U.S. President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House on Thursday.Alex Brandon/The Associated Press
Adnan R. Khan is a writer and editor based in Amsterdam and Istanbul.
The U.S. has “already won” the war in Iran. That’s according to President Donald Trump, who, less than two weeks after the bombing campaign began, told Axios that it would be over “soon,” and claimed that there was “practically nothing left to bomb.”
If you squint, you might be tempted to agree with him. Reports trickling out from Tehran residents describe apocalyptic scenes. According to The Washington Post, in the first two days of the war alone, the U.S. used up munitions worth as much as $7.6-billion – more than a fifth of Canada’s entire military budget for the last fiscal year. Within the first 100 hours, CENTCOM claimed it had sunk 17 of the Iranian navy’s ships and crippled its advanced air defence systems.
Such a spectacle of raw power can be seductive, and the American habit of showing reverence for its military might is understandable. After all, this is a country that’s spent, on average, nearly a trillion dollars a year on its military over the last decade. One would expect nothing less than an overwhelming ability to wreak havoc.
But this utter tactical dominance can also be fatally misleading. In today’s hybrid and asymmetric wars, winning is, at best, an ambiguous prospect. Without clearly defined, and often modest, strategic goals, even the most powerful countries risk falling into a trap.
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Tactical seduction is what convinced Vladimir Putin that Russian forces would easily steamroll the Ukrainians. More than four years later, facing hit-and-run attacks and innovative drone tactics, Russia finds itself deep in a quagmire.
The same illusion convinced Mr. Trump and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth that they didn’t need strategic goals for the war in Iran, because America’s unmatched military muscle would be enough to win. They underestimated the ideological motivations that keep the Iranian regime fighting, along with their horizontal escalation strategies, aimed at drawing in regional countries and inflicting as much economic cost on the wider world as possible.
Mr. Trump seems to have a singularly special talent for mixing up displays of power with strategic success. But successive U.S. presidents since at least the 1960s have been just as bewitched by the awesome power at their fingertips. Even presidents who started no wars have leaned heavily on military means to either try to end the conflicts they inherited, or deal forcefully with intransigent adversaries. Lyndon B. Johnson famously escalated what had been an advisory mission in Vietnam into a full-scale invasion. Instead of meaningfully overhauling strategic planning that might have altered the trajectories of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Barack Obama turned to drone warfare and troop surges. For both presidents, tactical domination was too seductive – and they would lose those wars.
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Bill Clinton, meanwhile, was stealthier with his use of American military prowess. When leaders became problematic – like Haiti’s Jean-Bertrand Aristide – he either had them quietly removed or opted for firing off a few missiles and then calling it a day. Mr. Obama would later embrace those same tactics – and after him, so would Mr. Trump.
And then, of course, there was the Iraq war. It seems like a lifetime ago that George W. Bush ascended to a lectern on the USS Abraham Lincoln and, in front of a giant banner reading “Mission Accomplished,” announced that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended.” For the journalists covering that war, myself included, watching the spectacle was beyond surreal. It was May 1, 2003, about six weeks after the start of the “shock and awe” bombing campaign, and three weeks after American soldiers had, in an iconic image, torn down a statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. The mood on the aircraft carrier that day was ecstatic.
Later, Bush administration officials would claim the banner that served as such a dramatic backdrop to Mr. Bush’s announcement was meant to be about the end of the USS Lincoln’s deployment to the Arabian Sea, not the achievement of any strategic goals in Iraq. At the root of the muddled message was the fact that, despite all the exultation at the time, there was no end goal.
As with the U.S.’s adversaries in those past wars, Tehran knows that it is up against a vastly superior enemy in tactical terms. But it also knows the strategic landscape – including geography, domestic politics, the global economy and, most crucially, time – remains favourable to Iran. And the regime’s strategic goal is crystal clear: survival.
A basic lesson has continued to elude a long line of U.S. presidents: modern wars are not won by sheer destructive power alone. Without coherent goals and the discipline to stick to them, an asymmetric war can quickly turn into unending localized skirmishes and targeted bombing campaigns. Tactical seduction has made America very good at winning those battles – but also tragically proficient at losing wars.