Walter Russell Mead on Developments in Iran / Free Ex

Well, short answer is because President Trump decided to do it now. And I suppose, you know, so we need to ask why he thought this was the time and why things were, you know, in such a shape that war was the best answer. I think there you would say that probably this is the weakest the Iranians have been in a very long time. In the 12-day war last summer, Israel, with an assist from the US, really took down a lot of their air defense systems. Their economy is on the ropes. They've actually ordered some fairly significant weapons from Russia and China, but those haven't been delivered yet. So there might well have been a sense in the White House that Iran is only going to get stronger, and as it gets stronger, it's going to be even less amenable to the kind of negotiations we would like to see. So that they may have just seen an opportunity right now.

I said, first of all, I've never been that comfortable with the war of choice, war of necessity argument, because almost all wars are wars of choice in the sense that you always have the choice. You can surrender. So the Germans can come across Belgium and Belgium can surrender and France can surrender. And very, very definitely when Churchill said, 'We're not surrendering,' that's a war of choice. Hitler was offering a peace deal. So that I think is just sort of fog that needs to be cleared out. But this is an offensive war in that Iran was not at that moment contemplating or carrying out major military action either against the US or against Israel. So this is very much, in that sense, a war that you initiate rather than a war that you respond to. And that I think politically it's a real double or nothing kind of thing for the president. If this thing ends badly, it's a quagmire, or the repercussions are terrible, it sets off some kind of regional chaos and instability that maybe then affects oil markets and raises prices for the long term, etc., etc., etc. A lot of people are going to say, 'Well, Mr. President, why did you wake up one morning and start this stupid, stupid war?' On the other hand, if it's pretty quick and there's a good result, there'll be a lot of people saying, 'Well, Mr. President, what a genius you are.' So it's a real gamble.

Well, you've got what you might call the Venezuela option, where elements within the regime decide that at this point it's better to work with the United States than against it. And in a sense, the US then uses Iran's access to world oil markets as a point of leverage to keep the government moving in what Americans think of as the right direction, away from nuclear weapons, away from ballistic missile programs, away from subversion of its neighbors. And I think that is probably quite acceptable to the White House. They would score that one as a win. I suspect the Israelis might score it as a win. You could also see, perhaps on a more optimistic note, you know, there's a great popular revolution in Iran. The fury against the mullahs erupts and Iran emerges with a very different kind of government, one that is aligned with the West not out of necessity but out of the choice of the Iranian people. That's probably the best possible result. I would not argue that it is the most likely result. But either of those two would probably score as a win in the American political context.

A loss? How about a long civil war in Iran that creates millions of refugees, that engulfs Iraq, that starts having a big impact on the security of oil flows, perhaps stimulating the return of jihadist ideology among Sunnis who feel threatened by everything that's going on there. Iran's uranium gets leached out to various groups that are even more radical than the current government. You think of a million ways this thing could go badly wrong.