The American people need the Iran war like a fish needs a bicycle. For our politicians and permanent bureaucrats, it’s a different story.
The political class, adrift after the Soviet Union fell, needed a new animating mythos. Neoconservatives taught them to experience preemptive war against tinpot tyrants as a civilizational crusade. The Middle East – where America’s “greatest ally” faced existential threats – offered the ideal stage for the clash between order and barbarism.
Here was the role of a lifetime: to call the shots on a world-historical mission that cast unilateral hard power as virtue. No wonder they cling to it, even after every failed regime-change war.
President Donald Trump’s vow that he would never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon was one of the few moments to draw bipartisan applause during his recent State of the Union address. So what if the geopolitical center of gravity now lies in the Indo-Pacific? On February 28, our leaders reached for another bloody encore in the desert, another stab at playing Wyatt Earp.
Like every functioning addict, America’s ruling class has enablers. Defense contractors monetize its messiah complex, the media industry mythologizes it, and a pro-Israel advocacy network leverages it by converting Israeli geopolitical ambitions into U.S. military imperatives.
When Israel decided to attack Iran, it should have been a time for choosing. Instead, the Trump administration treated U.S. participation as inevitable. The only choice we had was the timing. We could either join Israel’s opening blow or wait until Iran retaliated against U.S. forces before initiating hostilities. America’s terms of entry into the Iran war demonstrate “alliance entrapment,” regardless of whether Secretary of State Marco Rubio conceded it or not.
The first rule of a war of choice is to sell it as a necessity. In the absence of a direct attack on the homeland, the White House has cycled through several rationales. These include preventing an “imminent” nuclear threat (of which no public evidence has been produced), destroying Iran’s missile arsenal, liberating Iranians from tyranny, protecting Israel, and demanding the Islamic regime’s “unconditional surrender.” Ultimately, it settled on an official justification that is nearly verbatim from a memo by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies – a leading Iran-hawk think tank created to “enhance Israel’s image in North America.”
Since the war began, thirteen U.S. troops have been killed and 381 wounded, while the reported death toll across the Middle East is now in the thousands. If Trump opposed the 2003 Iraq War, why is he sacrificing blood and treasure in a strategically unwinnable regime-change operation? It appears that he objected to the outcome of that war and not the ideology that led to its failure. The “axis of evil” morality play always seduces those desperate to feel consequential.
The loudest case for Trump’s pursuit of glory in Iran was made by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. After all, dismantling the Shia theocracy and its proxy network would shift the regional balance of power in Israel’s favor. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch and “some conservative commentators” also reportedly pushed the President toward war. Given who the White House is now lionizing, it would be safe to infer that the latter includes big-name neocons Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro.
Contrary to what the Murdoch media entities and neocon cheerleaders claim, American tactical victories have not translated into functional success. Iranian missiles and drones still regularly strike U.S. bases, energy facilities, and civilian areas in our allied Gulf states. The Islamic regime remains intact and it has effectively closed off the Strait of Hormuz. Many of our Asian partners are reeling from the consequent oil and gas supply disruption.
Corroding Pax Americana is a small price for the ruling class to feel like history’s heroes. As the hostilities grind into a war of attrition, Taiwan and our other allies fear that the ongoing diversion of U.S. military forces from the Indo-Pacific will create an opening for Chinese adventurism.
But at home, defense industry-funded think tanks are marketing the conflict as if it closes that opening. Analysts from the Hudson Institute, for example, claim that the Iran war is the first act of a grand strategy to weaken China. They exaggerate China’s ties with Iran and overlook the U.S. military’s inability to conduct protracted wars in multiple theaters. This enabling narrative flips what is a strategic self-own into a 4D chess move.
America’s post-Cold War political elites have an unbroken record of acting out messianic fervor without accounting for its costs or leveling with the public. This pathology is often misdiagnosed as a society-wide symptom of late-stage capitalism or American imperial decline. But it is peculiar to the governing ecosystem. Nowhere is its totalizing influence more evident than in the devolution of MAGA into a personal loyalty creed.
The Trump movement made “America First” its rallying cry. Putting America first demands that American power serve American interests on American terms. Nowhere is this more violated than when Americans are asked to kill and be killed for a foreign country’s hegemonic agenda.
That which cannot be repaired must be replaced. The regime that needs changing is in Washington, D.C. It will take a gray swan event – like an avertible catastrophic war.
Meg Hansen directs the U.S. Chapter of the Indo-Pacific Studies Center. She was a 2023–24 Senior Fellow in the Budapest Fellowship Program and a Visiting Fellow at the Danube Institute.
