Doing foreign policy analysis in the age of Trump is like being a theater critic in Washington, D.C., in 1865. Yes, there’s a play to talk about, but one gets the sense that more important things are going on. Does anyone remember, or care, what play Lincoln was watching?
The war against Iran is important. The tenuous “peace” between Israel and Hamas is important. The war in Ukraine, tensions with China, and the impact of artificial intelligence are all very, very important. But these are now treated as little more than plays enacted on the world’s stage for a fickle audience of one man who believes himself the director.
The larger fact is this: The commander in chief of the world’s most powerful military seems to alternate among madman, buffoon, and authoritarian. That fact is not more important, but it is more consequential because it affects every other war, crisis, and development in the world.
How will the war in Iran play out? I have no idea—because Trump has no idea. He seems to have taken the nation to war with a vague end-state and underdeveloped plan—a venerable presidential tradition—but also with shifting justifications and shockingly little effort to win public or congressional support.
Most American wars start out popular as the public rallies around the president and the troops. This one was deeply unpopular from day one, which will severely restrict Trump’s options the longer the conflict lasts.
Trump has called on the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow their government. That surely would be the ideal scenario. Yet Trump’s grasp of strategy seems drawn less from Clausewitz or Thucydides than from South Park’s Underpants Gnomes:
Step 1: Bomb Iran.
Step 2: ??
Step 3: Regime change!
The goal is laudable. The United States has been locked in cold war with Iran for a half-century. It burst into hot war in 1983 in Beirut, in the 1988 “tanker war” in the Gulf, in 1996 at Khobar Towers, and from 2003 to 2011 in Iraq.
Iran is an international scofflaw, the chief state sponsor of terrorism, the main threat to the nuclear nonproliferation regime, and, as we were reminded last month, butcher of its own people. Iran probably murdered more of its own protesters than China did at Tiananmen Square. That is an impressively difficult achievement in tyranny.
The American people forgot or never knew the history. But the American State Department never forgot the humiliation of the 1979 hostage crisis. The American military will never forget that much of its misery in Iraq was at the hands of Iranian-backed militias. The CIA has long wanted justice for the 1984 kidnapping, torture, and murder of its Lebanon station chief at the hands of Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah.
That is why the American national security state has spent decades planning this war, why it unfolds with cold precision, and why Trump is likely to declare victory, sooner or later, over the smoking ruins of Iran’s military, its nuclear program, and the headquarters of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
But neither Trump nor anyone else has spent the equivalent time planning for the day after. The agencies that had a mandate to think about such things—the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development—are precisely those most damaged by the DOGE-induced self-lobotomy of the federal bureaucracy last year.
The U.S. military, as usual, will be left holding the bag. But the military’s last postwar occupation—in Iraq—does not inspire hope.
Trump is waging a war of regime collapse. In that, he may be successful, should the war kill enough of the senior leadership and the military. It is a war of pure destruction, a war to tear down the old without any thought to build anything new.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has repeatedly insisted that the U.S. will not get involved in a protracted war. He explicitly disavowed nation building. Like his predecessor Donald Rumsfeld, he wants to avoid a commitment of ground troops, even though the White House refused to rule them out. Hegseth seems intent on using this war to prove his theory of why the last wars ended poorly.
In so doing, Hegseth is a textbook perfect illustration of an old adage by Robert Jervis: Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, but those who remember history are doomed to make the opposite mistake.
Hegseth thinks he is being sophisticated, learning history’s lessons by avoiding the mistakes of the last war. And so he will make all new mistakes, the predictable effect of overinterpreting the recent past. That may be what Trump’s base wants, but the endless oscillation between extremes is no way to run a war.
Trump and Hegseth are likely to get their way and avoid all taint of postwar responsibility. But if there is to be no nation building, no postwar plan, no orchestrated effort to build something in place of the regime in Tehran—what then? What, exactly, is the plan?
Without one, Trump is not waging a war of regime change. Change implies that there is a direction and purpose to the transformation being wrought in Tehran. There is none. Trump is waging a war of regime collapse. In that, he may be successful, should the war kill enough of the senior leadership and the military. It is a war of pure destruction, a war to tear down the old without any thought to build anything new.
But collapsed regimes tend to lead to anarchy, civil war, and new forms of tyranny. It’s unclear how any of that would serve U.S. interests. Failed states export chaos to the world. We could, for example, envision fragments of the IRGC—the world’s most professional terrorist organization—devoting themselves to revenge against the U.S., Israel, and Europe, for decades to come—perhaps with dirty bombs made from Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium.
Or maybe not. Trump might stop the bombing tomorrow, content to hand over the country to the next authoritarian in line—Mojtaba Khamenei, son of the late supreme leader, is apparently alive and gaining support—in which case it will not be regime change but regime rotation, as in Venezuela, hoping the next in line will be cowed into submission. That might work for a few years, until the effect wears off and Iran reverts to business as usual.
It is impossible to say, because Trump does not need reasons for his actions. There is no reason for anything in the madcap carnival of the era, save that the carnival must swirl and center around one man. It is an illustration of how demagoguery undermines intellectual life, because under demagogues the world is not run by reason. Persuasion is pointless when the world is run by power and whim.
Amid the carnival, the military will do its job and retain its professionalism. The cause is reasonably just insofar as the regime in Iran has brought this on itself through decades of murder and tyranny. But the outcome is frightfully uncertain. It is very hard to see any justice, peace, or conciliation emerging through the fog of this particular war.
Within weeks or months, Trump is likely to declare victory and walk away. Behind him will lie a smoking ruin and the seeds of future conflict. His supporters will cheer because nations will be cowed, and they think that is what victory is supposed to feel like. That is what has become of American power in the age of Trump.
