U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says the Trump administration’s foreign policy is based on restraint and realism. But U.S. foreign policy actions across the world suggest a lack of understanding for what the concept means in practice. Restraint values diplomatic engagement over military coercion and domination. so don’t be fooled by Pompeo’s hollow language. The latest video from the Quincy Institute explains:
With not just one — but two — carrier battle groups now steaming in circles somewhere off the coast of Oman out of the range of Iranian missiles, we are all left with the head-scratching question: what is it, exactly, that the United States hopes to accomplish with another round of air strikes on Iran? Trump hasn’t told us.
The latest crisis du jour with Iran illustrates the strategic swamp willingly stepped into not just by Donald Trump but his predecessors as well. The swamp is built on a singular and hopelessly misguided assumption: that the use of force either by stand-off, limited strikes from 12,000 feet or even invasions will somehow solve complex political problems on the ground below. The United States today sits shivering, gripped with this runaway swamp fever — with no relief in sight.
It would be easy to write this off as uniquely Trump.Truthfully, Trump merely provides only the latest example of a political leader showing little capacity to think through how the use of force can achieve political objectives that, in theory, should make the country stronger relative to its adversaries, more prosperous, and safer.
In fact, recent history demonstrates the absence of chief executives capable of such straightforward calculations.
If anything, the late 20th and 21st centuries demonstrate the complete breakdown in strategy and strategic thought that could have guided the country’s leaders into making sensible decisions on whether and in what circumstances to loosen the holster and start blasting away. Instead, all that we’ve seen is a reflexive reach for that holster that seems to become easier over time — despite the clear lack of any achievable positive results for the country. The era remains littered with America’s destructive failures.
Clearly, the 1990s represented the time when the United States began its descent down the slippery slope of believing that limited standoff strikes and war could achieve political objectives at little cost to itself. During the decade, the Clinton administration repeatedly struck Iraq’s non-existent WMD sites with warplanes and cruise missiles in the vain attempt to force Saddam into coughing up all his supposed weapons.
Who can forget the August 1998 cruise missile strike on the Al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum that was supposedly providing chemical precursors to Osama Bin Laden? Never mind that, like Saddam’s non-existent WMD, the plant had provided no such precursors to al Qaeda; instead, the strikes destroyed one of Sudan’s main suppliers of veterinary and human medicines. Washington never apologized but acknowledged later their proof was non-existent.
These miscalculations, however, paled in comparison to the decisions to invade Iraq and Afghanistan in 2001 and 2003, respectively. In both cases, political leaders, seized with the post-9/11 fervor to avenge the attacks and build democracies where none had existed, believed that quick, low-cost operations would re-engineer the politics of both countries. Trillions of dollars and thousands of dead soldiers and civilians later, the United States fled both countries having failed in its myriad missions.
Demonstrating an apparent inability to think through the implications of colossal failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, America’s leaders and their European partners decided in 2011 to rain bombs down on Libya, which eventually led to the death of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi and a civil war that persists to this day.
To its credit, the Obama administration sought better political relations with Tehran through dialogue and diplomacy instead of saber rattling and eventually reached an agreement to limit Iran’s nuclear program, an agreement subsequently ripped up by Trump in 2018. President Barack Obama also normalized relations with Cuba, an effort also quickly squelched by Trump when he arrived in the Oval office. But the aforementioned Libya strikes and uptick of the killer drone war was all under his watch, too.
Another instance in this by no means exhaustive list must be the hapless Biden administration’s decision to start bombarding the Houthis in January 2024 in response to their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea. The Houthis initiated their attacks to press Israel to end its slaughter of the Palestinians in Gaza. Somehow, it was believed that the U.S. bombardment would lead to positive results and change the Houthis’ behavior. It continued until March 2025, when President Trump sensibly stopped the attacks, but not until after billions of dollars and U.S. ordinance was expended.
Several strands of continuity that bind these examples together led the country into the swamp. The first of these must be the hubris of political leaders, who clung to the innate belief in American power and exceptionalism. Clearly, a source of that hubris also was rooted in the confidence in its military superiority a — understandable for a country that spends more on its military than almost all of the rest of the world combined. Political leaders believed that a new family of digitized weapons delivered with great accuracy at long distances could pound our enemies into submission without bringing American coffins home.
Last but not least, we mistakenly believed our enemies were weak and we were strong, and that armed confrontations would be shaped by this basic and undeniable fact.
All of these assumptions represented (and continue to represent) a profound misunderstanding of circumstances that framed the pursuit of military dominance as the key instrument of policy.
These strands of continuity and misunderstandings about war and the application of force also collided headlong into the decline in the quality of presidential leadership in the post-Cold War era and, in parallel, a decline in the community of civilians and military alike engaged in strategic studies.
Stated differently, the “bench” of strategic thinkers in government to help inform decision-making on these issues has steadily deteriorated over the last quarter century. The academy shares the blame; it has deemphasized strategic studies in its graduate programs across curriculums. Political science programs at the nation’s hallowed universities push their students into theoretical and quantitative studies; history departments show little interest in military history. Those civilians interested in these areas inevitably get pushed into the D.C.-based think-tank community, which is driven by ideologically-based analysis and fund raising.
Moreover, the ascendance of the neoconservatives in this community demonstrates a disturbing “school solution” focused on using force to solve the various strategic problems facing the country that has helped warp the intellectual landscape in the marketplace of ideas.
Any sober analysis of America’s confrontation with Iran should tell us that the carrier battle groups can achieve no meaningful or positive political objectives should they be ordered to attack. The United States could order its land forces to somehow invade the country, but is there anyone who believes that such an extreme and unfathomable action would create a favorable outcome with what would be horrific costs?
Yet these considerations apparently remain lost to our political leaders — who cling to misguided beliefs that bombing and war will somehow create favorable outcomes — as undefined as those outcomes might be.
It’s the definition of insanity that stretches back more than a quarter century: expecting different results from the same actions, over and over again.
The Trump administration appears to be moving closer to a U.S. war with Iran, and there are plenty on the right, including inside MAGA, rallying against it. Unfortunately, they seem much more drowned out this time around.
Marjorie Taylor Greene certainly does her bit. “Americans do not want to go to war with Iran!!!” the former Republican congresswoman shared on X Wednesday. “And they voted for NO MORE FOREIGN WARS AND NO MORE REGIME CHANGE.”
Senator Rand Paul declares, “We have every right to defend our troops and shoot down threats. But you cannot bomb a regime into freedom.” Congressman Thomas Massie says no war with Iran, and is demanding a congressional vote.
Curt Mills, Executive Director of the American Conservative, has also pushed back on Washington hawks, recently telling Trump ally and former adviser Steve Bannon that the neoconservative think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies is “driving the push for war" with Iran and that "they have been instrumental in writing a lot of Trump's Iran policy. They are blowing the horn for war."
MAGA-adjacent figures like libertarian comedian and frequent Joe Rogan guest Dave Smith are clanging the warning bells too. “If they start talking to you about fighting a war with Iran, treat them like the enemy that they are,” Smith has said about war promoters on the right.
The Cato Institute’s Justin Logan, Jon Hoffman, and Brandan P. Buck are speaking out about the military build up, as have Judge Andrew Napolitano, Doug Macgregor, and Danny Davis, and last but certainly not least, former congressman, presidential candidate and libertarian icon, Ron Paul.
But the relative silence from other quarters is disconcerting.
Bannon said the U.S. bombing Tehran would be “insane” — but that was nearly a month ago. Sure, Tucker Carlson, a longtime opponent of war with Iran, said that if Trump launched a war with Iran it would be, “a middle finger in the faces of the millions of voters who cast their ballots in hopes of creating a government that would finally put the United States first.” But that was eight months ago, before Trump bombed Iran the first time in “Operation Midnight Hammer.”
Tucker is not as vocal about the immense firepower amassing in the region today, which dwarfs Washington’s regional military posture in June. Though to his credit, Carlson pressed U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee on the issue of Iran during his nearly 90-minute long interview with him, released Friday.
“I’ve never met an American that thinks, other than the people with ideological reasons to pretend they think it, that the imminent threat to America is having anything to do with Iran," he told Huckabee during a lengthy exchange about whether the U.S. should still be giving $3.8 billion in aid to Israel. He criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for pressuring President Trump to attack Iran.
"I don’t care about Iran. At all," Carlson said. "I care about America. And if blowing up Iran makes my country richer then let’s say that I’m for it. And if it doesn’t I’m totally opposed. It’s that simple. I think most Americans feel that way, no?"
One could point out that it has not been easy crossing the president on war or any other issue. Greene and Massie are so loathed by Trump at this point that he vowed to primary Greene, who retired instead. Meanwhile, Trump is currently backing a primary opponent against Massie. He regularly uses Massie and Paul as punch lines in his speeches, calling them names like “moron” and “loser.”
So who is the president listening to?
Lifelong Republican hawk, Sen. Lindsey Graham has spent a lot of time with the president. He has even cavalierly discussed the possibility that a war will kill Americans, saying things like, “could our soldiers be hit in the region? Absolutely, they could. Can Iran respond if we have an all-out attack? Absolutely, they can.”
“I think the risk associated with that is far less than the risk associated with blinking, pulling the plug, and not helping the people as you promised.”
Sen. Graham appears to be arguing that U.S. servicemembers dying on behalf of a war that cannot be properly explained to the American public is an acceptable tradeoff. That’s not surprising from a man who once said we needed to go to war with North Korea over its nuclear program because “if thousands die, they're going to die over there. They're not going to die here” and has casually advocated for blowing Iran “off the map.”
Right-wing talk host Mark Levin, who has a Sunday show on Fox News, has been a relentless one-man propaganda machine for Iranian regime change. Fellow Fox host Sean Hannity does the same, using the recent protests in Iran as an excuse for intervention. “If (the Iranian regime is) foolish enough to doubt President Trump’s resolve, just give Nicolas Maduro a call,” he said.
Then there are the military “experts.” Brett McGurk, a Middle East security adviser in both the Biden and first Trump administrations, has been making the case for war on cable news. Perennial guest Gen. Jack Keane, whose pro-war analysis on Fox dates back to the Afghanistan conflict, is saying in interviews that the “preferred option” is for a “combined U.S. and Israel attack” on Iran to collapse the regime and destroy its ballistic missile capability.
Meanwhile, RS reported in October that Israel’s government was paying social media influencers top dollar to promote its preferred messaging on Gaza and its military position in the region. Israel also wants to manipulate Chat GPT for optimum search results. Today, Americans across the country are getting text messages from Israeli-paid sources who want to chat about their feelings about Israel.
Israel even had U.S. pastors trained as "ambassadors" to preach the good word to their flocks.
When Massie posted that he would push for a constitutionally required congressional vote for any war with Iran, he added, “I’m just here enjoying that peace and quiet in the comments in the moments just before the paid influencers and bots get their message on how to respond to my latest move.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. has amassed more air power in the region than at any time since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Trump said Thursday at his inaugural “Board of Peace” meeting, that Iran “must make a deal. If that doesn’t happen… bad things will happen.”
If that “bad thing” is an Iraq-style regime change war with Iran, there has been no public debate about the wisdom of such a move. With the possible exception of Carlson, most of the original MAGA restrainers who once hoisted Trump’s “America First” flag as their own are either now marginalized or actively hated by the president.
Nor does Trump seem to be listening to regular Americans, who overwhelmingly say they don’t want this war.
Before he was assassinated in September of last year, Charlie Kirk was outspoken about the U.S. not going to war with Iran. He used his podcast to broadcast this message to his vast conservative audience. At the dawn of the new year, however, it seemed that the interventionists had taken over Trump foreign policy, beginning with the invasion of Venezuela that has been largely written off by MAGA as “America First.”
Arta Moeini of the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy shared an old Charlie Kirk X post on Thursday, adding, “Charlie was a friend & we were in regular contact during the 12-day war as he was working tirelessly behind the scenes to avoid US entanglement in Iran.”
Moeni continued, “My sense was he thought that (President Trump), whom he loved so dearly, was being led on a primrose path to ruin by some bad advisors in the inner circle who were obscuring the truth and shutting out America First voices in the admin.”
Former congressman Matt Gaetz, who was much louder over the summer about his wariness of bombing Iran, also appeared to see a Kirk connection in the administration’s current foreign policy direction.
On Wednesday, Gaetz shared an old clip of Kirk warning against a U.S. war with Iran at the behest of Israel, to which Gaetz simply said, “I miss Charlie.”
Why are these voices, once so integral to Trump’s original MAGA movement in 2016 and his 2024 presidential campaign, now muted? Trump isn’t very ideological. But he does value loyalty. Perhaps the treatment of MTG, Massie, and Paul have been warnings to others, and it’s just been easier for them to join the rest who say Venezuela is not “regime change” and that it did not touch off a “forever war.” Polling like this suggests that MAGA has largely bought that line, and that they don't mind war as long as it's Trump waging it.
The president once listened to OG MAGA restrainers, at least some of the time. We might now experience what happens when he talks to none of them, none of the time.
As an American attack on Iran seems increasingly inevitable, America’s allies in the Persian Gulf — the very nations hosting U.S. bases and bracing anxiously for an Iranian blowback — are terrified of escalation and are lobbying Washington to stop it .
The scale of the U.S. mobilization is indeed staggering. As reported by the Responsible Statecraft’s Kelley Vlahos, at least 108 air tankers are in or heading to the CENTCOM theater. As military officers reckon, strikes can now happen “at any moment.” These preparations suggest not only that the operation may be imminent, but also that it could be more sustainable and long-lasting than a one-off strike in Iranian nuclear sites last June.
There is an increasing sense of doom among the regional observers: given the scale of the build-up, there is no face-saving way for President Donald Trump to call off strikes and rescue himself from a situation into which he has needlessly driven himself into.
But while U.S. military planners look at target lists, Iraq and Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states see only risk.
“They may like to see the Iranian leadership weakened, but all of them are more concerned about a scenario of chaos and uncertainty and the possibility of more radical elements coming to power there,” Anna Jacobs Khalaf, a Gulf analyst and non-resident fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute, told Al Jazeera last month.
Since January, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Oman, alongside Turkey and Egypt, have been engaged in intense diplomacy to pull Washington and Tehran back from the brink. This is not because they harbor any sympathy for Tehran, but because they realize they would be on the front lines of the Iranian retaliation, and what happens after if the regime were to collapse.
As regional analyst Galip Dalay notes, in addition to the economic and security destabilization that might occur, there is the fact that as a rising hegemon in the region, Israel greatly benefits from the regime’s collapse.
“Iran’s power and ambition across the region is diminished, and the prospect of an Iran-centric order has receded,” he wrote for Chatham House this week. “For Middle Eastern leaders, the threats have changed: the greatest risks are now an expansionist and aggressive Israel, and the chaos of a potentially collapsed Iranian state.”
Bader al-Saif, an assistant history professor at Kuwait University, said something similar to the New York Times. “Bombing Iran goes against the calculus and interests of the Arab Gulf States, Neutralizing the current regime, whether through regime change or internal leadership reconfiguration, can potentially translate into the unparalleled hegemony of Israel, which won’t serve the Gulf States.”
For predominant Shi'a Iraq, the risk of political and social unrest looms. After decades of upheaval, following the U.S. invasion in 2003, Iraq is still struggling to form a stable political system and coherent government. Baghdad is desperate to stay out of this fight.
An expert with a profound knowledge of Iraqi politics who spoke with the Responsible Statecraft on condition of anonymity given the sensitivity of the matter, said, smaller, hardline Shi'a groups like Kataib Hezbollah and Harakat Nujaba might feel compelled to attack the American troops in the region in Tehran's defense.
However, the same source said that the main Shi'a political forces, comprising the Shiite Coordination Framework, including the State of the Law Coalition led by prospective Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, and the Fatah Alliance led by another influential commander turned politician Hadi al-Ameri, view a U.S.-Iran conflagration on their soil as an existential threat to their fragile sovereignty.
Tehran, too, is interested in ensuring Iraq stays outside the fray. What Tehran needs as it fights for its own survival is a functional neighbor and trade partner, capable of buying Iranian electricity, not a country relapsing into failure and chaos.
The danger to the Gulf is multidimensional. First, there is the immediate physical threat. Iran has repeatedly signaled that U.S. bases in the region are legitimate targets. The June 2025 attack on Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, following the U.S. strikes during the 12-day war, while with no casualties, remains a fresh and terrifying memory for Gulf leaders.
Any new, sustained campaign could see facilities in Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain come under fire from Iranian missiles or drone barrages. Statements from Iranian officials, such as Ali Shamkhani, the influential adviser to the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, suggest that this time the response would be much more severe than the largely symbolic strike on Al Udeid.
This threat is not hypothetical; Saudi oil facilities were crippled by an Iranian strike in 2019. The lesson was clear: Iran has the capability to strike the Gulf countries' infrastructure. With nothing to lose in a war that would be seen as existential for the Iranian government, the motivation to strike at countries that host U.S. military bases would increase.
Even if the Gulf states were to be spared Iranian strikes on their territory, there would be other devastating consequences. These states are trying to diversify their economies and attract foreign investment and talent; a threat of regional war would send capital and people fleeing.
A potential refugee crisis is another major fear. The Iranian port of Bandar Abbas is a short boat ride from Dubai. A conflict that devastates Iran's economy or triggers internal collapse could send thousands of displaced people across the water to the UAE.
Then there is a risk of an economic nightmare. As Iranian officials have explicitly warned, all options are on the table in the case of war, including blocking or mining the Strait of Hormuz. While a full closure is unlikely as it would severely harm Iran’s own oil exports to China, the IRGC Navy is now preparing a "smart" closure — selective interdiction that targets Western-linked tankers while allowing Chinese oil purchases to pass, Yemeni Houthi rebel style.
One-fifth of the world's oil passes through that strait. As happened with the Houthi blockade of the Red Sea in response to the Israeli attacks in Gaza, the threat of closure will send insurance premiums skyrocketing and raise global oil prices.
That will raise the specter of inflation. Strikes on civilian oil infrastructure designed to spike global prices and raise interest rates would be a direct attack on Trump's economic promise to Americans, in the year of the mid-terms.
Ultimately, there’s a heightened risk of a U.S. military attack ensuring Iran discards its official nuclear doctrine for civilian purposes only and opts for weaponization — ironically, the very outcome the war is ostensibly designed to prevent. Short of a full occupation of the country by the U.S. and Israel — an unrealistic prospect — there are no material obstacles for a dash for a bomb given Iran’s know-how, should such a political decision be taken in case the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei is incapacitated.
That would leave the GCC countries in a worst possible situation – living next to a revanchist, revisionist and potentially nuclear-armed Iran down the road. It would oblige them — certainly, Saudi Arabia and UAE — to seek their own nuclear deterrent plunging the region into a perilous, destabilizing arms race.
This broader fear of destabilization is the key reason why the Saudi Crown Prince and de-facto ruler Mohammad Bin Salman publicly ruled out the use of the Saudi air space for an attack on Iran. The UAE is on the same position, with Anwar Gargash, a key adviser to the president, calling for a “long-term diplomatic solution between Washington and Tehran”.
Despite the obvious risks, the Trump administration's approach has been perplexing. Even as Iran has offered serious concessions on the nuclear issue, such as suspending enrichment, and economic incentives to the U.S. during the last round of talks in Geneva, Trump appears to be seeking Tehran’s capitulation across the board – not only on the nuclear file, but also regarding the ballistic missiles – an absolute red line for Iran.
Meanwhile, the military buildup accelerates causing profound anxiety in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Doha, Muscat, Baghdad and elsewhere in the Middle East. America's Gulf allies are not cheering for war; they are desperately trying to prevent it. Trump would be wise to heed their advice – for his own, and America’s, own good.
“The repercussions of a state collapse would far exceed what the Middle East has experienced as a result of conflict in Iraq, Syria, or Yemen, whether in the form of instability, migration, radicalism, the proliferation of armed groups, or regional spillover,” wrote Dalay. “Regional leaders believe the U.S. must give regional diplomacy a real chance. The alternative is a devastating war and another catastrophic cycle of conflict.”
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