No, what President Trump is doing now vis-à-vis Iran would not be my strategy if I had been elected by the American people to be the commander-in-chief. My take on strategy—I’m a graduate of the Army War College, and they gave me a master’s degree in strategy—is pretty simple. First, you figure out your strategy, and then you beat the living snot out of the enemy until they give up and you attain your objective. Now, I was in the Gulf War, which is the last time we arguably did that on a large scale, and we did it very successfully. Admittedly, I was far in the rear, leading a heavily armed car wash, but I had a good view of what was going on at the VII Corps main command post. Our forces found the enemy and killed them until they stopped fighting. It’s remarkably effective when you do that.
But that’s the operational level. That’s where you’re doing the fighting that enacts the strategy. The strategic level is higher, broader, and more all-encompassing. And one of the things that’s going on here is an overlap between operational and strategic thinking, at least in the public pronouncements. What Donald Trump is announcing as his objectives are arguably operational objectives—destroy their Navy, destroy their air defenses, destroy their nuclear capabilities. Maybe we can argue that those are strategic considerations, but they are at least hybrid ones. The real strategic objectives are the big-picture, long-term stuff. We want an Iranian government that’s not going to keep trying to kill us and to end the undeclared 50-year war they’ve been waging against us, and we only recently started waging back. We also want to stop them from supporting Islamic psychopaths around the globe—hello, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. Finally, we would prefer the regime not murder vast numbers of its citizens. And these add up to one strategic goal, but speaking the phrase is like saying the word that the Knights Who Say “Ni!” cannot hear.
That phrase is “regime change.” The proper strategic objective about our enemy, the Islamic Republic of Iran, is “regime change.”
There, I said it. Get over it, pod bros and libertarians. Regime change has gotten a bad rap lately, mostly because when we tried to change regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, we screwed it up in the execution. In large part, this was because we failed to do what I mentioned above: kill enough of the enemy to force them to comply. Instead, we listened to the geniuses from the failed foreign policy elite who have never been in a fistfight in their life and thought it was a much better idea to try to buy off the locals and convert them into people like us. In other words, that meant imposing hamstringing rules of engagement while sending them buckets of cash and gender trainers because the kind of stupid people who ran our foreign policy since World War II were the kind of people who thought that the rest of the world was eager to share the same gooey political ideology as a Santa Monica wine woman.
They forgot that war, at least the military aspect, is about inflicting massive violence until the other guy gives up. And, as Clausewitz observed, war is inherently a political act. It aims to affect politics; war itself is politics by other means. And there’s nothing more political than changing a regime. In fact, regime change is a traditional way to end wars, as are negotiations. Either make a deal or go in, cut the leader’s head off, and put in a leader you can live with. That’s what the Romans did. And the Romans lasted for a while, until they started channeling the Democrats and allowing foreigners to come in and destroy their feminized nation, but that’s a whole other thing.
As noted, my preference would be to go in and pound the Iranian mullahs and their minions into smoking rubble. We should certainly let (and, in fact, encourage) Israel do that with Hezbollah—the fact that these sociopaths have American blood on their paws only makes the vengeance more righteous. But they have to be finished. The problem with these freaks is that they actually believe their millennial jihadi nonsense. They don’t mind dying. In fact, they’re happy to do it. And we should make them happy.
Again, that’s my preference, but I don’t get to choose because I didn’t get elected president. So, what do we make of what President Trump is doing?
Let’s examine his strategy with an open mind, putting aside our prejudices and preconceptions. Trump is taking a different approach. A lot of people who agree with me that the best course of action is to simply kill them until they surrender are extremely upset with him. But here’s the thing: he may be wrong, but he’s not crazy. He comes at this strategic problem from a different perspective. He’s a guy who makes deals. He uses all his advantages. He is a guy who is not a hammer. I’m a hammer. I’m a soldier. Everything looks like a nail, and I want to pound it.
But Trump looks at things differently. He sees pressure points beyond the target list. You might argue that Donald Trump is using the elements of national power as levers to obtain the ultimate strategic objective more comprehensively than anyone has waged war against the Iranian regime in the past. What are the elements of national power? Well, that gets a little convoluted because people keep adding letters to the applicable acronym, but let’s keep it simple because I was in the infantry, and I like simple. And I will get grief from strategists about how I’m simplifying things, but that’s OK because anybody who calls himself a “strategist” is probably a dork anyway.
The applicable acronym for the elements of national power is DIME, and it stands for “Diplomacy, Information, Military, and Economic” power. These are the ways a nation-state exercises power. There is diplomacy, the power to negotiate, but also the power to build alliances and therefore create pressure on an opponent. There is information, and the ability to use messaging to attain an objective. Right now, information is one of Iran’s two remaining viable tools of national power since it’s alienated everybody else, and we’ve mostly pounded its military into dust. There’s military power, which is the loudest and most visible of the elements. Then there’s economic power, which Iran is also attempting to leverage by closing the Strait of Hormuz.
But of course, Trump is leveraging these elements, too. Diplomatically, he has created what is essentially an alliance of enemies of Iran that surrounds it and can strangle it. He has essentially got Israel and the Gulf nations on the same side. That’s no small thing.
The information aspect is probably America’s weakest lever, in large part because domestic and foreign opponents of Donald Trump have decided that American failure is in their short-term political interest, so they are sending messages that we’re about to fail. This discourages our friends and encourages our enemies, but they don’t care. Trump is using information, too. His messages, his information warfare offensive, are pushing the idea that he really wants a deal, but it has to have certain things in it. His message is “I’m reasonable,” even though I don’t think he’s reasonable in the sense that the Iranians and Trump’s domestic opponents hope. His constant cheerleading for this hypothetical deal draws attention from the current main effort, the economic effort. The mullahs think they can drag this out, but dragging it out actually hurts them.
Let’s skip to the economic element. That’s where Trump is focusing, but you don’t see that like you see fireballs blooming over the mullahs’ hidey-holes. Trump is throttling their economy, going straight for the wallet instead of the throat. He’s cut off their ability to sell oil, and behind the scenes, we are screwing with their banking system. Iran’s economy is going to collapse. The question is when. Sure, the mullahs are perfectly willing to allow their people to suffer economic hardship, even starvation, but at a certain point, it’s all going to fall apart. The hope is that the people will rise, maybe supported by some generals who have had enough. If it works, the regime collapses and is replaced by something better—if not a friend, then at least not a nuke-chasing enemy.
As for military power, we’re holding off on fully exercising it for now. At least, that’s what it looks like to outsiders. I have absolutely no inside information on it, but it’s pretty clear what’s happening. Our forces are watching, rearming, and more importantly, assembling a juicy target list for when the president says, “Go.” One problem with holding back on the “M” is that it makes us look passive to the enemy (and others), even if we’re actually aggressively preparing. The lack of “M,” therefore, can be an “I” issue.
Now, if the IRGC fired rockets in our general direction, I would unleash unholy hell on them. That’s not how Donald Trump operates. We’ve seen before that he is willing to absorb fires that have no substantial effect in order to avoid increasing the military effort, which would be at the expense of the diplomatic, informational, and economic initiatives. In other words, he is choosing to let them shoot rockets at us, which we shoot down, and not retaliate as long as no one gets killed because he doesn’t see it in our interest to go kinetic again right now. That option is still there, and we have another ace up our sleeve—our loyal friend (the ravings of idiots like Thomas Massie aside), Israel is ready to pummel them when they get uppity. Trump can sit back and look diplomatic, playing the good cop to Netanyahu’s bad cop. At the same time, Trump can make some noises—diplomatic and informational—about Israel not crushing Hezbollah in Lebanon, and then Israel can continue with its righteous work of crushing Hezbollah in Lebanon while Trump gets to shrug, while in the background, you hear the sad trombone.
“Don’t blame me—that kooky Bibi is out of control. Oh well!”
Among some of us who generally feel as I do about the need to defeat these creeps, there’s concern that Donald Trump is about to give the mullahs pallets of cash and generally surrender in order to get this whole thing over with. It was not as fast as the Venezuela mission, and now he wants out at any cost. That’s just crazy talk. Some people with whom I often agree are very worried that Donald Trump doesn’t understand that the Iranians are a bunch of liars who will never keep their word. But here’s the thing—Donald Trump’s not an idiot. He knows they are a bunch of liars who will never keep their word. But he really doesn’t need them to keep their word, because the hypothetical agreement is not the end state he’s after. The end state he’s after is the fall of the Islamic regime via economic strangulation, which will take time. The deal is a deception, a shiny distraction from the real objective.
We keep hearing how Trump doesn’t have time because the midterms are coming and those gas prices have to come down, but it’s the Iranians who better listen to that clock ticking. Trump’s worst-case scenario is that he loses the House. Their worst-case scenario is that they lose their heads, and that’s what Trump’s betting on. Time is on our side, even if too many weak Westerners have forgotten the importance of strategic patience. Life is not MTV; you can’t win if you have the attention span of a gnat on meth. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and Tehran won’t fall in one.
So, if my analysis is correct—and my bias is that I want it to be correct—then Trump is leveraging all the DIME elements to attain the end state of regime change, but he’s not telling us that. That’s one of Trump’s things—he never tells people exactly what he’s doing, but his plan is pretty obvious if you don’t panic and take an objective look at what’s happening. He keeps talking about a deal, but it’s ridiculous to think that he’s somehow so eager for any agreement that he would sign his name to something that disgraces him forever. If there’s one thing Donald Trump doesn’t do, it’s let himself be humiliated, and he’s certainly not going to allow himself to be humiliated by this bunch of perverted weirdos. The Iranians think dragging out the negotiations helps them. It does create a pain point for Trump in the midterms, but they’ve got a lot more to lose. He can suck it up. Can they?
Now, I could be wrong about all this. Donald Trump could be eager to sign an awful deal, and that will have him go down in history as a giant joke who allowed these 7th-century pagan fanatics to humiliate him. But does that sound like Trump? When’s the last time he gave in and allowed himself to be humiliated? He doesn’t do that. And the idea that, somehow, he and his advisors don’t see the obvious reality that the mullahs are weasels and they are playing for time is just silly. I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am. We are constantly hearing about how Trump is supposed to be throwing in the towel, yet the towel never gets tossed. Where is the terrible deal he has allegedly been right on the verge of signing since April? Nowhere. It doesn’t exist. And yes, the clock is ticking, but for whom?
That’s how I interpret his strategy from the outside. Again, it’s probably not what I would do. I would take this opportunity to blow our enemies all to hell. But there’s more than one way to skin a strategic cat. The idea that Donald Trump is flailing and totally lost could be accurate, but it would be out of character and a departure from his now decade-long history of being in the public eye. More likely, he is stretching this out because every day they get weaker, while he can absorb the pain.
All the critiques of Donald Trump and the Iran War depend on either thinking that Donald Trump is an idiot, which is wishful thinking for his opponents, or residual concern that he’s not going to unequivocally win this war. I get the concern that he might be so eager to close this chapter that he cuts and runs, but you must ask yourself something. When has Donald Trump ever cut and run? Why would Donald Trump ever allow not only his own personal humiliation, and not only the humiliation of his country, but the endangerment of his country from these wounded animals who would happily nuke us the second they finished off Tel Aviv?
You might not agree with Trump’s strategy, but he has one. And he’s the guy who got elected, so he gets to set the strategy. It could very well work. Now, is this wishful thinking? Maybe, but his history gives the president grounds to expect some trust. He has never screwed us, and why would he start now to help an enemy he has been railing against for almost 50 years?
So don’t panic. Chill out. Watch what happens. I’m betting on the United States.
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