Iran didn’t adapt to America's playbook. Russia and China already have
The world now knows that, in a daring daylight strike on a clear Saturday in Tehran, the United States and Israel opened what President Donald Trump, in his address to the nation, called "major combat operations" against the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Operation Epic Fury is the very sort of thing that was not supposed to happen under President Donald J. Trump: America appears to be pursuing an open-ended regime-change operation in the Middle East. Having committed the prestige of his presidency to this project, Trump must now see it through. We should be open to the possibility that it will be achieved swiftly. If it is not, then it becomes the dominating project of his second term — and, moreover, the defining one.
There are significant differences between this regime-change project and the ones preceding it in Iraq and Afghanistan. First and foremost, there is no American occupation force in the offing. American aircraft will range across Iran at will; American soldiers will not.
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The president made it explicit in his address that he expects the people of Iran to overthrow their own regime, and there is reason to believe they will. (Alleged footage of Iranians cheering the death of the ayatollah lends credence to this belief.) The good news, if one wishes, is that those other models are not being followed. The bad news is that the most applicable precedent for regime change by airpower alone is Libya.
Yet all this is speculative in these opening days. Iranians are not Libyans, nor Iraqis nor Afghans. After the elaborate machinations in the Venezuelan operation — in which, we now know, human intelligence and canny political calculus played a major role in American success — who can say the same is not underway in Iran? The benefit of the doubt is functionally irrelevant post facto, yet this war-making team has earned it.
The Iranian regime staggers under Israeli-American blows now in part because it is not a learning entity. Having had the opportunity to study the American way of war, especially under Trump — who has, after all, attacked them more than once before — it has apparently failed to adapt. The same is not true of America’s two great-power adversaries, Russia and China. They will have drawn two major lessons already.
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One is that the Americans must never be allowed the time and space to assemble the sort of striking force that took weeks to put in place against Iran. For nearly 40 years, every major American war has begun with a de facto Operation Desert Shield: a prolonged and very visible movement of forces and materiel to the theater of action. This movement almost inevitably becomes war, with only the early 1998 American buildup against Iraq being an exception.
In the generation leading into World War I, mobilization as such became a casus belli — the threat of troops on railways and in position alone was sufficient to justify war — and it would be rational for America’s enemies to draw a similar conclusion now. When American forces mass, an American attack usually follows. Preventing that massing is therefore both urgent and compelling.
The other major lesson America’s adversaries will draw is that American power projection is deeply reliant on free access to bases in allied nations. No American campaign at scale would be possible without land-based access: this was true even against Venezuela, and it is absolutely true against Iran.
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That access, in the present case, does not extend merely to Middle Eastern facilities in Israel, Jordan and elsewhere — it also extends to the network of European facilities that have constituted a hub of American power abroad for generations. Access to those European bases, along with European logistics and support, is essential to what America does now.
This is a reality that American policymakers and officeholders ought to internalize, because our enemies already have. Just as precluding American massing becomes imperative for them, so too does denial of American access — through the weakening of alliances or other means. Expect efforts to fracture and disperse those alliances to accelerate. Even if every corner of American politics does not understand our alliance structure to be a benefit to America, every corner of Russian and Chinese politics does.
The consequences of these lessons will unfold in ways visible and invisible in the very near future.
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This is the sort of thing that was not supposed to happen under Trump, but it is happening because, unlike the ayatollah and his regime, the president does learn and adapt.
What has come to the fore is a set of realities and enduring American interests that drive his actions now, along with his unique preference for cutting the Gordian knot in perennial strategic problems.
A president who ended the Venezuelan regime and who contemplates the end of the Cuban regime is entirely willing to do the same to the Iranian regime.
He has his ideological priors, to be sure, but unlike so many in the Beltway, they are orienting rather than confining. They are also informed by his own sense of history, invoked in his address, which drew upon half a century of bitter Iranian war against the United States. He sought peace and was rebuffed. Now the Iranian regime — what’s left of it — reaps the whirlwind.
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There will be much conversation about the Washington consequences of all this, not least in how the edifice of "restrainers," despite feeling themselves at a historic apogee of Beltway influence, failed to prevent this outcome. In fairness, they might note that they may well stand vindicated in a decade’s time.
One faction is, however, defeated — and deservedly so. It is the squalid chorus of antisemites who have emerged from left and right in recent years, often under the guise of anti-Zionism or "having the conversation we need to have about Israel."
Here is a conversation starter for them: At this very moment, American men and women are in harm’s way, waging war against one of America’s cruelest and most implacable enemies. With them are our allies, our friends and now our brothers in arms, the Israelis. That is a fact that ought to carry finality.
We are at war, and in the skies above Iran, it is the Stars and Stripes and the Star of David — together — fighting for you and me.