Trump’s Iran Strikes Going To Define Interventionism For A Generation

On Big Decisions, And Consequences

Firm opinions about foreign policy are generally bad, in my experience. There are occasionally situations where there are rights and wrongs, but far more often there aren’t. We make deals with dictators and bad actors, draw distinctions to make ourselves be able to sleep at night that make little sense in the context of broader politics. Why did I defend Canada’s reset of relations with India while opposing a reset with China? Because foreign policy is a wasteland of moral quagmires and balancing acts.

The decision to intervene or not is similarly fraught with challenges, because there are cases where intervention succeeded and failed, and where deciding not to intervene was right and was wrong. You can make a case that every intervention is Iraq 2.0, or you can make the case that failing to intervene would be tantamount to not doing so during the Gulf War. It’s a complicated game where we’re all bringing biases to the table and very little actual evidence or knowledge. And now Trump’s bombed Iran.

There’s a huge generational gap between myself and plenty of my friends, who tend to be 5-10 years older than me. For them, born in the early 90s or late 80s, their political awakening - and certainly their sharpest, defining foreign policy question - is Iraq, and the absolute failure of that war. For them, that is the reference that they come to immediately, the throughline they judge this through.

For me, that’s not quite true. I was 6 when Bush invaded Iraq, I was 9 when the surge happened, and the Arab Spring was the first foreign policy crisis of my life. The decisions taken in Libya and then Syria - both in how limited decisions to intervene were, and decisions to not - are what have defined me and how I think about this.

There is no right answer to this, in large part because we do not have the basic information to properly judge this, and some of it we’ll never know. Right now we don’t know how badly hit any of the American targets are, we have no idea how quickly they can be rebuilt, and we have no idea what kind of delays and limitations this actually did to the Iranian nuclear program. We’ll never know what the Americans actually were told before they launched this attack, and whether they had some reason to think this would be taken without serious retaliation. We have no idea, so it’s hard to say with anything resembling certainty whether this was a mistake or a stroke of genius. (I have my doubts, given the intellectual calibre of people cheerleading a bombing campaign, but, you know.)

It’s a situation almost perfectly designed to induce strong opinions about something of immense consequence where we’re all guessing. Counterfactuals are impossible, and it’s easier for us to ignore the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in Syria at the hand of western indifference than the dead Iraqis killed at the hand of western intervention. Twitter is a cesspool, with everyone cosplaying as Middle East experts auditioning for First Take without an understanding that that only works when there aren't global consequences to getting this wrong. There are slightly higher stakes on this than on picking Game 7 on Sunday night.

The problem is this could be a good thing, but to take that view is to trust a lot of people who plainly do not deserve to be trusted. But if it is a good thing, it doesn’t mean it is repeatable or should be repeated. It is possible that in this specific case the facts lined up just right for this specific action, but that case has absolutely not be made yet. It’s somewhere between likely and certain it never will be, given the charlatans, idiots, and evil people running American and Israeli foreign policy these days. But it’s not exactly like I’m going to shed a tear for Iran’s nuclear program getting set back.

It is obviously important to say that there was an actual solution, Obama’s Iran Deal, and that should never have been ripped up. This is another reminder that Republican governance is bad, and should be avoided at all costs. But at the end of the day the spectre of Iraq hangs over this, both in progressive belief that this is a mistake and in conservative hopes that this will undo the consequences Iraq had on the viability of future interventions.

(The faux certainty that this will be a disaster is only matched by the certainty from some on the left that Kamala Harris would have also done this. Not only is there no reason to think this, given Obama signed the JCPOA and Biden, you know, never bombed Iran, but the Iranians were at the negotiation table this month. But also, at some point actual Republican harms have to matter more than your guess at what a Democrat might have done. It’s fucking absurd to make the actions of a Republican President about Democrats, but such is the position of people who think they’re enlightened. As someone who also has conflated idiotic contrarianism with being the smartest person in the room, sometimes the “basic” opinion is the right one.)

We are living at the crossroads of history, but we are living at a time when western failures of doing nothing loom large enough that the idea of intervention is not completely off the table anymore. This is a proudly important time for the world, not just because of what it means for Iran but for others. If this ends up being the disaster many are predicting, it’ll take intervention off the table for another 15 years, as the generation younger than me talks in hushed tones about Iran the way every geriatric millennial does about Iraq.

The stakes of this move are immense, and I’m not even smart enough to list half of them. Getting this wrong will have huge consequences, not just for Iran but for the world. It is the kind of decision that only makes sense if they know they have it. Whether they do or not is impossible to assess. If this was coming from an administration led by a President it was easy to believe had thought through the consequences of his actions, this would feel different. If the Secretary of Defence wasn’t an ex-Fox News pundit it’d feel different. If the Director of National Intelligence wasn’t Tulsi Fucking Gabbard we’d all feel better about there having been a process that makes some amount of sense. But Trump is President, presiding over a cabinet of lackeys and loyalists. There’s every reason to think this will be exactly as big a disaster as it seems. There’s also every chance the success or failure of this will determine whether the West intervenes militarily for the next 20 years.

Having done this, they better not have fucked this up.