Why U.S. Victory in Iran Would Be Bad for Washington—and the World

So that there is no moral confusion about this statement, I must make explicit what I am not calling for: I do not wish for the death or injury of U.S. soldiers. Nor do I wish for the destruction of the state of Israel, whose right to security I have supported in column after column.

With these provisos, though, I have come to the conclusion that an outright U.S. victory over Iran would be more dangerous for the United States, Israel, and the entire world than an end to this senseless war by some other means—even if that means resorting to the classic, face-saving tactic of declaring victory and “going home” in the absence of any clear-cut political, military, or strategic triumph over the remnants of the Iranian government.

First, let’s acknowledge the obvious. U.S. President Donald Trump himself has never given a remotely coherent vision of what a victory in Iran would consist of. Therefore, to support this war means subscribing to an open-ended and unreasoning view of U.S. power—a view that American might makes right—and indulging what Washington can do in ways that are totally divorced from any moral or ethical consideration of what it should do.

But this is just for starters. What is wrong with this war is not just the fact that Trump never sought authorization from Congress, as the U.S. Constitution calls for him to do. It is also more than his inability to provide a clear, honest, and consistent statement of his government’s purposes in this conflict. And it is more, too, than the reality that a president who has boasted that he knows more than generals has been repeatedly and embarrassingly taken aback by Iran’s obvious and foreseeable efforts to defend itself.

The far bigger problem that underpins all of these realities is that the United States is governed by a malignant narcissist whose megalomaniacal tendencies have bloomed alarmingly before the world’s eyes during his second term in office. Scarcely a day goes by without more stark evidence of this fact, from his vulgar and grandiose remaking of the White House (including a new ballroom) to designs to place his likeness on U.S. currency to his power-drunken statements about “taking Cuba” and being able to do whatever he wants with a sovereign country—all while still obviously unchastened by his government’s deepening imbroglio in Iran.

It is precisely because the U.S. body politic has found no way of reining in Trump and imposing reasonable limits on his power that we must hope that the current conflict with Iran can finally do so. In eras past, when dangerously toxic characters have imposed their grip on the country’s governance, Congress, the courts, and U.S. civil society have generated a kind of immune response, restoring the nation to a semblance of health. Think of President Richard Nixon and Watergate. Think of the moment when, in 1954, Joseph N. Welch, the chief counsel for the U.S. Army, upbraided fascism-inclined Sen. Joseph McCarthy, famously challenging his reckless red-baiting during a hearing, saying: “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

It is impossible to cast an Iran ruled by Islamic clerics, with its record of domestic and international violence, as heroic. But the possibility of Trump being able to destroy another country and impose his personal whims and authority on yet another nation has become more frightening than a stalemate or even an embarrassing end to the war for the United States.

If Trump is unbridled now, just imagine how wildly and dangerously inflated his sense of impulsive, will-driven prerogative and impunity would become in the wake of a defeat of Iran. Neither the United States nor the world can afford to have the U.S. presidency mutate into a cancerous dictatorship that continues to ride rampant and roughshod over the rest of the world.

And for those who believe that the United States is rightfully protecting Israel, I have two responses. The United States under Trump is doubling down on the mistakes of the Biden administration, essentially playing the junior partner with bottomless pockets to an Israel that has become addicted to permanent war as a substitute for politics and reason in its own region, and thereby empowering and emboldening another malignant politician, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in the process. Netanyahu seems to believe in nothing more than a strategy toward Israel’s neighbors that consists of the grotesquely named “mowing the grass” to wipe out any Arab resistance to Israeli policies.

But that approach is doomed to fail. This is not only because Israel’s neighbors cannot be wished away but because, as Israeli atrocities multiply in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and elsewhere, the eventual regeneration of movements that believe they are justified in vengeance is guaranteed.

Meanwhile, however thrilled Netanyahu may feel in the moment, exulting in the fact that he seems to have realized his self-avowed dream of 40 years of bringing Iran to its knees, Israelis and people who care about the country’s future security should worry about a future in which Washington has lost most of its other alliances, its standing in the world has fallen off a cliff, and it has foolishly depleted its financial and military resources in pursuit of an ill-judged war. A United States fiscally sapped to the tune of another $200 billion, as the White House just requested for its foolhardy war, will be less able to spend on reasonable and well-rounded security needs, whether in the Middle East or elsewhere.

In fact, China and Russia stand to become the biggest beneficiaries of this conflict. Already, the ongoing war is weakening Washington’s security posture in Asia, and the surge in oil prices has made financing the Ukraine war vastly easier for Russian President Vladimir Putin. The United States even stands to emerge weaker in the Middle East. That is because the entire rationale for the quasi-alliances linking the Gulf states to Washington is that the latter can provide them security against Tehran. But missile and drone attacks from Iran have shown this to be manifestly untrue. Gulf states have allowed the U.S. military to use their territories to mount land-based missile attacks on Iran, and Tehran is making them pay the cost with damaged airports, the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and the destruction of their visions of becoming international havens of tourism, sports, and finance.

The way to end this war is not with bombs but with an easing of tensions and eventual guarantees of security for all in the Middle East. That includes Iran. The world was closer to such an outcome under the arrangements negotiated by the Obama administration to subject Iran’s nuclear program to strict controls. Trump started a war even though some of his own intelligence reports acknowledged there was no imminent threat. Finding a way back to dialogue and mutual reassurances will be incredibly difficult, but that is the only way forward.