By Nick Catoggio
Tuesday, May 05, 2026
On Tuesday morning Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine
briefed the press on the latest developments in America’s don’t-call-it-a-war war. “Since the ceasefire was
announced, Iran has fired at commercial vessels nine times and seized two
container ships,” he noted grimly.
“And they’ve attacked U.S. forces more than 10 times.”
Just yesterday, two U.S. Navy destroyers that entered the
Strait of Hormuz were forced to repel a “sustained barrage” of Iranian drones, missiles, and small
boats. That’s a funny kind of ceasefire.
No matter, though. The regime’s numerous recent attempts
to kill American service members are “below the threshold of restarting major
combat operations at this point,” Caine assured reporters.
The destroyers weren’t the only targets in Iran’s
crosshairs on Monday. Iranian forces fired at a South Korean tanker near the
strait and launched a new airborne assault on the United Arab Emirates, an
American ally. ABC News asked the president shortly afterward how he
planned to respond.
“[It was] not heavy firing,” Donald Trump scoffed,
minimizing the volley aimed at the UAE by pointing out that only “one got
through. Not huge damage.” A foreign
affairs reporter saw those remarks and predicted that the president’s
“hesitation is likely to encourage more Iranian strikes. Tehran calculates that
Trump is desperate to extricate himself from the war, no matter the cost.”
Sure enough, as I was writing this newsletter on Tuesday,
Iran began firing again at the UAE.
This isn’t supposed to happen.
A president who postures constantly as the rootin-est
tootin-est tough guy on the global block isn’t supposed to shy away from a
fight when an enemy tweaks his nose. More to the point, that enemy isn’t
supposed to be willing to tweak his nose in the first place. A core promise of
postliberalism is that ruthlessness breeds deterrence: The more brutal you are
toward those who defy you, domestically and abroad, the less defiance you’ll
meet.
In theory, America’s power to deter aggression should
never be greater than when the country is being run by a loose-cannon
postliberal strongman. In practice, U.S. deterrence is conspicuously weak right
now.
Despite weeks of bombing and bombastic presidential
threats, Iran continues to hold the strait hostage. Dismayed by Washington’s
failure to neutralize Iranian air attacks, our Gulf allies are turning to Ukraine for help instead. Europe remains on
the sidelines of the war and is making plans to reboot NATO without the United States if necessary.
Meanwhile, China is preparing to feel out the president on whether America is still committed to defending Taiwan.
We’re left with a paradox: This supposedly
deterrence-minded “peace through strength” administration isn’t doing a
particularly good job at deterrence.
A schoolyard in which America has set out to bully anyone
it chooses is supposed to be a schoolyard in which everyone will seek its
friendship and avoid antagonizing it. That’s not the situation we find
ourselves in.
Declining capabilities.
I wrote about the White House’s complicated approach to
deterrence last
year but thought of it again when I read National Review’s latest
editorial, “Don’t Pull Out of Germany.”
Last week the Pentagon announced that it would redeploy 5,000 American troops stationed in that country,
potentially with more to come. Are those soldiers urgently needed in the
Persian Gulf, perhaps? Not at all: They’re being pulled because Trump is mad at
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz for alleging that the U.S.
has no “truly convincing strategy” in negotiating with Iran and that “an entire
nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership.”
That was undiplomatic of Merz to say, particularly when
he knows that our country is governed by a fragile child, but it’s obviously
not a reason for the White House to revisit America’s posture in Germany. After
all, we need the Germans almost as much as they need us. “Germany is the hub of
the American presence in Europe,” in the New York Times’ words, a “center for medical
treatment, aircraft arming, and maintenance” for U.S. troops in the region and
beyond, and has been a “critical way station for forces and aircraft flying to
the Middle East to support Operation Epic Fury.”
There’s no strategic logic in antagonizing the Germans
while we’re using their country as a springboard to Iran, just like there’s no
strategic logic in further undermining NATO if we’re keen to prevent a major
new war involving Russia from breaking out. If we’re going to draw down in
Europe, argues National Review, we should do so in a responsible way
that doesn’t tempt Vladimir Putin to press his luck. “The credibility of the
U.S. deterrent must be restored to its former fearsomeness” as we wait for our
European allies to fully rearm, they write.
I got stuck on that line because it seems obvious to me
that the credibility of American deterrence will never be restored to
its former fearsomeness, especially in Europe, even after Trump is gone.
Realistically, the United States may never again enjoy the sort of military
dominance it enjoyed for the past 35 years. Certainly, it will never again
enjoy the trust and confidence of allies that made its fearsome European
deterrent possible in the first place.
Start with the present conflict, which has affirmed our
military’s ability to inflict immense damage on an enemy yet has plainly shaken global faith in the United States’ power to impose
its will. “America has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on ships and
planes that are good at defeating competitors’ ships and planes but ineffective
against cheaper, mass-produced weapons,” the Times observed recently. “The American economy
does not have the industrial capacity to produce enough of the weapons and
equipment it does need. And the country has struggled to fix these problems
because of a sclerotic government and a consolidated defense industry that
resists change.”
There’s no easy near-term fix for any of that,
particularly our declining advantage in naval power. Worse, the White House
and Pentagon displayed an alarming tactical slow-footedness that bodes ill for
future conflicts by failing to predict Iran’s foreseeable reliance on drones in
this conflict. Not even a PowerPoint presentation by Volodymyr Zelensky himself last fall could awaken the
president and his military aides to prioritize drone countermeasures, never
mind that Iran has been a key supplier of the technology to Russia. America,
supposedly the bleeding edge of global defense, now finds itself fighting the
proverbial last war.
If the future of warfare is inexpensive, low-tech
unmanned aircraft, we should expect our country’s traditional military
advantage to shrink. A world in which nations like Ukraine and Iran can stymie
much better-armed major powers by cranking out hundreds of thousands of drones
is one in which America’s immense firepower will have less deterrent force than
it used to. Donald Trump’s political base should understand that better than
most, ironically: A core right-wing argument for the Second Amendment is that
smaller arms, widely dispersed, can level the playing field against a much more
conventionally powerful military force.
Technological shifts and tactical shortsightedness are two obvious reasons the
United States isn’t deterring enemies like Iran as effectively as it once would
have. But there’s another.
Declining will.
It almost goes without saying that a country capable of
electing Trump, let alone electing him twice, will never and should never be
trusted again to guarantee another nation’s security.
The United States could choose the most pro-NATO Democrat
in creation as its new president in 2028, and it wouldn’t do a lick to alter
Europe’s calculus on rearmament, I expect. The delusion of 2021, that
Americans had come to their senses and would never again let a Trump-type
postliberal lead them, has been shattered irreparably. The trauma of the last
15 months has convinced Europeans that they’re now forever one U.S. election
away from seeing NATO collapse.
They don’t have a Trump problem—they have an America
problem, and they know it. They can’t rely on us anymore.
In fact, as their defense capabilities grow, my guess is
that their hostility to hosting U.S. troops will grow with it. Why would a
Germany that’s capable of defending itself continue to allow soldiers inside
its borders from a country whose current leadership has spent months pressuring
Ukraine, the tip of the European spear against Moscow, to surrender?
Postliberal America is a serious security risk to Western
liberalism. The only reason Europe is accommodating it at the moment is because
it’s somewhat less threatening than postliberal Russia
is.
Another way to frame the problem is this: Even if Trump’s
tough-guy belligerence can be counted on to effectively deter enemies, no one’s
sure anymore whom the United States regards as an enemy. Is Russia an enemy? Is
Ukraine? Is China? Is Germany?
Whom are we committed to deterring, and from what? For
self-evident reasons, an America that no longer agrees with itself on who its
adversaries are can’t be trusted by its partners to deter anyone.
A postliberal president in the Tucker Carlson mold would
be more coherent in that regard, treating authoritarian regimes as ones to
emulate and Western democracies as ones to abhor. A consistent, if despicable,
foreign policy of courting the former and deterring the latter would follow
from it. But Trump isn’t ideological the way Carlson and his ilk are. He’s
transactional.
He has postliberal preferences, obviously, but whether
someone is an ally or adversary changes day-to-day depending on how willing
they are to seek his favor. Germany could probably get back in his good graces
in an hour by pledging naval support for American operations to reopen the
Strait of Hormuz. Iran might well have tempted Trump into rekindling friendly
relations by offering him a historic Nobel-bait grand bargain at the start of
his term, notwithstanding the last two months of Truth Social bravado about the
country being ruled by “deranged scumbags” for the last 47 years.
All of that might be tolerable to U.S. allies if the
president were known for shrewd strategic acumen and/or Putin-esque
perseverance in achieving his goals. Despite his fickleness, there would be an
obvious upside to them in wooing him to help deter some mutual (temporary)
enemy. He is … not those things, however.
He attacked Iran believing that it would quickly
transform into a Venezuela-style client state and somehow had no countermove
ready when the Iranians predictably closed the strait. (An irony of the war is
that the threat of U.S. retaliation did successfully deter Iran from
choking off the waterway for decades, leverage Trump squandered by attacking
preemptively.) And it couldn’t be clearer that he’s more desperate than the bad
guys are for a deal that will end the conflict and the political pain it’s
causing him, never mind that the regime and its nuclear ambitions remain in place.
Why would any ally have confidence in someone like that
to skillfully deter an antagonist?
Beyond all of that, the Iran conflict will surely
intensify the American public’s queasiness about foreign wars in the medium
term. The U.S. went 15 years without a major foreign intervention between the
end of the Iraq occupation and this year’s misadventure; it might be a
similarly long time before one of Trump’s successors is willing to risk the
sort of political backlash and affordability crisis that the
president is facing now.
If so, America will no longer be willing to provide a
robust military deterrent for U.S. allies for the indefinite future. Europe
and, possibly, the Far East will be on their own because that’s how war-weary
Americans will want it. And if I’m wrong, there’s good reason to think fiscal
reality will intervene soon enough and destroy our ability to ride to the
rescue even if we want to.
The days of “fearsome deterrence” are ending.
Beyond deterrence.
There’s one more reason the U.S. under Trump isn’t
deterring traditional enemies like Iran and Russia. For all its pretensions
about “peace through strength” and scaring the bad guys into submission,
postliberalism isn’t really concerned with deterring enemies.
That’s a smokescreen for its true ambitions, the same way
“pivoting to China” is a smokescreen
for cutting off American weapons to the country that’s been making life
difficult for Putin for the past four years.
Postliberalism is primarily concerned with predation, not
deterrence. It imagines the U.S. military less as a shield—largely unnecessary
given the low risk of another nation attacking our country—and more as a sword.
The postliberal project to make America great again calls for dominating the
weak and extorting them for advantage. The armed forces are the muscle in that
racket beyond our national borders.
You can try to frame the president’s designs on Venezuela
and Cuba as a form of deterrence, but not very convincingly. Supposedly, he had
to depose Nicolás Maduro to deter drug trafficking to America, but in that case
why leave virtually everyone else in the regime in place? Supposedly, he has to
remove the remnants of the Castro regime to deter … communism, I guess? It’s
not clear. Cuba is no threat.
The obvious truth is that Trump coveted things that those
countries have and has turned to his muscle to secure them. It’s no secret what he wanted out of Venezuela, and he’s reportedly eyed
Cuba for years as a development opportunity both for America and for himself.
Per The Atlantic, one person who met with him about the
island during his first term claimed that “the president had been most excited
about the prospect of Trump-branded hotels or condominiums. ‘He’s interested in
Cuba as a market for him, and completely agnostic about the politics,’ this
person said.”
The same acquisitive impulse explains his desire for
Greenland. Controlling that territory isn’t about deterring China or Russia, neither of whom poses a threat to it. It’s about the
might-makes-right logic of postliberalism and the president’s insatiable
appetite for imperial grandeur, his dream of changing the map of the world
just because he can.
He’s even offered an acquisitive rationale for the war in Iran amid grumbling
that Americans don’t have the stomach to indulge him in his banditry.
Under postliberalism, the only thing the U.S. military is
supposed to deter is the leader of some pipsqueak country in our near-abroad
telling the president “no” when he gets a new craving. Go figure that our
allies and enemies alike have concluded that American strategic deterrence is
now at best undependable and at worst an illusion.
No comments:
Post a Comment