Trump’s Biggest Mistake on Iran

Ambitions of global empire override the interests of American citizens yet again.

Editor’s note: We interrupt your regularly scheduled Understanding America for this comment from Oren on Iran.

The decision of whether to start a war is the most consequential a president can make, and President Trump has chosen wrong. If the operation in Iran tips the economy into recession and devolves into a military quagmire, his decision will more obviously be wrong. If the Iranian regime falls tomorrow, he will still have been wrong. He has given priority to the ambitions of American empire over the interests of American citizens, in exactly the manner of the “globalist elites” he had sought to replace.

In the decades after the Cold War’s end, the United States adopted a framework in which American dominance of the global system was the ultimate imperative. As I observed last year in Foreign Affairs, President George H. W. Bush’s seminal Defense Planning Guidance in 1992 called for the United States to “promote increasing respect for international law, limit international violence, and encourage the spread of democratic forms of government and open economic systems,” and to “retain the pre-eminent responsibility for addressing selectively those wrongs which threaten not only our interests, but those of our allies or friends, or which could seriously unsettle international relations.”

The following year, President Bill Clinton ratified this bipartisan consensus in a speech at the United Nations. “We cannot solve every problem,” he said, “but we must and will serve as a fulcrum for change and a pivot point for peace.” Four years later, in his second inaugural address, Clinton went further, anointing the United States the world’s “indispensable nation.” At around the same time, neoconservatives Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan assigned the American people “fundamental interests in a liberal international order, the spread of freedom and democratic governance, an international economic system of free-market capitalism and free trade,” and a “responsibility to lead the world.”

Prioritizing the American empire over American citizens and then claiming this would somehow redound to their benefit, hollowing out the Heartland to stitch global markets together, giving more attention to upholding abstract principles on the other side of the world than to helping families make ends meet—these are the kinds of tradeoffs that the American elite embraced. The strategy worked so poorly, and became so despised by so many Americans, that they elected Donald Trump president instead of continuing to go along with it.

In January, debating the Hudson Institute’s Michael Doran on the future of U.S. policy toward Israel, I argued against action in Iran, because “there is not a lot of good reason to believe that the United States attempting to intervene in Iran would be successful or push it in a better direction in any reasonable timeframe.” Instead, it seemed to me, “the United States should take its limited resources, both literally and figuratively, and focus on those things that are most relevant to the interests of the American people,” including “strengthening the architecture of our existing alliances, which is not especially strong right now, and focusing on the very many problems that we have here on this side of the ocean.”

Of course, the first-order cost of this war, like any war, is the death, destruction, and instability that it causes. That’s why the United States should only ever go to war as a last resort, only after careful deliberation, only with a just cause and a clear rationale, and only after leaders have built support from the citizenry they are sworn to represent, and from whom the soldiers and resources must be drawn. The Trump administration did none of this, which makes the costs unjustifiable and also weakens the U.S. position, lacking the deep political support necessary to make a “fight until we win” posture credible. Deploying ground troops, as is reportedly under discussion, would compound all these problems.

The quick, limited strikes on Iran in June and Venezuela in January seem to have given the White House a false confidence that “We Can Just Do Things.” But this conflict is two-sided, and the other side currently holds a veto over how and when it ends. The regime could fall, but it appears more likely to survive, solidify control, and radicalize further—with less to lose and no fear of an American threat already carried out. (Already, this has become an argument for regime change as the only option.)

When it comes to the Middle East, a second-order concern must always be energy. One reason past presidents have not attacked Iran is that it was expected to respond by shutting the Strait of Hormuz, as has been diligently war-gamed for decades, sharply reducing global supplies of oil and natural gas. Destruction of energy infrastructure by both sides would deepen the crisis and impose continuing costs for years after a shooting war ended. Sharp price increases are already hitting the American family directly in its pocket book and will likely get worse before they get better.

Those increases also pose a rather serious political challenge ahead of the midterm elections for a White House that had insisted it was advancing an “affordability agenda.” The Trump trade agenda has come at a remarkably low cost to consumers and offers a tangible and vital domestic payoff; igniting a contest to destroy Persian Gulf infrastructure is a different story. As the New York Times headlined ominously last week, “U.S. Inflation Stayed Subdued Before Onset of Iran War.”

The energy shocks pose a direct threat as well to the objectives of rebalancing the global trading system and reindustrializing the American economy. Rising energy prices are not conducive to major industrial investments, or flourishing manufacturing and agricultural sectors. If they tip the economy into recession, the president’s vision for a new “golden age” will recede over the horizon. The positions of trading partners more reliant on the Gulf, whose investments in the American economy and demand for American exports are vital to American growth, are quickly weakening as well. For instance, Politico reported on Wednesday:

The meeting between President Donald Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi in Washington on Thursday was meant to be a celebration involving cherry blossoms, big investment checks and an affirmation of close ties between the two allies. The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran has scrambled that agenda. Japan depends heavily on oil shipped through the Strait of Hormuz…

President Trump also announced this week that he would postpone the long-anticipated summit with China’s Xi Jinping because of the war.

And then there is the cost in resources. The war has already meant moving vital strategic assets out of other regions and expending limited munitions, reminding the world that the United States can barely fight one limited war for a few weeks, let alone fulfill its purported commitments to deter more powerful adversaries around the world. The Pentagon has reportedly asked the White House for $200 billion in supplemental spending to support the war effort, an outrageous request that underscores the folly of the entire mission.

Recall, the White House position (backed by much commentary) is that the war is going well, perhaps as well as could have been hoped or anticipated. And yet, after less than three weeks, the price tag could be $200 billion? Will anyone in the administration promise that even that amount will prove sufficient? This is why our Constitution rightly requires the president to secure authorization from Congress before initiating a conflict. No member of Congress should vote for that spending unless they are prepared to identify the people whose taxes they will raise to fund it. Even then, the list of other priorities that such outlays could instead have funded is too depressingly long to include here.

Finally, there is the simple matter of distraction. The attention of the White House is among the most valuable resources available to policymakers. Politically, the American people rightly take the president’s focus to signal what their government considers to be the nation’s most pressing problems. When a war is on, not much else happens. And so much else needs to happen—not only on trade and reindustrialization, but also on immigration, on technology, on health care, on education, on housing, on family. All must take a back seat to, well, whatever it is we are accomplishing 6,000 miles away.

Against all these considerations, the argument for the war (depending on which you pick and attempt to decipher) usually requires a circular worldview in which American hegemony is vital to the goal of preserving American hegemony. We are dropping bombs on Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps bases from which attacks might otherwise be launched at the American bases we must have in the region for situations where we want to drop bombs. We have taken steps that led predictably to the closing of the Strait, because it was dangerous for Iran to have the power to close the Strait. To prevent nuclear proliferation, we must demonstrate our willingness to flatten countries that do not yet have nuclear weapons. How this helps the American people is unclear, once you turn your eyes away from the hand-waving assumption that global empire benefits the typical citizen.

Critics of the war have been quick to call Trump’s decision impulsive, egotistical, and indefensible. But he is proceeding in precisely the proud tradition that policymakers, commentators, and scholars promoted for decades, in which addressing the cost of health insurance for American families takes a backseat to addressing the cost of shipping insurance for boats carrying oil to China.

Trump has not so much gone out on a limb as climbed up the wrong tree—one already filled with neoconservatives who spent years condemning him as reckless, vulgar, uninterested in constitutional imperatives, and dangerous to global stability… until he became their kind of reckless, vulgar, uninterested in constitutional imperatives, and dangerous to global stability.

In 2020, Bill Kristol warned against Trump’s “recklessness, his irresponsibility” and the prospect of him “unleashed, unbridled with a bunch of sycophants working for him,” without military advisors like Jim Mattis and John Kelly to guide him. John Bolton said that Trump was “dangerous” because “I don’t think he understands enough about international affairs to be able to recognize threats to America unless and until they have a direct impact on his personal political circumstances.”

But last June, Kristol told the New York Times, “you’ve got to go to war with the president you have. … If you really think that Iran can’t have nuclear weapons, we have a chance to try to finish the job.” In January he said the administration “should be helping the brave people of Iran overthrow a cruel and terror-sponsoring dictatorship.” As the first missiles landed last month, Bolton told the Free Press, “I tried to convince Trump to do this in the first term. I’m sad that I didn’t succeed then, but if there were ever a moment to do this, this is it.”

In 2016, John Podhoretz called Trump “an unspeakable human being” and “an emetic” who was “about to be vomited up.” Now he waxes rhapsodic: “The six weeks of diplomatic dithering following the Iranian slaughter were, in fact, simply temporizing. We got our ducks in a row… Today, February 28, 2026, may be the most important day of the 21st Century so far.”

This tree in which Trump and his war chorus now find themselves together is dead, its core long since rotted. Americans tried its bitter fruit and turned away in disgust. If the weight of this foreign adventure finally causes it to keel over, the president will have quite a distance to fall.

There is another tree, far from the online swamp of identity politics and ethnic hatreds, where most Americans sit, uninterested in empire and yearning to live in a republic with representatives focused on the interests of their fellow citizens. President Trump should climb down and head on over. Regardless, it represents the nation’s well-rooted future, and we all share responsibility for ensuring it grows.