What Trump's Iran Humiliation Can Teach Democrats About Fighting

Let’s use Donald Trump’s Iran debacle as a metaphor for domestic accountability politics.

If you asked me to place a bet on the near-term resolution of Trump’s war on Iran, I’d ̶i̶n̶f̶i̶l̶t̶r̶a̶t̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶W̶h̶i̶t̶e̶ ̶H̶o̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶m̶o̶n̶e̶t̶i̶z̶e̶ ̶i̶n̶s̶i̶d̶e̶ ̶i̶n̶f̶o̶r̶m̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶K̶a̶l̶s̶h̶i̶ still wager that it ends as stupidly as it began: Something resembling the status quo ante will be restored, but with Iran’s hand greatly strengthened. America will be humiliated everywhere outside redoubts in the U.S. where people find comfort or profit in the propagation of self-soothing lies.

But that could be wrong! Predicting near-term events with great specificity is hard even under the best circumstances, unfogged by war.

What about the medium and long run? Even harder! As we drift away from specificity toward broad strokes, things get a little clearer. For instance: I don’t think Iran’s rivals in the region, nor the broader world, will gladly tolerate a new status quo in which, thanks to Trump, Iran gets to control a global economic kill switch.

Iran is not as megalomaniacal as the U.S. under Trump. Iranian leaders seem to realize their fortunes will change if and when global publics no longer view it principally as a victim of foreign aggression. Nobody can credibly blame Iran for defending itself, but they will blame Iran for extorting the world after the war is over. So I don’t suspect Iran intends to brandish its ability to shut down the Strait of Hormuz the same way, say, Trump wielded tariff authority over the past year. Iran isn’t mighty enough to force the world to its knees.

But it does have regional ambitions. Either those will yield, and the Iranian revolution will give way to normalized relations with the west, or it will husband its new power long enough to develop a nuclear deterrent. As nice and clean as the Hormuz deterrent turns out to be, it can be worked around. If keeping the strait open and safe requires making endless concessions to a scheming and corrupt regime, rival powers will make new investments—in infrastructure, to bring commodities to market other ways, and in innovations, to reduce our dependence on dirty energy. Or there will be more war.

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This is why Benjamin Netanyahu had such bad luck, until Trump’s second term, trying to persuade American presidents to effect regime change in Iran on his behalf.

The U.S. government surely sits on many different plans for war with Iran. These plans just as surely include contingencies for the risk to the Strait of Hormuz. The idea that Iran would respond to an air campaign or invasion by making passage through the strait impossible (or intolerably risky) has been well understood for decades. Thus, the only truly viable war plans are ones in which that risk is eliminated, or in which the U.S. and allied publics are bought-in enough to endure the sacrifice of a lengthy energy crisis: an occupation big enough, and well-enough supported with intelligence, to protect ships transiting the strait; a just-war scenario in which everyone knows why we’re at war, and broadly supports its aims.

The approach Trump has taken, of punching Iran in the nose (decapitating its leadership, destroying its military infrastructure) without landing a knockout blow, and placing himself on the hook politically for all the economic and humanitarian consequences, is not contained in any viable war plan, because it is dumb. Good advisers would never intentionally tempt their decision-making bosses to pick a big fight without preparing for easily anticipated consequences.

And I think this is more or less why Democratic leaders and their advisers are so impervious to arguments from the outside that they retool the party for fighting.

In their minds, fighting Trump the way he should be fought, to say nothing of fascism-proofing America post-Trump, entails political risks that are a bit like going to war with Iran on a lark. It isn’t that the pro-democracy coalition is too weak to prevail in theory, and in this case, the cause is clearly righteous. It’s just that winning will be hard, and fighting will unleash political consequences that an unprimed public will not tolerate. If Dems cross a red line, then retreat, we’ll all be worse off than if they’d made do with the rotten status quo ante; and the fascists will know liberals lack the determination required to win.

And here’s my big concession: ...