363 - The Leadership Vacuum: Blasting Iran is the Wrong Move at the Worst Time
A Widened War is Perilous
Has Trump, who promised to do the opposite, now started World War III? Buster bombing Iran's underground nuclear enrichment sites may have destroyed Iran's ability to build its own nuclear weapons. Or it may have more likely stimulated Iran to finish building the deadly bomb, and soon to use it. That would be a woeful result, and a direct consequence of Trump's transactional failure to ignore his impulses and think strategically and carefully. Does Trump have a plan? Is it merely to follow the most extreme of Israeli actions?
As a key commentator in Europe wrote: “Although Trump has sought to eliminate the nuclear threat from Iran, he has now made it far more likely that Iran becomes a nuclear state.” An expert in Washington said “You would want to think several steps ahead, and there is no evidence that the President has done that.”
Washington still needs to lead the world, and bombing Iran (avoiding the U. S. Constitution once again) is hardly responsible. Nor is it likely to be consequential -- except for rising energy costs everywhere and the strengthening of the most aggressive forces within Iran. Abandoning diplomacy and Obliterating Fordow and Natanz may have sundered Iran's bomb-making abilities. But it doesn't look that way. We may well have wasted our big bombs. Radiation levels have not risen.
A month ago, Trump warned against intervening in foreign conflicts. “The interventionalists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand,” he said. Exactly! He pledged to keep the U.S. out of “stupid, endless wars.” Did we learn nothing in the attack on Saddam Hussein?
Trump may think authorizing the use of buster bombs shows leadership when in fact it demonstrates how fully we live in a leadership vacuum. He has gambled recklessly, as usual. Being poorly informed and poorly advised by his depleted staff is no excuse.
"I may do it. I may not do it. Nobody knows what I am going to do." That is hardly consummate leadership. Nor is dropping bombs without appreciating how dangerous it is. Further, Trump misled America, purposely. The U.S. Air Force had been planning the bombing of Iran for months.
The real choices are clear. Putin needs to be told firmly that taking more territory in Ukraine and pulverizing that land with missiles and drones is no longer an option. Israel needs to be told decisively to stop killing Gazans who gather for food at Israeli sponsored distribution sites in the Strip. And, not least, Trump needs to call off the dogs of war against Iran, even if Iran responds desperately by attacking U.S. bases in the Middle East.
The U.S. has gained nothing except more turmoil by joining Israel's attack on Iran. War in the Middle East only distracts us and Trump from the other theatres of combat. Regime change in Iran, that Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu both crave, must come from within to be successful, not from assassinations and aerial bombardments.
These perilous times demand steady and immensely thoughtful leadership. Instead, the U.S. has a president who acts impulsively and, this time around, is constrained by no experienced foreign policy hands - no John Boltons even, and certainly no one of the experience and considered crafty intelligence of Henry Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski. Marco Rubio, doubling as secretary of state and national security advisor, has lost his independence to Trump yesmanship. Tulsi Gabbard, by once speaking truth to power, can no longer bring the accumulated wisdom of the intelligence community to bear on Trump's thinking.
No one with any sagacity is minding the store. President Biden had Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security chief Jake Sullivan to guide him, along with an array of knowledgeable national security staffers like Fiona Hill. But that depth is no longer present. The fate of the free world thus now depends dangerously on a capricious, prejudiced, inexperienced, aging, would-be despot with worrying instincts.
He would rather throw Marines and the national guard into Los Angeles to confront a non-existent rebellion than to think strategically about the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. naval ships bottled up in the Persian Gulf, and a skyrocketing petroleum price that would follow a fuller war in the Middle East. Such a war would kill innumerable Iranians and American combatants, and would plunge the world into a crisis even bigger than that caused by Putin's invasion of Ukraine and Netanyahu's response to Hamas' atrocities. The collective "we" hardly needs more tumult, and Washington hardly needs to associate itself more completely with Netanyahu's war aims.
Netanyahu wants to avoid facing court charges for corruption. War postpones that reckoning. Netanyahu revels in fighting and mayhem while claiming that his main interest is in eliminating Iran as a nuclear power and bringing down the rule of Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It is immensely destabilizing for Trump to go all in with Netanyahu. The U S. is now at war with Iran despite Congressional objections and supposed Constitutional restraints. Thus, Trump has once again shredded the Constitution.
Doing so is illegal. Doing so destroys all ability for the U. S. to pose as a peacemaker rather than a war monger. Doing-so would take our eyes off the prize, too --- the peaceful preservation of Ukraine. Trump has the ability (no one else can) to order Putin to desist. He needs firmly to tell Putin that since the end of the Soviet Union Russians and Ukrainians have never been one people. He needs forcefully to deny (as Putin said last week) that "the whole of Ukraine is ours." Putin also uttered "Wherever a Russian soldier steps foot, that's ours." For Trump to permit such imperial threats without firm rebukes would be a strategic mistake. Kissinger would have expostulated.
Trump does a lot of damage to the position of the U.S. (and certainly makes us less "great") by acting transactionally instead of strategically and carefully, and of course by trusting his Queens N. Y. intuition rather than listening to those who are less explosive. In so many ways, this absence of leadership often directly undercuts others of his own objectives. He says he wants to reduce imports of fentanyl into the U.S. and gang violence. Instead, he allows his subordinates to weaken the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), which investigates illicit gun trafficking and violence; the firing of two-thirds of the ATF work force effectively ends surveillance of weapons' proliferation. It also makes it hard to answer complaints from Mexico and Haiti that U.S. gun running is fueling the killing sprees, gangs, and cartels in those countries.
And the closing down of USAID, as I have written, has the potential to bring disease to American shores (and killing literally hundreds of thousands of Africans) while dangerously ending all funding for democracy promotion and anti-corruption initiatives in eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa. (See Nicholas Kristof's columns this weekend from Sierra Leone.) Likewise, the U.S. last week was trying re-hire the Persian-speaking work force of the Voice of America that had been discharged in a fit of foolishness along with most of the rest of VOA, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
Kissinger, for all of his many faults, always thought three dimensionally, with an eye not on the first step in a chain of consequences, but on the end game. No one is doing that in the White House now. Our experienced ambassador to Ukraine has resigned in despair and is running for Congress in Michigan. Rubio just parrots Trump's words. Literally no one is weighing bad options against each other.
These United States, and freedom loving Europeans, Asians, and Middle Easterners are all left with ignorance feeding mindless, addled, decision-making. As I said in 2002 to a person running for public office, going to war in in Iraq would be the "a wrong war, for the wrong reason, at the wrong time." Democrats in Congress fail the nation if they do not compel Trump to obey the War Powers Resolution and force him to observe his own campaign pledges to keep the United States out of foreign wars. This is a time for peace-making and for positive leadership that benefits humankind. Let us somehow emerge stronger despite the screaming leadership vacuum that has caused so much suffering and decay.