The world now knows that in a daring daylight attack on a bright Saturday in Tehran, the United States and Israel opened what President Donald Trump called “major combat operations” against the Islamic Republic of Iran in his address to the nation.
Operation Epic Fury is something that should not have happened under President Donald J. Trump: America appears to be pursuing an open-ended regime change operation in the Middle East. Now that Trump has entrusted the prestige of his presidency to this project, he must now see it through to completion. We must be open to the possibility that this will be achieved quickly. If not, it will become the dominant project of his second term – and the defining one at that.
There are significant differences between this regime change project and the projects that preceded it in Iraq and Afghanistan. First and foremost, there is no American occupying force in the offing. US planes will fly through Iran at will; American soldiers won’t do that.
The president made explicit in his speech that he expects the Iranian people to overthrow their own regime, and there is reason to believe that this will happen. (Alleged images of Iranians cheering the Ayatollah’s death lend credence to this belief.) The good news, if you wish, is that those other models are not being followed. The bad news is that Libya is the most appropriate precedent for regime change through air power.
Still, this is all speculative in these opening days. Iranians are not Libyans, nor Iraqis, nor Afghans. Who can say that the same thing is not going on in Iran, after the elaborate machinations of the Venezuelan operation – in which, as we now know, human intelligence and shrewd political analysis played a major role in the American success? The benefit of the doubt is functionally irrelevant in retrospect, but this war team still earned it.
The Iranian regime is now reeling under Israeli-American blows, in part because it is not a learning entity. Now that they’ve had the chance to study America’s approach to war, especially under Trump, who has attacked them more than once before, the country has apparently failed to adapt. The same does not apply to America’s two major adversaries, Russia and China. They will have already learned two important lessons.
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One is that the Americans should never be given the time and space to assemble the kind of strike force that took weeks to deploy against Iran. For nearly four decades, every major American war has begun with a de facto Operation Desert Shield: a prolonged and highly visible movement of forces and equipment into the theater of war. This movement almost inevitably degenerates into war, with the only exception being the American build-up against Iraq in early 1998.
In the generation leading up to World War I, mobilization as such became a casus belli—the threat of troops on the railroads and in position alone was enough to justify war—and it would be rational for America’s enemies to draw a similar conclusion now. When American forces gather, an American attack usually follows. Preventing this mass formation is therefore both urgent and compelling.
The other important lesson that America’s adversaries will learn is that American power projection is highly dependent on free access to bases in allied countries. No large-scale US campaign would be possible without land-based access: this was true even against Venezuela, and it is absolutely true against Iran.
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That access, in the present case, extends not only to Middle Eastern facilities in Israel, Jordan and elsewhere – but also extends to the network of European facilities that have been a hub of American power abroad for generations. Access to those European bases, along with European logistics and support, is essential to what America is doing now.
This is a reality that American policymakers and officeholders should internalize, because our enemies already have. Just as excluding American mass support for them becomes imperative, so does denying American access – through weakening alliances or other means. Expect efforts to break and spread these alliances to accelerate. Even if every corner of American politics does not understand that our alliance structure is an advantage to America, every corner of Russian and Chinese politics does.
The consequences of these lessons will unfold in both visible and invisible ways in the very near future.
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This kind of thing should not have happened under Trump, but it is happening because the president, unlike the Ayatollah and his regime, is learning and adapting.
What has emerged is a set of realities and enduring American interests that now shape his actions, along with his unique preference for cutting the Gordian knot on perennial strategic problems.
A president who has ended the Venezuelan regime and is considering the end of the Cuban regime is perfectly willing to do the same to the Iranian regime.
Sure, he has his ideological priorities, but unlike so many on the Beltway, they are exploratory rather than restrictive. They are also informed by his own sense of history, which he cited in his speech, which built on a half-century of bitter Iranian war against the United States. He sought peace and was rejected. Now the Iranian regime – what is left of it – is reaping the whirlwind.
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There will be a lot of talk about the fallout from all this in Washington, not least about how the edifice of “restrainers,” despite being at an all-time high of Beltway influence, failed to prevent this outcome. Frankly, they might remark that in ten years they might be proven right.
However, one faction is defeated – and rightly so. It’s the nasty chorus of anti-Semites that has emerged from the left and right in recent years, often under the guise of anti-Zionism or “having the conversation we need to have about Israel.”
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Here’s a conversation starter for them: Right now, American men and women are in danger, waging war against one of America’s cruelest and most implacable enemies. With them are our allies, our friends and now our brothers in arms, the Israelis. That is a fact that must be final.
We are at war, and in the skies above Iran, the Stars and Stripes and the Star of David are fighting – together – for you and me.
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