The Case for Trump’s War Fog

The Case for Trump’s War Fog

Abe Greenwald, Executive Editor for Commentary

Regarding Donald Trump’s Iran endgame, all we can do is speculate. Depending on when you catch the president, he might speak about the ultimate goal of the war in precise, vague, or even self-contradictory terms.

A lot of Americans have a problem with Trump’s back-and-forth declarations. It’s understandable to want clear, convincing answers about why American men and women are fighting. Is this about achieving a long-lasting peace through regime change or buying a few years of relative Iranian paralysis by destroying the country’s most threatening weapons capabilities? 

Yet over the past 10 days, I’ve become strangely comfortable with Trump’s confusing statements about the war. I have a couple of reasons.

Since we’re all left to speculate, I’ll throw in my hunch with everyone else’s (and we’ll all be wrong in the end, anyway): Trump expects this to be a regime-change war but doesn’t want to say so with clarity until he can determine that the U.S.-Israel campaign has made the prospect viable—or considerably more viable than it is this early into the fighting. Similarly, he doesn’t want to signal the coming of U.S. ground troops unless and until he’s assured that the regime’s fighting forces have been sufficiently pacified and that Americans won’t be dropping into a fatal misadventure. 

Why is that a bad thing?

Critics complain that the president doesn’t know how to end the war. Forget that the war just started. The more important point is that the changing facts on the ground and in the sky will shape the kind of victory the U.S. is able to achieve. Why should Trump demand or forecast regime change before he knows whether doing so will come back to bite him? If we take out a dozen more newly minted supreme leaders, destroy the regime’s missile stocks, secure its fissile material, ensure safe passage in the Strait of Hormuz, and find that the Iranian people are still unable to seize political power from the remnants of the regime, then this will have been a successful war to defang Iran for the coming years. 

If, however, the regime is blown to smithereens, the IRGC is decimated and induced to give up, and Iranians obtain arms and take control, this will have been a war for regime change. That’s the preferred outcome. But even those of us who are most eager to see Iranians liberated don’t believe that it’s the U.S.’s responsibility to ensure their freedom with a lengthy, high-risk nation-building investment. Those days are long gone.    

There’s another reason that Trump’s ambiguity makes good sense. The only thing he should be telegraphing to Tehran is American strength. And for all his unintelligibility, he has repeatedly delivered that message in simple, straightforward terms. If we’re guessing at his next moves, so is the regime. All they know—despite what they claim—is that it’s taken less than two weeks for the U.S. and Israel to raze to dust what the regime has been building up for half a century. 

That’s all we know, too. For now, I’ll take it.