Iran

Beirut It seems that American planes were actually on their way to bomb Iranian targets last night when they were called back. That’s what the New York Times was told by a senior official in the administration, speaking anonymously of course. ‘Planes were in the air and ships were in position, but no missiles had been fired when word came to stand down.’ Was this President Trump or the Pentagon? It’s possible that the US military suddenly learned of a vulnerability in some part of their forces spread around the Middle East, in Bahrain, in Iraq, or in Syria, but then again, they’ve had time to prepare. More likely, this was Trump.

This time Donald Trump is unlikely to storm out of the room in a huff. He’s invited the top congressional leadership from both parties to a meeting at the White House this afternoon to discuss Iran. Now that Iran has shot down a US naval surveillance drone, Trump is in a bind. Instead of looking like Mr Big, he’s starting to resemble a paper tiger. At first Trump tweeted, 'Iran made a very big mistake!' which made it sound like he was going to take military action against the mullahs. But then a more emollient Trump appeared, telling reporters, 'I have a feeling…that it was a mistake made by somebody' who was freelancing rather than acting on orders from on high. Not likely. The truth is that Iran is calling Trump’s bluff.

The Trump administration’s Iran policy is regime change in all but name. Rudy Giuliani, the president’s former attorney, once told me that while the administration emphasizes 'change in behavior', the Islamic Republic is so flawed that its regime is probably beyond reform. On this week’s Washington Shots podcast, pundit Tom Rogan told me that the list of demands Mike Pompeo laid out last year is so compendious as to demand the collapse of the Islamic Republic. Rogan, an Iran hawk, thinks the secretary of state has gone too far. So too does Trump — or so he did until the Thursday's flare-up, the apparent Iranian bombing of an oil tanker in the Gulf of Oman.

Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, a Trump favorite and Fox News star, may have just fired the first loud shot of a new ideological war that may be heard around the world. 'The "fog of war" is no fog to me, or any of the 700,000 people I serve,' Gaetz clarified to a surprised Washington crowd of lefties and libertarians last month. 'It is not hazy,’ said Gaetz, whose North Florida district has the highest concentration of active-duty military in America. 'We see the impact of war every day among the people we love who shape our lives. It is a stark reminder that the unmatched freedoms we enjoy are not free — they are bought with the blood of American patriots.

Heiko Maas, the German foreign minister, was in Tehran on Monday. The ‘Iran conflict’, Maas said, is ‘one of the biggest conflicts of our time’. No one wants war with Iran. But what would peace with Iran look like — and what exactly needs to be pacified? The degree to which Maas’s statement was at once accurate and not accurate suggests the tricky nature of the ‘Iran conflict’. Iran’s forces are minimally engaged in conflict, but Iran’s proxies, Hezbollah especially, are everywhere engaged: in Lebanon, in Syria, in Yemen, and across Europe. On Sunday, news from London showed how the Iranian regime uses its proxies to play a double game with the West.

The dogs of war are barking a little less loudly. While the risk of miscalculation remains, it is increasingly clear that neither the US nor Iran really wants a war in the Persian Gulf. After weeks of threats, incidents, and saber rattling, both President Trump and Iran’s leaders are slowly de-escalating. President Trump, for all his digital eruptions, clearly does not want to fight. On his trip to Japan last week Trump explicitly disavowed regime change. Last Monday, he said that Iran has ‘a chance to be a great country with the same leadership’. Trump also suggested that Japan could serve as a mediator between the US and Iran, a role that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe appeared to embrace. (Iraq has also offered to mediate).

Donald Trump says that America could ‘end’ Iran, and no doubt we could. The US could launch an air campaign that would destroy the Islamic Republic’s most important military assets. But it’s hard to see exactly how. With a diminishing number of useful allies, not to mention a military exhausted from 18 years of war on terror, America is not in the position it once was to exert great force in the Middle East. Ever since the push to invade Iraq, the US has been shedding allies. We have become increasingly dependent for help on an unimpressive handful of wannabes. Turkey sat out the Iraq War: so did France, Germany and Canada, three of our most potent military supporters.

Here’s a vexing question for Republicans. Does Donald Trump know why he won the presidency in 2016? As the chances of war with Iran – war by design or war by miscalculation – appear to increase, this question grows ever more pressing.In 2016, Trump ran on such an anti-interventionist platform that you half expected to wake up and find that he’d received all-important endorsements from Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis and the ghost of Susan Sontag. This was Trump at his best. He launched an astonishing broadside against the Bush family in South Carolina: ‘We should’ve never been in Iraq. We’ve destabilised the Middle East… they lied.

On Monday, Sen. Bernie Sanders circulated an open letter, calling on Congress to override last week’s presidential veto of a bill demanding a halt to US participation in Yemen’s civil war. The bipartisan bill was the first time Congress invoked the 1973 War Powers Resolution to check presidential foreign policy. Amid the president’s myriad other current problems, a potential veto override could be a chance to rub salt in the wounds. The issue of Yemen, then, will linger. Was Yemen worth the veto? The war, occurring the most secluded and oil-poor corner of the Arabian Peninsula, seems, to many, tangential to American interests.

Donald Trump continues to show that he is one of the boldest presidents in modern American history. He may also be the nuttiest. His decision to remove waivers on the purchase of oil from Iran has set America on an unwavering course for war with the Middle Eastern state. Like Franklin Roosevelt, who tried to starve Japan into submission by halting its imports of oil, Trump seems intent on trying to bludgeon Iran into submission by preventing it from exporting any crude. The problem is that the Iranians aren’t cracking. Instead, they are likely to double-down. Already they are threatening to shut down the Strait of Hormuz. Trump will be in dire straits if Iran does that. A fifth of the world’s crude oil flows through it.

Donald Trump is a master of the obvious. This is why his foreign policy keeps surprising the status quo powers of American politics: the media, the bureaucrats, and the elected officials. Today, these wise monkeys are reeling at the news that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps is a ‘foreign terrorist group’, and that the IRGC ‘actively participates in, finances, and promotes terrorism as a tool of statecraft’. Here’s something else that’s obvious. Since 9/11, the United States has staggered from one fiasco to another in the Middle East: the invasion of Iraq, the endorsement of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the trashing of Libya, the incoherent response to the Syrian civil war, the humiliation of an effort to get out of the region through the ‘Iran Deal’.