From Marathon to Hormuz
There may be reason to congratulate President Trump — and the United States Air Force — for defeating the heirs of Darius and Xerxes, though keep in mind the Greeks did it first and look what happened to them. Many triumphs and great accomplishments, and many tragedies. Check out Herodotus before being too celebratory about Marathon and Salamis.
Nations and civilizations must learn to rise and fall and rise again. Let us hope this will be the case with the British Empire, or at least Great Britain, or at the very least England. In the meantime, my modest advice is that while the recent American military campaigns are worthy of praise, I would not count my chickens until they are hatched, as the hicks say (no pejorative meaning here, my family has a productive chicken farm).
It is not entirely his opponents’ fault if the president’s explanations of what we are doing are immediately denounced as bluff or negotiating gambit or even mad rants.
What is it exactly that we got that justifies assurances of victory — and realistic hopes for durable peace? Compared to what we said we wanted? By we I mean the normals who see America’s power and prosperity, qualities that must be simultaneously spiritual and material, as blessings to be guarded not squandered.
In our own Hemisphere we got the removal of a bandit dictator suspected of running illegal killer drugs into our country: a worthy cause but did we or did we not leave his own allies in charge to bide their time? Were our forces ordered to attack and kill innocent fishermen and sailors in Caribbean and Pacific ocean ways? Such questions cannot simply be sent into a memory hole, particularly as we are talking about freedom of the seas on the other side of the planet. Where, we are assured, our bombardments are focused on military targets, but where the president himself has threatened the very civilians whom he vowed to free from tyranny.
We got a pause in the fighting, which is surely better than an intensification in the fighting, and we have, from either side, ours and theirs, “points” that would render the pause permanent, if they can be agreed upon and enforced.
Well, to begin, that means these points must be clearly defined and discussed. There are at least two issues, or “points,” over which the other side appears to be reverting to the old Soviet diplomatic default line: “what’s ours is ours and what’s yours is up for grabs.” They want to keep their nuclear bomb program and control over the Strait of Hormuz. Moreover, they want to be paid, by means of tolls for passage through the Strait, for damages caused over the past weeks of bombardments. They also demand the withdrawal of our military forces from the region, and they are applying pressure on our ally, Israel, to withdraw its forces from the territory they have occupied to provide strategic depth that enhances (somewhat) its security from cross-border artillery fire and incursions from Hezbollah, the Iranian regime’s ally and proxy.
You, they say, pull back and desist from trying to stop us from our aggressions, which we will feel free to resume. It is as if the Japanese militarists, following the attack on Pearl Harbor, said, Okay, enough, now you stay out of the Pacific Ocean, do not rebuild your fleet, and let us do as we please in China, the Philippines, Singapore, and wherever else we feel our interests require us to rule.
What we know about Donald Trump is that he will reject this and propose alternatives. It appears both sides are willing to pause and assess the situation on the ground, but that is about as much as we know. Unhinged condemnations of the president’s war policy and negotiating style are not helpful, even if you feel he does go a little over the top from time to time in his rhetoric.
Iran is in the hands of a monstrous Nazi-type regime that threatens freedom-loving people, including the vast majority of Iranians, and this regime was — perhaps still is — developing a nuclear arsenal to complement the other weapons it has been using against its own people and the neighboring countries. President Trump’s initial idea was that we have seen enough of this regime over nearly 50 years to know it is wicked and aggressive; he himself said so when the regime came to power, when he himself was not even in politics.
But we knew this about the Soviet Union early on, as well, and still we saw that overthrowing it was not realistically feasible, so we lived with it for the better part of a century. If regime change, in any meaningful sense, is not possible, we can sustain a system of regime containment, as we did with varying successes and failures, during Russia’s Soviet era.
The air wars conducted by the U.S. and Israel by all accounts have prepared the ground for such a system, and this is more than previous American administrations were able to achieve with combinations of diplomacy, sanctions, and bribes. President Trump has promoted political and commercial as well as defensive policies with states in the region that felt, with reason, threatened by Iran’s theocratic tyranny. He has changed the political and public mind set in the region. For this, he can take credit, if not claim definitive victory.
The Islamic Republic’s weapons include artillery, rockets and launchers, naval forces, and much more, including a ruthless and vicious secret police, the Islamic Republican Guard Coprs. Since coming to power close to fifty years ago, this regime, a deformed and perverse form of Shiite Islam, has spent vast resources on its military and security forces. It has declared America and Israel to be its number one and two enemies, and repeatedly promised to annihilate them, while taking opportunities to kill Americans and Israelis either directly or by means of proxy terrorist organizations which it has armed and financed.
Just recognizing and saying out loud that war is war and enemies are enemies, not people with whom we have a misunderstanding that can be fixed by good faith negotiations, is a long-overdue return to the reality of international politics.
For Americans weary of foreign policy where the question is whether, or when, not-winning is better than not-losing, the Trump foreign policy should represent an answer aptly put by Wes Moore, Maryland’s governor and possibly the opposition party’s most formidable candidate for president: just what are we doing?
Unfortunately, the president’s focus on simplifying our foreign policy is undercut by his erratic, impatient, intemperate manner which amount to saying let’s be pals one day and we’ll send you all to hell the next. It is one thing for a U.S. Army general to say “war is hell” while his commander in chief speaks of “malice toward none” (at different stages of the conflict, mind); it is rather different when the president says both more or less simultaneously.
Gov. Moore said, in a recent speech, “They [referring to his former 82nd Airborne brothers-in-arms with whom he served in Afghanistan] are getting orders without a mission. If they [the majority party] are wondering why this war is not popular, how about you start with the fact that no one even understands what we’re doing.”
The fact that a serious pol and veteran can say this is a striking example of how confusing the administration’s communications are. It has made it difficult for the American public to grasp why we should respond forcefully to a country that has been declaring its intention to destroy us and our civilization for half a century.
Maybe President Trump is right, he has knocked them on their heels and he has a plan to keep them there. Too, a significantly new geopolitical situation is emerging in the Middle East, largely thanks to Trump’s diplomatic initiatives during his first term and the military successes of our and Israel’s air forces. Extraordinary changes in the balance of forces — and thus opportunities for peace — have been achieved. And yet, paradoxically, Governor Moore has a point: no one, at home or abroad, knows what they — our leaders — are doing. Of course the details of policy, in wartime, are not meant be an open book; the aims must be clear.
Triumphalism in such circumstances seems premature, even unseemly. Despite the feats of arms, the administration raises doubts on how it means to capitalize on the courage and skills of men and women in the skies and on the battlefields. What is the plan? Is it to come out on top of a clash, if not of civilizations at least of two radically opposed conceptions of the purposes of politics and of relations between nations? Or is it to re-establish the kind of international order, based on an uneasy standoff between free nations and despotic regimes, that defined the second half of the past century?
It is not entirely his opponents’ fault if the president’s explanations of what we are doing are immediately denounced as bluff or negotiating gambit or even mad rants, though certainly on our own side the criticism should be more civil than it has been. Adroit as the president’s verbal feints may be in arguments, there is a point at which they confound both sides. To paraphrase a famous line, clarity of purpose — even more than truth — may be the first casualty in a bellicose world.
READ MORE from Roger Kaplan:
On Presidents, Popes, and the Parlous State of International Affairs These Days
The Australian Open and the Politics of Words
Poles Apart? Thoughts Sparked by the Australian Open
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