By Nick Catoggio
Thursday, May 14, 2026
I don’t know Mike Nelson, but I can tell that he enjoys a
challenge.
Before he began contributing to The Dispatch,
Nelson served in the Army Special Forces. Go figure that his latest piece for
our publication would dial the degree of difficulty all the way up by trying to
imagine a
nondisastrous outcome to the war in Iran.
He’s not optimistic. Step one, he argues, is for the
president to learn from the criticism he’s been taking, face reality, and
accept that his “current approach makes him look foolish and weak.” But that
would be “out of character” for Donald Trump, Nelson allows, putting it very
mildly indeed.
It won’t surprise you to learn that I share his
pessimism. His piece got me thinking about whether any argument remains
that this conflict was a good idea for America. How has it made the United
States stronger? In what way has it meaningfully improved our position in the
world, either by weakening our enemies or increasing our deterrent leverage
over them?
I can think of four possibilities.
One: The spectacular success of the decapitation strikes
on Iran’s leadership at the start of the war will force Bond villains
everywhere to think twice about tangling with America. Xi Jinping might be
persuaded that his military can defeat ours, but that will be a cold comfort if
he has reason to believe he won’t survive the conflict himself.
Two: We’ve done real damage to Iran’s conventional
military capabilities. Navy, air force, missiles, launchers—Iranian assets have
taken a beating, limiting the regime’s ability to make mischief in the region.
There’s always some deterrent value in knocking down a bad guy.
Three: Iran’s attacks on American Gulf allies like Saudi
Arabia and the UAE might draw those nations closer to Israel. A Middle East in
which Jews and Sunnis unite to contain the Khomeinist menace might be a more
stable Middle East long-term, which is good for the United States.
Four: A deal to end the war will likely include a
complete freeze on uranium enrichment by Iran lasting well into the next
decade. In April Axios reported that the two sides have been haggling
over the time frame, with Iran proposing a five-year suspension and the U.S.
countering with a 20-year demand. Three sources told the outlet they’re
confident that a compromise will be reached of “at least 12 years,” with one
guesstimating 15 as more likely.
That’s my best stab at optimism. How do each of those
arguments hold up to scrutiny?
Benefits?
Only U.S. intelligence knows how feasible a decapitation
strike on someone like Xi Jinping might be, but we can make a few safe
assumptions.
First, China’s defenses are considerably more
sophisticated than Iran’s were, especially after Israeli attacks degraded the
latter. Second, America probably hasn’t penetrated the Chinese government to
the phenomenal degree that Israeli intelligence penetrated Iran’s, making
targeting more difficult. And third, after seeing Ali Khamenei liquidated on
day one and Nicolás Maduro snatched from his bed, enemy leaders will take
extreme precautions going forward to protect themselves when a fight with the
U.S. is brewing. The leaders of Cuba’s regime are surely much harder to locate
right now than they’ve ever been.
That’s the way war works. You learn from major tactical
mistakes made in other conflicts and you adapt. Unless you’re the United States.
Meanwhile, America has done less damage to Iran’s
capabilities than the president would have us believe. Leaks over the past week
suggest that 70 percent or so of Iran’s pre-war missile
stockpile remains intact and 70 percent of its missile launchers are still in
the field. “Most alarming to some senior officials is evidence that Iran has
restored operational access to 30 of the 33 missile sites it maintains along
the Strait of Hormuz,” the New York Times reported on Tuesday. We’ve made
a lot of things go “boom,” it seems, just not the things we were most
hoping to destroy.
America’s naval blockade of the strait has also been less
effective than hoped due to the regime’s tolerance for pain and its resilience
in keeping its oil flowing. The blockade was supposed to strangle Iran’s
economy in a matter of weeks, but the latest estimate is that the country can
hang on for three to four months before serious hardship sets in. (One
U.S. official told the Washington Post that it can endure for much
longer than that.) Nor have the Iranians been forced—yet—to shut down wells due
to lack of storage capacity, which could permanently damage their oil
infrastructure. “It’s nowhere near as dire as some have claimed,” one source
told the Post of Iran’s predicament.
Enemies like China already understood before the war that
the United States would bring fearsome power to bear in a conflict. What
they’re learning now is how ineffective that power can be in achieving core
strategic goals—although I suppose that too was understood after Vietnam,
Afghanistan, and, to a lesser extent, Iraq. If you doubt that “doing massive
damage” and “being effective” are two different things, ask yourself whether
you’re more impressed with Russia’s military capabilities now than you were before
seeing them in action in Ukraine.
Sunni states drawing closer to Israel in common cause
against Iran is a nice thought, and certainly one possible future. Conceivably,
in fact, the worse the war goes for the United States, the more likely that
future may be. If Iran comes through this with something like a “victory,” it
will be more hubristic and menacing than it was before. What choice will its
regional enemies have after Uncle Sam tried and failed to slay the beast but to
band together in mutual defense?
There’s another possible future, though, one that Robert Kagan recently described in The Atlantic.
Kagan is a longtime right-wing hawk, exactly the sort of person whom you’d
expect to be enthusiastic about taking on Iran. Nope: The United States has
been “checkmated” in this conflict, he observed, and that will have bad
consequences for the Jewish state.
"Israel will find itself more isolated than ever, as
Iran grows richer, rearms, and preserves its options to go nuclear in the
future,” he predicted. “It may even find itself unable to go after Iran’s
proxies: In a world where Iran wields influence over the energy supply of so
many nations, Israel could face enormous international pressure not to provoke
Tehran in Lebanon, Gaza, or anywhere else." If Sunni powers are forced to
choose between good relations with a U.S.-Israeli alliance that can’t protect
them and good relations with a radicalized Iranian regime that can and might do
them severe damage, which should they choose?
As for the prospect of Iran freezing uranium enrichment
for 15 years: Did we really need to go through all this to get that?
The price of getting the regime to back off on nukes for
a while, according to Axios, is the U.S. “agreeing to lift its sanctions
and release billions in frozen Iranian funds.” How many billions is up for
negotiation, but the possibility of an astounding $20 billion payout has been floated. That’s another reason
to feel underwhelmed by how much damage the war has done to Iran’s military
arsenal: When this is over, we’re essentially going to end up paying them to
rebuild it.
A cash-for-freeze trade would unmistakably resemble the
deal that Barack Obama signed with Iran in 2015. The United States released $1.7 billion to the regime at the time in exchange for the
Iranians’ promise to enrich uranium to no higher than 3.67 percent purity until
2030. Trump tore up that agreement during his first term, causing Iran to go on
a spree of stockpiling uranium in which it accumulated
nearly 11 tons in the years since. Now here we are, back at the same
negotiating table, offering them a lot more money to give up a lot
more radioactive material.
We could have bribed them into dialing back their nuclear
program at any time before the war, without firing a shot. Why didn’t we?
“There’s no dispute that it worked,” Obama said this week of the 2015 deal, “and we didn’t have to
kill a whole bunch of people or shut down the Strait of Hormuz.” Why did the
White House risk a global oil crisis, with all the economic misery that
entails, just to inevitably arrive at “JCPOA,
Except Bigger!”?
Costs.
So the alleged benefits of this war are dubious. The
costs, on the other hand, are real.
Start with wealth. If you total up the consequences of
higher inflation due to rising oil prices, slower economic growth, bearishness
on Wall Street over a possible recession, and future outlays to replenish U.S.
military stockpiles, you’re looking at a figure in the trillions.
Diplomatically? This has been one of the worst fiascos in
the history of the United States.
Whatever was left of NATO is functionally gone. Europe
resents the White House for having stuck them with soaring energy costs and an
economic slowdown over a conflict they didn’t want and weren’t consulted on.
The White House, including erstwhile
hawk Marco Rubio, resents Europeans for denying the U.S. access to some of
their military bases (although it’s not clear how that access would have
affected the war) and is keen to scapegoat them for somehow not bailing Trump
out of the mess he’s made in the strait. This marriage can’t be saved.
Sunni powers have also learned a hard lesson about the
risks of allying with America, particularly when Iran broke the ceasefire
earlier this month by firing at the UAE. After Trump declined to retaliate, one
regional expert told the Wall Street Journal, “From the perspective of the
Gulf states, it looks like the U.S. is not prioritizing their security and
basically threw the Gulf states under the bus.” The same report claims that
Iranian leaders have begun to say of their Sunni frenemies, “those who wrap
themselves in America are naked.”
U.S. allies across the world have surely begun to wonder.
A shining lesson of the Iran war is that the president has no stomach for
lengthy conflict, grasping for excuses to avoid resuming hostilities despite
Iranian provocations during the ceasefire. He “believed that the U.S. military
was unstoppable” and that Iran would “be another Venezuela,” The Atlantic alleged of Trump’s pre-war thinking,
and when he discovered otherwise he grew “bored” with the matter and began
looking for a way out.
If your nation’s security depends on Donald Trump’s
commitment to your defense, you’re in grave danger. And if your regime finds
itself in conflict with him, you can probably survive simply by outlasting his
unrealistic expectations for your demise.
America’s war has also helped China in numerous ways, not
surprisingly.
For starters, we’ve burned through a meaningful part of our missile stockpile to
repel Iranian attacks—not always successfully, either—including a majority of
high-tech THAAD interceptors designed to neutralize enemy missiles in flight.
Some of those missiles were moved to the Middle East from the Far East, where
they were initially based to contain China. U.S. allies like Japan and South
Korea greeted that development “with dread.”
It will reportedly take “years” for defense contractors to replace the missiles
we’ve lost in the current war, and their ability to do so will require easy
access to rare-earth minerals. Guess which country the United States depends on for that. If the
president sounded like more of a supplicant than usual in praising
Xi during today’s visit to Beijing, there’s a reason.
China has also seized opportunities to fill strategic
vacuums created by America’s misadventure. Since the war began, it has sold
weapons to U.S. allies in the Gulf to help them pick up our slack in repelling
Iranian missiles, per the Washington Post. And it’s “reached out to Thailand,
Australia, the Philippines, and other countries to help them manage their
energy needs and is offering access to Chinese-produced green energy technology
as a longer-term solution.” They see an empire in decline, and they’re taking advantage.
As for Israel, it’s a cinch that the war will further
weaken the fragile relationship between our two countries. American opinion had
turned against the Jewish state over Gaza before the first bombs
fell in Iran; perceptions that Trump was somehow
maneuvered into a new and unpopular Middle Eastern misadventure by
Jerusalem will feed resentment that Israel wields too much influence over U.S. foreign policy. Benjamin
Netanyahu has already begun preparing for the inevitable rupture, assuring 60
Minutes recently that he thinks ending American military aid to Israel is a fine idea.
And pity the poor Iranian people, who will probably pay
the steepest price of anyone.
The war began with Trump vowing, sincerely or not, that
all he wanted in the end was freedom for Iranians. Not only was that mission not
accomplished, postwar Iran might plausibly be more oppressive than the pre-war
version. A wounded regime led by Ali Khamenei’s fanatic son and Revolutionary
Guard hardliners will move quickly and ruthlessly to suppress nascent
uprisings. It will treat its survival amid a U.S.-Israeli onslaught as divine
validation of the Khomeinist project. And it will resolve to take all necessary
measures to ensure that it never again finds itself in a position as vulnerable
as the one it’s in now.
There’s one more cost from the war that the United States
will need to bear.
That’s the civic cost, a subject I considered
in a newsletter titled “The Iran Disaster” nine days before the conflict began.
“Never has America fought a war this substantial without some form of buy-in
from Congress and the general public,” I wrote. “In no real way is a country
that functions like that a republic. It’s Caesarism, the total unmooring of
executive accountability from law in matters of life and death.”
And so it is. We are adrift strategically in an
unauthorized conflict that threatens the global economy, with no end in sight,
having long ago blown past the 60-day
deadline that the War Powers Act (supposedly) allows for unilateral
presidential action, yet Congress remains quiescent. Republican quislings in
the House and Senate have let an autocrat seize power from the legislature to
wield military power without any meaningful limit whatsoever.
It’s one of the most consequential constitutional
perversions in American history. How’s that as an epitaph for the war?
Optimism.
There are two ways in which this conflict might come to
be seen as fortuitous for America. Call this optimism if you like, although
both scenarios are dark enough that the word seems inapt.
One is that it causes a broad, durable, long-overdue
backlash to Trump and Trumpism. That was my thesis in the February piece, in
fact: By backburnering the cost of living yet again and moving forward with a
war that voters clearly didn’t want, the president “could incinerate much of
what’s left of his political capital.” Three months later, he’s at 38.5 percent approval and is telling reporters that he won’t
let Americans’ financial pain push him into a bad deal with Iran.
The prime directive of postliberalism is to hurt Them,
never Us. His base, the “Us,” is now hurting like everyone else. The
aftershocks of that could be so ruinous economically that the president ends up
losing the political capital he needs to justify further authoritarian power
grabs. Does that count as optimism?
If not, try this: Maybe a comparatively minor
disaster in Iran will inadvertently spare us from what would have been a major
one against China.
Perhaps you’re confident that a plainly declining United
States still has the smarts, will, industrial capability, and leadership to win
a potentially long war against the Chinese in their own backyard. If so, that
makes one of us. A confrontation over Taiwan increasingly feels like a calamity
in the making for America; with Trump at the helm, my best guess at the outcome
would be a hasty U.S. retreat after initial fighting proved far costlier than
the White House expected.
Now, thanks to Iran, we have a ready excuse to avoid all
that: We’re spent. We’ve depleted much of our missile arsenal, we’ve
created war-related hardships for the American people, and we’ve reminded
everyone—again—that the U.S. military, as impressive as it is, seldom achieves
the too-ambitious strategic goals of its civilian commanders. All three of
those things point straight at contriving some excuse to get out of China’s way
in the Far East.
I think the president would relish doing so. His
preoccupation with countries like Venezuela and Cuba in America’s near-abroad
and distaste for defending Europe against Russia suggest that he’d rather focus
on his “sphere of influence” and leave China to its own.
Abandoning Taiwan would mean the end of the United
States’ reign as global hegemon. It would elevate China to the status of peer
hyperpower, forcing countries across the planet to make their peace with
Beijing. But at least it would spare many thousands of American service members
from having to die in yet another operation that probably won’t accomplish what
it set out to do.
Strategic defeat in Iran will quell any appetite for a
worse strategic defeat in the Far East. National decline may at last force upon
us a foreign policy of “restraint.” Call it “America First” if you like.
