The Warlords’ Insolence

President Donald Trump’s assault on Iran has been costlier, bloodier, and harder than its naïve architects expected. True, it has degraded Iran’s capabilities, written down its navy and hammered its infrastructure. But the price has been steep, materially and politically. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has inflicted harm, and self-harm, far and wide. Such is the damage to price stability that it led, ironically, to Washington allowing Tehran to sell oil, the kind of yield to the theocrats of Tehran that U.S. Iran hawks once denounced. 

Iran’s regime has proven resilient, resilient enough to survive decapitation. Indeed, the assassination of “supreme leader” Ali Khamenei has empowered hardline elements within the country, in turn making it harder for Trump to resolve the war via coercive bargaining. As for forcing Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions or trade away its missile programme, the war has weakened internal voices within the Islamic Republic for that path. Depending on which day Trump’s envoys were speaking, the war was supposed to break the regime, or end its prerogative to enrich uranium, or terminate its missile programme. No dice.

Five weeks of pounding has resolved nothing, fixed nothing, achieved nothing momentous or constructive beyond attrition. And that wasteful attrition — including 1600 civilian dead and rising — has come at a price for America. The war consumes scarce military munitions that are needed in other theatres. It bottles up American forces at a time when China still menaces Taiwan. It enriches Russia, thereby weakening America’s bargaining hand against it. Operation Epic Fury may display the superpower’s capacity for destruction. But Iran’s defiance, its refusal to buckle to ever more strident threats, also makes Trump’s war an exercise in impotence, reducing Washington’s prestige. Iran’s regime is physically weakened but politically stronger, even more resolved to pursue a latent nuclear capability. If this is victory, or if victory somehow comes, it will taste of ashes.

The pyrrhic campaign has also inflicted a further harm. It has needlessly damaged U.S. alliances, reducing the amount of available cooperation in the future when America may need it. At the very time Washington ought rationally to prioritise its foreign policy efforts in a serious dialogue with Europe, instead the Trumpists are pleased to set relations on fire. They issue short-sighted public threats and recriminations against Britain, France and other European states. They insist that a condition of NATO is unquestioning support and base access for all operations anywhere. Unlike their forbears Dwight Eisenhower or Lyndon Johnson, they refuse to separate quarrels about individual wars from the need to sustain a wider relationship. This is mindless lashing out. It is symptomatic of a state that entered the war intoxicated with its sense of power, and deeply anxious about its own relative decline, only then to run up against its own limits.

As then, so now, various Washington hardliners decide that the obvious move is to bash Western Europe. Disappointed that their ill-conceived children’s crusade in the Middle East has faltered, they turn their rhetorical guns on other parties who were sceptical of the wisdom of the war to begin with, and who remain strangely reluctant to leap on the bandwagon now that the wheels are falling off.

The last time this happened in earnest, it was a faction in and around the court of President George W. Bush who decided that the rational response to bloody chaos in Iraq was to excoriate transatlantic allies publicly. Donald Rumsfeld, Bush’s Secretary of Defence, lambasted “Old Europe”. Colin Powell, despite cultivating a reputation as the respectable face of the Bushites, threatened to punish France for its dissent after Baghdad fell in May, 2003. And now we have the embarrassing spectacle of Ari Fleischer, George W. Bush’s nuncio during that war, giving it a high school try. Here is the dismal fare he offers:

As it happens, the U.S. did pay ransom to the pirates for a time. And isn’t it rather Britain and France’s refusal to acquiesce now that is the source of his grievance, here? Isn’t it not their weakness but the quiet mettle of both countries’ governments that enrages this Fox News prophet, unleashing his pig-ignorance and pig-insolence?

Blunt words deserve a blunt response. Let’s start with the big one, discretely absent from Fleischer’s potted history. In September 1939, Britain and France declared war on Nazi Germany, the greatest threat to civilisation in history. The United States did not. Discuss. It stood aloof, refusing belligerence, content to be a hard bargaining arsenal, donating deficient destroyers in exchange for Britain’s west Atlantic bases. It waited to be attacked. It waited for Adolf Hitler to declare war upon it. And America could only lead an invasion of western Europe in the end because Britain had held out for five brutal years.

If the foreign policies of further back are dispositive of the value of countries like Britain, Fleischer will be intrigued to learn that it was British naval dominance of the nineteenth century, after the war of 1812, that screened the U.S. and enabled it to focus on growth by delaying its own naval expansion. You’re welcome.

Fleischer seems to think that the U.S. is a stranger to Realpolitik and compromise. It’s not a conversation he should invite. Who sold out who over Northern Ireland? Who signed the Doha Agreement? Who cut a large deal indeed with China in 1972? Who sponsored the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s and facilitated the arming of Bosnia’s jihadis in the 1990s? If the test of a country’s valour is its refusal to bargain with evil, it’s a test every great power flunks.

Unwisely, Fleischer wants to turn the botched military campaign of today into a general Socratic dialogue on the historical virtues and vices of the republic and its allies. He wants a bedtime story of American valour and the fecklessness of others. A reminder is due, therefore, that the countries he scorns bled for years in Afghanistan. Tell dead men’s families, from Britain to Denmark, about West European free-riding. Tell the many more maimed and psychically broken by the long war against the Taliban. Fleischer may also be unaware of British and West German divisions that helped hold the line against the Red Army throughout the Cold War, or the Royal Navy frigates and submarines that endured long, bleak deployments in the frigid, storm-ravaged Northeast Atlantic to provide the Alliance’s principal anti-submarine screen. Or perhaps he forgets to mention it.

Fleischer affects to hold Eastern European states in high regard. Yet under Bush, in the summer of 2008 as Russia invaded Georgia, the United States delayed and limited its response, turning up only after a safe interval when the aggressor had left the scene. And this despite Georgia’s participation in Operation Iraqi Freedom, precisely on the basis that the investment would earn repayment in U.S. patronage and protection.

Recall, too, that under Bush, the U.S. prioritised arms control agreements with Russia over the welfare of Chechnya, whom Moscow was brutally flaying. While we are on the topic, if you are an American super-patriot, isn’t the whole question of historical commitments to Eastern Europe rather a minefield, from Yalta and Budapest onwards?

The United States, despite its claims to singularity, is a normal (only larger) great power similar to the countries Fleischer denounces. It tends to pursue its interests, narrowly conceived, and sometimes deliberately stays out of fights that aren’t worth the candle, despite the expectations of third parties. 

Like Marco Rubio and Donald Trump, Fleischer wants to make the NATO alliance a mechanism for automatic allied support beyond the North Atlantic area, for any undertaking a president fancies. The whole point of that alliance, and one reason it survived, is that it is confined to the defence of the North Atlantic. NATO European allies are no more obliged to take part in operations beyond that area than the United States was obliged to help Portugal’s colonial war in Angola, or Britain’s in Malaysia. Or, indeed, Britain and France over Suez.

No matter how strongly Washington demands it, its transatlantic allies reserve the right not to participate in hubristic, self-defeating military campaigns. If the consequence is America’s abandonment of NATO, formal or otherwise, then alas that is how it will be. If the U.S. wants a more distant, more protectionist rearming Europe that tilts towards China, cuts off intelligence sharing and base access, and reduces its orders to U.S. arms firms, it can have it. Is that really the future America looks forward to?

If this makes unpleasant reading for Americans, that is precisely because it is the kind of conversation abroad that loud, warlike voices in the U.S. are encouraging. As it happens, there are those of us who are making a losing argument, that Europe’s best pathway for security is to offer a deal to Washington, to negotiate a gradual, orderly and cooperative burden shift, to offer the U.S. the main thing it says it wants in the region, a European-led defence, in exchange for time and help. But hostile, demagogic rhetoric and overt threats by Fleischer and his ilk are making it harder by the day to make that argument.

Washington would be better served listening to those Americans who warn that it is better to end all this truculence. It isn’t the unipolar era. The world is wide and full of friction. Quieter voices should be heard, who argue that the U.S. should concentrate its strength rather than pick fights everywhere, cultivate and bargain with allies rather than humiliate them, and show “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind”.