its goals. Trump launched the war bent on ending Iran’s nuclear program, destroying many of its military capabilities and hinting at regime change. Now he seems most intent on freeing the strait from Iran’s grip.
Among some at the lower levels of the administration, there’s a sense of despair.
“I don’t see a way out of this,” one U.S. official familiar with the administration’s Middle East strategy told me. The official argued that the Trump team “fundamentally misunderstands” Iran’s rulers. Trump and his aides “have always felt like they can just keep applying pain and Iran will crumble, but the regime is not going to crumble.”
Toosi then outlines three different schools of thought on the war: the hawks that would escalate the application of military force to include ground troops, the restrainers who would deescalate pretty much on Iran’s terms, and the sanctioners, who want to ratchet up maximum economic pressure even more in the expectation that Iran’s economy will eventually buckle. As Toosi notes, all of these approaches “seem grounded more in hope than reality.”
It seems that by default, the Trump administration has settled on the sanctions option. According to the Atlantic’s Jonathan Lemire, “Trump’s new strategy is to try doing nothing, and see whether that works. The president is de-emphasizing both diplomacy and military action, and instead placing his faith in economic pressure, in the hope that time can accomplish what force could not. This wait-and-see approach is meant to allow stepped-up financial sanctions and a U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports to inflict economic pain.”
The problem, as Lemire notes, is that “this new tack will require the president to show patience,” and as I’ve previously noted, president Trump lacks patience to a pathological degree. The only virtue this approach has for Trump is that because it is a continuation of the status quo, it is the laziest and easiest approach.
But it is worth stepping back for a second to appreciate the degree to which the Trump White House is losing in Iran and elsewhere because of this stalemate.
