By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, March 27, 2026
“Some men just want to watch the world burn.”
That line from Christopher Nolan’s The Dark
Knight had legs. Early on, it was a kind of shorthand for the agenda of
Islamic terrorists, which made some superficial sense because the movie was a
bit allegorical about the war on terror. But very soon it was applied to a wide
array of leftist nihilists,
rightist poltroons, and various mass shooters who couldn’t be reasoned with. In 2019, Time
magazine observed how the Joker—the character the line indirectly
described—had been “memeified by anarchists, gamer-gaters, men’s rights
activists and incels, his ethos of ‘let the world burn’ inspiring trolls across
social media.” That’s true, but the phrase was hardly limited to just that
crowd.
I’ve been thinking about that line, and the Joker more
broadly, a lot this week because I’ve been struggling to find a good analogy or
pop culture reference to describe the predicament the U.S. is in with regard to
the war in Iran. In my Los Angeles Times column, I compared Iran to
an outnumbered weakling holding a vial of nitroglycerin in the engine room of
the global economy. Sure, you can take him out, but if you do so carelessly,
the damage could be self-defeating.
That’s why the Joker comes to mind. He uses a similar
logic in the film. He captures Batman’s best friend and love of his life. The
caped crusader can beat the Joker in a fight, but if the Joker doesn’t care
about being beaten up, Batman has no other leverage over him.
The problem with the phrase “some men just want to watch
the world burn”—at least as it was used during the war on terror—is that it
didn’t actually describe our enemies. Al-Qaeda had actual goals, so did
the Taliban and all of the other Islamist movements.
They weren’t nihilists, like the Joker. Say what
you will about the tenets of Islamic fanaticism, at least it’s an ethos. So a
better way to describe Islamist terrorists, including those running Iran, would
be something like “some men are willing to watch the world burn”—if they
get to rule the ashes.
And that gets me to our asymmetry problem.
The Iranian regime wants things because it believes
things. At the top of its list: survival. But not necessarily survival
of any single individual, but regime survival. Not far below survival is
all of that Islamic Revolutionary eschatological nutbaggery we’re so familiar
with: a Shiite-flavored caliphate unifying the Muslim world, the destruction of
Israel, seizing Mecca and Medina, beating up girls for showing too much
forehead or ankle, hanging gay dudes, etc. The regime’s leaders also want Iran
to be a regional hegemon, to have nuclear weapons. At least in the minds of the
mullahs, these are not conflicting priorities. It’s a question of sequencing:
You can’t get all of that sweet caliphate rizz without military dominance.
Mirror, mirror.
One of the cardinal sins in intelligence, war, and
foreign policy is called “mirroring” or “mirror imaging.” It’s when you assume that your opponent
has the same motives, values, and decision-making processes as you do.
This gets at the main reason I have such contempt for the
cartoonish version of “realism” that pervades a lot of left-wing, isolationist,
and libertarian foreign policy. It’s systemic, reified mirroring. Many so-called realists think “self-interest”
has a universal definition that spans all borders and cultures. This form of
realism always had a vulgar Marxist twang to me, because many Marxists assume
everyone everywhere is driven by their “class interests” in the same way that
realists have a universal definition of “national interests.” Jihadi suicide
bombers do not blow themselves up to further the class interests of the
proletariat. Vladimir Putin is not sending hundreds of thousands of Russians to
their death in Ukraine purely out of some “realist” definition of “national
interest.” In international relations theory, the people who believe otherwise
are called “suckers.”
Nations care about honor. Some are driven by cultural,
theological, or ideological commitments that defy one-dimensional, largely
economic definitions of the national interest.
What is true of nations is often true of people, too.
In other words, mirroring isn’t just a problem in foreign
policy. I still chuckle about a conversation I once had with the political
consultant Dick Morris, who couldn’t grasp that I didn’t have—or want—some
shady side hustle or grift that would allow me to more lucratively monetize my
journalism career. Morris’ understanding of self-interest was just very
different than mine.
Donald Trump runs into such failures of the imagination
all the time. For instance, he couldn’t understand why Mike Pence wouldn’t want
to be a hero to the January 6 mob. “You’re too honest,” he harangued. “You’ll go down as a wimp.”
“It doesn’t take courage to break the law,” Pence told
Trump. “It takes courage to uphold the law.” Pence explained that he took an
oath to defend the Constitution.
When Pence said that, Trump must have shuddered with
incomprehension like the guy in There’s Something About Mary when Ben
Stiller suggested
someone could just come out with a “Six Minute Abs” video. Trump just couldn’t
grok the idea that Pence’s motivations and values were different. One of the
funniest things about the Trump era is how people have realized how to appeal
to Trump’s conception of self-interest. That’s why everyone is giving him
awards and gold statues: He's a sucker for flattery and praise, and he’s
incapable of grasping how small it makes him look.
Donald Trump has a similar challenge understanding the
Iranians because he thinks everyone eventually just wants a “deal.” That
assumption worked out for him pretty well—so far—in Venezuela, because the
Maduro regime was basically just a bunch of mobsters pretending to be
socialists. But the Iranians want different things because they believe
different things. And they are willing to watch a lot of the world
burn to get them. In fact, they’re willing to light the matches. These are the
bastards, after all, who used thousands of
children to clear minefields and soak up enemy fire in the Iran-Iraq war.
Indeed, just this week, the regime lowered the age
for “war supporting” roles to 12.
If you’re that determined, or simply that evil, closing
the Strait of Hormuz and blowing up your neighbor’s oil and gas facilities is
hardly a moral or strategic red line. Listening to Trump, he clearly believes
that if you kill the fanatic(s) at the top, you’ll eventually find someone who
wants to cut a deal. I don’t think this is logically preposterous. It’s
certainly possible that you can liquidate enough Iranian leaders until you find
that person. But the regime isn’t organized in a way to make that easy,
particularly only striking from the air. Yes, Iran has someone called a
“supreme leader” but under him are layers upon layers of true believers who are
convinced this war is an existential battle, not a mere negotiation. Trump’s
view of “leadership” is entirely personalized, which is one reason he rejected
the idea of building support for the war in advance. It’s also why he thinks
other leaders can just cut a deal, the way he thinks he can.
All of Trump’s talk this week about how a great deal to
end the war is just around the corner strikes me as a similar tactic to his “two weeks”
schtick. It’s just something to say to buy time. I think it’s probably not a
complete lie that the Iranians are talking, but it’s certainly an exaggeration
that they’re “begging to make a deal.” And whether you believe it or not,
the fact is the regime knows the truth of it. If it’s a lie, then the regime’s
leaders are not crazy for thinking they’re winning, because Trump has signaled
that he wants out of the war more than they do. He loves to say he won’t tell
the enemy what he’s going to do. Fair enough. But when he says the war will be
over soon, he’s telling the regime something far more useful than revealing
some target package.
Maybe it will work, but I can’t envision a scenario in
which Trump declares victory and gives up only for the Iranians to respond by
blowing up a tanker, oil facility, or some American soft target. The cliché
about the Middle East is that you win by not losing. For the Iranians, simply
declaring that they took the worst the big and little Satans could dish out and
are still standing is a strategic win. Claiming sovereignty over the Strait of
Hormuz and turning it into an Iranian maritime toll booth would be a massive
strategic victory for the Islamic Republic. And, so far, I don’t see the exit
strategy that prevents that from happening—other than an actual victory.
The intra-right fight.
Commentary’s Abe Greenwald made a version of this
point in his newsletter this week:
If Americans can
look at the stunning success of the war so far and proclaim it a failure, we’re
not, at this moment, a people who can be convinced of the necessity of war
(without a direct attack on the homeland). We no longer believe the evidence of
our senses, let alone the pleadings of Donald Trump. America currently suffers
from a set of stubborn comorbidities that make persuasion on military affairs a
nonstarter. Our Vietnam Syndrome was compounded by Iraq and Afghanistan
Syndrome and further complicated by Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Further on, he concludes:
And when it’s
done—successfully, God willing—it might reopen a space for persuadability in
our doubtful and dug-in culture. Victory is Trump’s strongest argument.
I agree that victory would be Trump’s strongest argument,
not least because Trump is so terrible at making arguments the normal way.
Anyway, to Abe’s credit he acknowledges from the outset
that Trump did not launch this war in the most advisable way. He should have
made the argument, gone to Congress, etc. But much like Noah Rothman and Bret
Stephens—both of whom I respect enormously—Abe is frustrated that people can’t
recognize the “stunning success of this war so far.”
I think this misses some crucial factors. I agree
entirely that as a military endeavor, the war has been remarkably successful.
But the key words in “stunning success of this war so far” is “so far.”
I do not simply mean that militarily this could suddenly
go horribly wrong—which of course is possible—or that we might end up losing
militarily—which is damn near impossible. We haven’t lost a war militarily
in decades. We lose wars when we lose the will to finish them.
The importance of the “so far” point is that it
constrains the category of the analysis to the purely military. The actual success of any war is determined
when the fighting stops. And when the fighting stops, the criteria we apply
include more than tallies of ships, planes, or tanks destroyed and enemies
killed. It also weighs whether the larger strategic aims of the war were
achieved. The Tet Offensive was a military disaster for the Viet Cong, and a
strategic coup. Indeed, Vietnam is an excellent example of winning by not
losing. The enemy hung on, and we lost our will. The Iraq war was a military
tour de force, and a strategic mess.
This gets at Abe’s point. The only way to convince people
this war was worth it is by winning—really winning—it. Conceptually, that
realization requires knowing what victory is.
I don’t think victory is possible without regime change,
for the reasons I alluded to above. Leave the regime in place and the clock
restarts on the mullahs' eschatological agenda. And instead of a vaunted
ballistic missile program as its first line of deterrence, Iran could have the
Strait of Hormuz as its primary tripwire. “Try anything like that again, and
we’ll really destroy the global economy” is politically and strategically at
least as effective a deterrence as a ballistic missile or drone program. And
that economic force field could then give Iran the space to reconstitute its
military and nuclear programs.
That’s certainly what the Israelis believe, which is why
support for the war in Israel is so high.
But I have my disagreements with Abe & Co. For
starters, I think Abe somewhat discounts that for a large number of people on
the left and the anti-Israel right, victory is the last thing that will
persuade them this war was worth it. I’m sure I am being unfair to some
individual people, but when I listen to the Tucker Carlson right or the Max
Blumenthal left, I don’t hear people who want this war to succeed, I hear
people who need it to fail. Abe might be right about the broad middle of
the country. I certainly hope that if Iran tossed off this murderous regime,
set itself on a path to democracy or just decency, and aligned with America,
Israel, and the West, a lot of people grumbling about the war would celebrate
and think it was worth it. But that’s the last thing the isolationists and
Israel-haters want.
But putting the cranks aside, I think the larger problem
with the Iran war debate on the right is that people are talking past each
other. The “why can’t you see we’re winning” folks want to focus on the
military scorekeeping. That’s defensible, but that narrow prism blinds them to
some degree, not just to the strategic challenges, like Iran’s asymmetric
advantages in the Strait of Hormuz, but also to the entirely legitimate
concerns of a public that wasn’t consulted or prepared for yet another massive Trumpian
ego trip. Preparing the public for a war of choice isn’t just a matter of good
manners or constitutional hygiene, it’s an essential necessity for strategic
success.
Why? For starters, you need public opinion on your side.
But doing things the right way also helps the administration see its blind
spots. Does anyone doubt that the war would be going better if the
administration had held a hearing where it had to answer what its plan for the
Strait of Hormuz was? Trump is now threatening the existence of NATO because
he’s so “disappointed” allies he said he didn’t need aren’t now racing to help
out there. I think NATO should help. But it’s as if Trump doesn’t understand that
our NATO allies are democracies and their leaders are elected politicians,
answerable to publics that detest Trump—for understandable reasons.
Again, Abe acknowledges Trump’s failure to launch the war
the right way, and Bret Stephens offers a more perfunctory acknowledgement as
well. “I am not blind to the Trump administration’s failures in planning,”
Stephens writes, “particularly its unwillingness to make a stronger
public case for war and get more allies on our side before the campaign began.”
I agree. But this minimizes the problem to the point of
dismissiveness.
The argument over the war in my corner of the world
reminds me of a lot of domestic partisan fights. If one side favors a policy,
it tends to dismiss complaints about how the policy was implemented as so much
fastidious fussery about formalities. When Democrats control the White House
and the Congress, a lot of progressives will declare the filibuster to be an
outrageous impediment to democracy, and a lot of conservatives will insist the
filibuster is a vital bulwark against majoritarian steamrolling.
When the teams switch from offense to defense, the teams
trade arguments like players in a softball game swapping gloves. Suddenly,
right-wingers think the filibuster needs to go and left-wingers are scandalized
by the idea. The same dynamic often applies to judicial appointments, various
executive orders, legislative reconciliation brouhahas, etc.
If partisans can get what they want, they don’t care—or
don’t care that much—about the constitutional or normative shortcuts, end-runs,
hacks, betrayals, tricks, or cheats. For a bunch of people, ending the Iranian
threat would be such an unalloyed good that complaining about how Trump got us
into it feels to them like an irrelevancy or deliberate effort to undermine it.
I have some sympathy for this, insofar as once you’re in a war the priority
should be to win it and save the recriminations for later.
But that’s a general principle. We are in a specific
context. If you want to call it Trump Derangement Syndrome to not trust a
president who threatened to seize Greenland by force, lied his way into turning
Venezuela into an American equivalent of a British East India Company colony,
vowed to hundreds of U.S. generals and admirals that he wants to use the
military to fight the “enemy within” in American cities, talks about how he can
simply “do whatever I want with” Cuba, repeatedly threatens to sue or destroy
media outlets critical of him, openly uses the Justice Department for
persecution of his perceived foes, tried to steal an election, puts his name on
anything and everything he can, hangs banners of his face Kim Jong Il-style
from government buildings, and cavalierly talks about the need for Republicans
to nationalize the electoral system, you’re free to make that argument. But
suggesting that those of us who give weight to these facts when assessing the
war are defeatist, unpatriotic, or too Trump-deranged to see the bigger picture
is unfair and myopic.
In normal times, debates about the War Powers Resolution
or the need for congressional approval generally occur within certain
parameters of trust and, well, normalcy. These are not normal times.
Argumento ad Trump Derangement Syndrome follows a
similar dynamic to the partisan hypocrisy I attributed to fights about the
filibuster and the like. When Trump does something people like, those people
dismiss complaints about it as so much TDS. When Trump does something they
don’t like, they put his actions in the same bucket of outrages that stem from
his ignorance and deformed character. But it’s the same guy in both situations,
and just because you like what he’s doing in this instance doesn’t mean he’s
not doing it with the same mix of egoism and incompetence he displayed when he
did something you didn’t like.
Just to repeat myself from last week, the people claiming
Trump has betrayed MAGA are merely getting the just deserts of their apologias
for the lawless, crude, or bullying things they approved of. He is the same guy
he’s always been. Feeling betrayed by the bull in the China shop when it breaks
the one thing you wanted to save is unserious.
None of this means the war isn’t worth winning, and none
of it means the mullahs didn’t have it coming. But assuming that just because
you’ve long supported regime change in Iran doesn’t mean that, this time, Trump
is doing it the right way, for the right reasons, or that it will end well. Nor
does it mean that complaints that he didn’t do things the right way are just so
much fastidiousness.
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