Wartime is here
Again
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This weekend I’m actually secreted away at an undisclosed location trying to meet a book writing deadline, but of course I’ve also been following events in the Middle East. I’m very tired, but here are a few thoughts:
I’ve spent a lot of today probably taking too seriously Trump and Israel’s claim that the end goal of this war is regime change, in the sense of the destruction of the Islamic Republic. Ayatollah Khomeini is dead, but Trump has also indicated that he might just call the whole thing off after a few days, which in all likelihood will allow the regime to re-assert itself. We live in a vast space of indeterminacy because so does Donald Trump.
I don’t have a great read on Israeli politics, but my sense is that Netanyahu’s big-picture thinking here is basically that this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to somehow deal with the threat from Iran for good and he’s going to push to do that. So he’s going to want to keep U.S. firepower in this fight for as long as possible.
There seems to be a division of labor among the U.S. and Israel, at least according to reports I heard on the first morning of the attacks. The U.S. is supposedly restricting itself to military targets while Israel attacks regime sites and personnel. This solves a problem Israel had during its previous war with Iran, when it started to struggle to generate sorties. It reinforces the idea that Netanyahu needs the U.S. in order to handle the military while he goes after his bigger prize.
The thing that I still don’t get about any regime change plan is… what the plan actually is. This is something else that pushes me to think that Trump might just try to call this off sooner rather than later. Bombing a country has rarely produced a durable change in its government - much less one that the bombing party gets much say in.
However much bombing happens, it seems hard to see the protest movement taking power from the military and the clerics. It also seems hard to imagine Trump making a Venezuela-style deal with anyone who is going to maintain the Islamic Republic in power. But of all the things that it is hard to see happening, I guess that has to be the most likely at this point.
But most of all, I am probably getting ahead of myself here. This is the very early days of the conflict, which looks set to become a long battle of attrition. Besides its drones and missiles - which as I write this seem to be scoring some consequential hits - Iran likely has other tricks up its sleeves. Every hour that the war continues raises the chances of substantial Israeli or American casualties, which could dramatically change Trump’s calculus.
One thing I do know is that as the war continues, the U.S. military will put pressure on Trump to curtail it. That’s because every day that it continues is costing the U.S. THAAD interceptors, Patriot missiles, and SM family naval missile interceptors. The U.S. has only a limited stock of these assets, and they are needed around the world from Ukraine to Taiwan. Replenishing stocks takes literally years, meaning that the U.S. military could be left short-changed in a major contingency.
Thanks for reading, and stay safe. I’ll probably be back with more thoughts tomorrow, when maybe things will be clearer - but probably not.