Washington’s Iran Wars

The Ceasefire That Wasn’t

There is a particular rhythm to America’s Middle Eastern wars that has become almost liturgical: the strikes, the declaration of victory, the memorandum of understanding signed with great ceremony, and then, within weeks, the recognition that a piece of paper signed at a palace in France does not repeal the underlying logic of the conflict it was meant to end. Iran and the United States have now performed this cycle twice in a single year, and Washington’s foreign policy class is once again mistaking a pause in the fighting for the resolution of it.

President Trump’s declaration this week that the ceasefire is “over,” followed a day later by his insistence that no “long-term” military action is intended, is not a contradiction so much as a symptom. It reflects an approach to Iran that has, for two decades now, oscillated between maximalist rhetoric and tactical restraint without ever settling on what Washington actually wants the endgame to look like. Is the objective regime change? Denuclearization? Freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz? Each strike seems to answer a different question, which is another way of saying that no one in Washington has really decided.

This is worth dwelling on, because the war’s origins in February — the strikes that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader and a tier of the regime’s leadership — were sold as a decapitation operation that would break the Islamic Republic’s capacity to make trouble. What followed instead was a hardening of exactly the security-state logic that decapitation strikes are supposed to short-circuit. Iran’s hardliners, rather than being cowed, have used the humiliation of a slain leadership to justify precisely the kind of asymmetric harassment of shipping in the Strait that now serves as the pretext for renewed American strikes. This is a familiar pattern to anyone who has watched Washington’s post-9/11 wars unfold: the application of force against a state actor produces not the intended capitulation but a scattering of the threat into forms harder to deter and easier to escalate.

Notice, too, who is absorbing the costs of this brinkmanship. It is not principally Washington. It is Bahrain, sheltering the Fifth Fleet and now living under recurring air-raid sirens. It is Kuwait and Qatar, drawn into a fight over a waterway they did not start. It is the global economy, still paying down the largest oil-market disruption in modern history, months after the “ceasefire” was supposed to have ended it. The Gulf Arab states that Washington has spent decades cultivating as partners are discovering that proximity to American power in this region is not the same thing as protection by it — a lesson Iraq’s neighbors could have told them about in 2003, and Lebanon’s could have told them about more recently still.

There is also the question, so rarely asked plainly in Washington, of what an Israeli veto over American Iran policy is costing the United States. Netanyahu’s public jabs at Erdoğan this week, delivered from inside a NATO summit meant to showcase Western unity, and his lobbying against the sale of F-35s to a NATO ally, are a reminder that Jerusalem’s regional priorities and Washington’s alliance architecture do not always point in the same direction — and that American presidents have shown themselves consistently unwilling to let daylight show between the two, even when the strategic interests plainly diverge. A foreign policy genuinely oriented around American interests, rather than the maintenance of a permanent security guarantee for one regional patron, would ask harder questions about that arrangement than either party in Washington currently seems willing to pose.

None of this is an argument that Iran’s conduct in the Strait of Hormuz — attacking commercial tankers, threatening the arteries of global trade — is defensible. It plainly is not, and a regime willing to strangle its neighbors’ economies to assert control over a waterway invites the consequences it is now receiving. But recognizing that Tehran’s behavior is provocative is different from concluding that Washington’s answer to it — a war without a defined objective, prosecuted in a country where the last two decades of American military intervention in the region offer little evidence that force alone produces durable settlements — is wise. The strategic question American policymakers should be asking is not merely “how do we respond to the last attack” but “what does five more years of this look like, and is it one we can afford.” On present evidence, nobody in Washington has stopped long enough to answer it.