How Will the Iran War End? Even Trump May Not Really Know

From the beginning of the Iran conflict, United States president Donald Trump has presented an array of reasons and objectives for attacking Iran. Many of them are contradictory:

• It’s about nuclear weapons (the same ones that were “obliterated” last year).
• It’s about fundamental regime change (and yet the “Venezuela solution” would also be just fine).
• There was an imminent threat of attack against the US (which no intelligence agency was able to pick up, and which a recent high-level resignation from the administration has publicly claimed never existed)—or Trump just had a “gut feeling” that it was time to do this, as it has to be done sooner or later anyway.
• An impending Israeli attack pushed him into it (or he pushed the Israelis).
• It’s about the Iranian people choosing their next leader (but Trump must have final say in who that is).
• This could go on for a month or more (or it is “very complete, pretty much,” and could be over “very soon”).
• America doesn’t need any allies in this fight and has already won the war without them (but they need to send ships right away).

Trump supporters regard all of this as a sophisticated strategy designed to keep opponents off-guard. Sometimes called “the weave,” it is held to be a process of veering between different courses to keep opponents guessing and maintain maximum options until the last minute.

A large part of this strategy is reducing the number of people and power centres involved in the ultimate decision down to a few trusted individuals who report directly to Trump, thus keeping everyone else in the dark. There is a reason why the entire diplomatic apparatus of the US has been sidelined in the search for peace in the major conflicts of the day (Ukraine, Gaza, and now Iran) by the president’s son-in-law and a real estate developer friend.

Perhaps this approach works well in the world of real estate, though Trump has gone spectacularly bankrupt more than a few times. But it is not well suited to statecraft. If the United States expects allies to support America’s actions, and even contribute forces, Washington needs to let them know what it is doing and why before the shooting starts. If adversaries are to be offered “off-ramps” to de-escalate conflicts, they need to know what those ramps are. Perhaps most importantly, if they are to support it, the American public needs to understand the course of action being taken.

Moreover, Trump’s approach to diplomacy shows very little regard for any perspective but his own; the idea that the “other side” may have its objectives and priorities seems alien to him. And he is frequently so isolated from reality that his perspective can be spectacularly wrong. In Gaza, the idea that Palestinians could be induced to voluntarily leave their homes and face permanent refugee status elsewhere, even if it could be made comfortable, so that Gaza could be developed into a beach resort for the benefit of others was jaw-droppingly insensitive and foolish. The idea that Ukrainians would give up part of their homeland, after all they have suffered, upon seeing their president being yelled at in the Oval Office about “cards” was equally imbecilic.

Any number of experts on Iranian politics and society could have told Trump, if he had been willing to listen, that the Iranians are a proud people who will not respond well to being bullied. Even if they don’t like their current regime, which is brutal and repressive, the image of their homeland being bombed and of an American president insisting that he must have final say over who their next leader should be is not going to play well. Iranians are sensitive to foreign intervention. In the case of America, this goes back to 1953, when an elected leader was overthrown in a CIA-backed coup because he wanted to nationalize Iran’s oil.

Moreover, the idea that a clean and surgical air campaign could lop off the head of the Iranian regime to permit a more pliable successor to emerge belies the reality of almost fifty years of the Islamic Republic. Perhaps it will work in Venezuela (though it remains to be seen if the remains of the Nicolás Maduro regime will ultimately have the last laugh), but Iran is very different. The regime is deeply embedded and conditioned by ideas of “resistance.” It is also deeply corrupt, and its security services know they have nowhere to go if they lose power—they WILL fire on the crowd if they have to, as they have proven. Succession plans run several people deep for all key posts, and they don’t much care how the people suffer as long as the regime endures.

The hope that real regime change could be accomplished from the air alone has been widely discredited in many different cases. But the one red line that Trump appears unwilling to cross is “boots on the ground.” In that sense, if this exercise was about regime change, it was doomed from the start. If, on the other hand, it is about changing the behaviour of the regime—the Venezuela idea—it needed to give the power brokers of the Iranian system (the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) a sense that there is a possible and acceptable tomorrow for them. They never had this, especially not from America’s ally, Israel, which sees the destruction of the IRGC as an existential goal. In this sense, Israeli and American war aims may be in danger of diverging the longer this goes on.

How will this end? It seems increasingly likely Trump doesn’t really know. He may soon decide that it’s too costly, economically and politically, and just stop. He will then select a goal from the wide range of objectives he has put out there and declare that it has been achieved and that he is completely victorious. But there are at least two big problems with this.

First, whether Israel will also stop at the same time, remains to be seen. Though Israel and the US are supposedly in this together, their basic aims are not necessarily the same. An end to this which leaves some vestige of the regime still in power and holding on to the nuclear material and knowledge that would allow it to re-constitute its nuclear program someday is unacceptable to Israel. It is altogether possible that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will want to keep going for some time yet, and Israel’s war in Lebanon will also continue.

• There’s Absolutely No Justification for Trump’s War on Iran
• Trump’s Golden Dome Is a Fantasy. Canada Could Still Be Dragged into It
• Why Regime Change by Force Is Unlikely to Work in Iran

And second, Iran also gets a vote in how this ends. Tehran’s calculus could evolve if the regime comes to believe that, a) it will survive no matter what the US and Israel throw at it from the air (even if the Iranian people suffer terribly), and b) Trump is increasingly desperate for a way out. Sensing that Trump needs out, Tehran may opt to keep threatening global oil supplies for a time to teach him a lesson. This would further erode public opinion in the US and also regional and global support for America. And, by eventually lifting the threat to the Straits at a time and for reasons of its choosing, Tehran would make the point more firmly than ever that it, too, had a say in dictating the terms on which the fighting ended. This would allow Iran to claim that it was not defeated but fought this out to a draw and that its pressure on the global economy forced America to stop.

The chaotic, downright dysfunctional way Trump and his team have tried to elaborate their goals offers many other possibilities for Iran to claim victory. Recently, Secretary of State Marco Rubio tried to offer a clear goal. “The goals of this mission are clear,” Rubio said at a State Department event. “It is to destroy the ability of this regime to launch missiles, both by destroying their missiles and their launchers; destroy the factories that make these missiles; and destroy their navy.”

This sort of statement creates a trap for the US. So as long as Iran can show that it retains the ability to fire missiles and drones, even if only a very few of them, the United States and Israel have not achieved their objective—at least, not this one anyway. And for all the different objectives and goals that Trump has offered up since the war began, there are ways for the Iranian regime to demonstrate that they have not been met. All the regime needs to do is survive and it “wins.”

From a “Western” perspective, if the major allies remain steadfast in their refusal to be drawn into an American war of choice, significant further damage could be done to the alliance when the dust settles. Trump’s ridiculous assertion that allies “owe” the US their support for a war they (the allies) neither sought nor were consulted on will only raise further questions as to whether the rift that has opened up over Ukraine and Greenland is now permanent.

Trump is about to learn what military officers and strategists have known since the beginning of time: It’s very easy to start a war but much harder to end one—particularly if you never had a clear goal to begin with and have picked a fight with an enemy which only needs to keep going to “win.”

Reprinted, with permission, from the Centre for International Policy Studies.