Almost as soon as the U.S. began the war in Iran, an international consensus decided that it was a terrible idea. And since then, the critics have had plenty of material to confirm that thesis. We’ve seen confusing messaging from the White House, rifts with Israel, broken ceasefires, an MOU that lasted less than a month, reports of diminished munitions, unhappy allies, an overheating bond market, and of course, a steady din of Truth Social threats that are invariably walked back by the president 72 hours later.
But what if all of this ultimately works?
I think it’s worth keeping in mind that the net impact of the Iran War remains a largely unsettled question. So rather than surveying a sea of expert opinions deriding the war as a catastrophe or an endless supply of Foreign Affairs essays explaining why the U.S. strategy is doomed to fail, I will begin by citing not a think tanker, but cultural critic Chuck Klosterman, from his book But What If We’re Wrong?:
But what about the things we’re all wrong about?
What about ideas that are so accepted and internalized that we’re not even in a position to question their fallibility? These are ideas so ingrained in the collective consciousness that it seems foolhardy to even wonder if they’re potentially untrue. Sometimes these seem like questions only a child would ask, since children aren’t paralyzed by the pressures of consensus and common sense.
It’s a dissonance that creates the most unavoidable of intellectual paradoxes: When you ask smart people if they believe there are major ideas currently accepted by the culture at large that will eventually be proven false, they will say, “Well, of course. There must be. That phenomenon has been experienced by every generation who’s ever lived, since the dawn of human history.” Yet offer those same people a laundry list of contemporary ideas that might fit that description, and they’ll be tempted to reject them all. […]
In her book Being Wrong, author Kathryn Schulz spends a few key pages on the concept of “naive realism.” Schulz notes that while there are few conscious proponents of naive realism, “that doesn’t mean there are no naive realists.” I would go a step further than Schulz; I suspect most conventionally intelligent people are naive realists, and I think it might be the defining intellectual quality of this era. The straightforward definition of naive realism doesn’t seem that outlandish: It’s a theory that suggests the world is exactly as it appears. Obviously, this viewpoint creates a lot of opportunity for colossal wrongness (e.g., “The sun appears to move across the sky, so the sun must be orbiting Earth”). But my personal characterization of naive realism is wider and more insidious. I think it operates as the manifestation of two ingrained beliefs:
- “When considering any question, I must be rational and logical, to the point of dismissing any unverifiable data as preposterous,” and
- “When considering any question, I’m going to assume that the information we currently have is all the information that will ever be available.”
If we grant for argument’s sake that Chuck is correct and naive realism is the defining intellectual quality of an era in which public intellectuals are terrified of criticism and chronically seek the comfort of measurable support for their arguments, then how might that bear on Iran discourse?
What’s clear and measurable after six months is that the war has taken longer than Trump said it would, messaging from the White House is reliably chaotic, domestic prices are rising, allies are reeling with bond problems of their own, it’s been politically catastrophic for Republicans, and there’s no easy off-ramp from any of this. It’s rational and logical, then, to side with the former Chatham House director who recently called the war “a strategic loss and an embarrassment” reflective of “a whipsaw foreign policy that doesn’t know its limits.”
The War at Six Months
As you can probably guess, I suspect those takes are simplistic and naive, or at least too confident at the current stage. For one, Iran’s long-term leverage has already been permanently degraded. American allies in the region have begun constructing billions of dollars’ worth of pipelines to circumvent the Strait of Hormuz, and once those projects are complete, there is no unringing the bell for the IRGC and the current regime. Their longstanding leverage over the global economy will be diminished, leaving behind a regime that’s massively unpopular both domestically and regionally, with vanishing ability to defend its interests. Even Iraq, long a quasi-vassal of the Iranians, is building a pipeline and partnering with the U.S.
Establishing alternatives to Hormuz is a break with nearly a half-century of history that never would have happened without the war as a forcing function to focus minds and mobilize capital. I wrote about this inevitable outcome back in May. Previously, because 20% of the world’s oil transits the strait (in addition to petrochemicals, gas, helium, fertilizer, and more critical inputs), the Iranian regime has preserved its reign with the implicit threat of holding the global economy hostage and decimating the political fortunes of any U.S. leaders who undertake a prolonged effort at regime change. Indeed, as Karim Sadjadpour wrote for the Atlantic in March, that strategy worked well for Iran in the past, and it’s exactly what the IRGC assumed would prevail in the present conflict.
The IRGC has failed, though—at least so far. Oil prices have been contained (with the help of China), American markets have continued to grow, and Iran’s success in closing the strait appears to be waning as we reach the middle innings of the conflict. Bloomberg reported last week that Goldman analysts have found that “oil exports from the Persian Gulf have recovered to around two-thirds of pre-war levels.”
A natural follow-up to that data might be: “That’s great the strait is now two-thirds open, but it was 100 percent open before the war!” Yes, and now let’s consider what else was true before the war.
Iran was cheating on the JCPOA as soon as it was signed, and the regime of course continued enriching uranium after the JCPOA was scrapped. Over the past decade, its nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities had metastasized into an ominous problem for the stability of the Middle East and the world. In addition to either tacitly or actively sponsoring terror throughout the region, including the October 7th attacks and Houthi attacks on American shippers in the Red Sea, Iran was explicitly aligned with Russia and China and receiving military assistance from both, all while murderously subjugating a population of approximately 90 million people. And the problems, across every vector, were getting worse. Whatever the costs of the war have been, doing nothing came with costs, too.
The U.S. chose action. In response, Iran has largely failed to cripple the global economy while also proactively attacking countries like Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, which has undermined the regime’s efforts to turn the Middle East against the U.S. Instead, those countries have pushed the U.S. to eradicate the regime for good, and now it’s Iran that looks isolated and crippled. As Brett McGurk wrote at CNN this week:
According to the International Monetary Fund, Iran’s economy is expected to contract by more than 5% this year, with inflation approaching 70%. The value of Iran’s currency has fallen sharply. Prices for basic goods have soared. An Iranian Labor Ministry official recently estimated that more than one million jobs disappeared during the first three months of the war alone.
These statistics matter because Iran’s ability to sustain the conflict ultimately depends on more than its remaining missile arsenal. Before the war, the Iranian regime confronted unprecedented public pressure against its repressive rule and failing economy. Thousands of Iranians were reportedly killed in the streets. […]
But the Guards require resources to rule by force, and this new fourth act — a military embargo — is something that Iran has never confronted before. Indeed, this is the first time since the 1979 Revolution that Iran has faced a quarantine on its economic lifeline through Hormuz.
Their way out is to stop threatening ships in the Strait and abandon what’s left of its mostly destroyed enrichment program. That’s a deal Trump would accept. Doing either, however, from the vantage point of the Guards would show weakness and threaten their rule.
From here, we’ll see. I’m not stupid enough to predict an imminent American victory in the middle of a conflict that has, by some measures, been ongoing for about 45 years. Anything can happen over the next few months, and U.S. costs are real in the meantime. The war has claimed at least 18 American lives and required tremendous sacrifices from service members and their families. Regional bases have been decimated, resources are being stretched thin as the conflict prolongs, and the diminished stock of missile interceptors looks real. Meanwhile, spending continues, gas prices are as high as they were in 2022, and Treasury yields remain volatile. Continued upheaval in that second area could strain the entire U.S. economy (as well as the government’s future debt service).
Where I disagree with many critics of the war is in their conclusion that any of those data points are evidence of a failed or failing war. I see that data as evidence that successfully prosecuting any war is incredibly chaotic and fraught with political, economic, and human downsides.
Costs, Benefits and the Bet
Measured against the warnings from experts that were expressed at the outset of this conflict, the U.S. is doing quite well. The price of oil has not skyrocketed and sparked a global economic crisis, while Trump has not committed 250,000 troops to taking Iran by land, risking tens of thousands of lives in the process. The U.S. strategy hasn’t been perfect, but it hasn’t been static, either. The military eventually arrived at the right blockade strategy, and this week struck two Iranian oil tankers in a new “tanker-for-tanker” approach that makes quite a bit of sense. Finally, interceptors notwithstanding, the stocks of offensive weapons are not a problem. My expectation is that the current semi-kinetic equilibrium will hold until the midterm elections in November, and from there, the U.S. will continue to escalate in an effort to topple the Iranian regime altogether. That’s the goal, that’s the off-ramp. And it’s also possible that Iran will accelerate that timeline.
The core question is of course whether all these risks are worth it. The U.S. rationale for attacking Iran was summarized by one writer in March as “We just sort of felt like it”; to this day, I think that’s how many people view the war. Riding high off the win in Venezuela, with Netanyahu egging them on, and with visions of taking Kharg Island that date to the 1980s, Trump and his administration assumed it would be easy. And why not? they thought.
Through that lens, then sure, the war looks profoundly reckless, particularly in the context of constrained military resources, exhausted service members, and a looming confrontation with China. But for reasons I laid out in March, I continue to see potential benefits that are obvious, and perfectly consistent with countering China during a cold war with Schrödinger’s characteristics.
For one, in the wake of this war the U.S. is now entrenched as the world’s preeminent energy superpower and has gained strategic leverage that comes with that title. Perhaps that happened by accident, or perhaps not. But second, and contrary to explanations from Trump, Marco Rubio, Scott Bessent, and Pete Hegseth—who have no reason to state all of their objectives publicly—the war has always looked to me like a calculated bet that toppling a straightforwardly tyrannical Iranian regime, securing the Strait of Hormuz, and gaining leverage over the flow of regional energy exports is not only achievable but could also be a potentially powerful deterrent to Chinese aggression in the Taiwan Strait. China imports more than 50% of its oil from the Middle East, in addition to critical petrochemicals. Assuming the costs can be managed (and they have been so far), I’m completely comfortable with the U.S. using its military to throttle a murderous regime and chase that strategic upside.
Trump’s strategic intent aside, what should also be clear is that it’s required real mettle and conviction to stay committed to a comically unpopular war that looks like it will cost the Republicans the midterm elections, which in turn could lead to any number of political headwinds for Trump personally. I wrote only two weeks ago that I find Trump foreign policy exhausting, but if the president were as selfish and capricious as his loudest critics allege, he would have bailed months ago. Slinking away with a harebrained sequel to the JCPOA would have been easier, and probably smarter politically.
Instead, the war continues. Iran’s leaders have already forfeited their long-term leverage by attempting to close the strait and are now being suffocated as the U.S. military opens shipping lanes for everyone else and closes them to Iran. We’ll see how much longer the regime and the IRGC can survive, whether the U.S. economy can remain stable, and how much more the U.S. will escalate in the months to come. The ultimate goal appears to be removing a regime that has targeted U.S. troops and destabilized the Middle East for the past 40 years, and killed 30,000 Iranian protesters just last January. And if you’ve seen what’s happened to Venezuelan oil exports to China this year, it’s probably not coincidence that decisively winning this war would leave China’s most prolific oil suppliers indebted to the U.S. military, which may also have final say over who and what passes through the Strait of Hormuz.
Through that lens, the war looks like a wildly ambitious assertion of American strength as a potentially catastrophic standoff with China looms in the background. And yes, the entire exercise could be a last gasp of hegemony. It could end horribly. But I would ignore the people telling you it already has.
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Note: I’ll be off next Friday. We’ll return to publishing the following week, September 18.