Something happened yesterday, and Trump is now determined to take the country to a war of choice. He can change his mind at the last minute, as he did in 2019, but short of that, there will be war.
It is important to understand that capitulation is most likely not an option for Iran for a variety of reasons.
First, Trump's conduct in the past 10 days has destroyed any confidence Tehran has in him and his desire for a peaceful outcome. For the Iranians to ever back down from their long-standing position to never give up enrichment, they must have confidence that backing down ends the conflict. They have no such confidence in Trump at this moment. They don't think he will stop there.
Second, Tehran has lost confidence in Trump's ability or willingness to say no to Israel (that confidence existed earlier to some extent). And Israel will not be content with even a complete dismantlement of Iran's nuclear program.
If the nuclear program is destroyed, Israel will then turn to Iran's missile program. It will not accept Iran having missiles that can wreak havoc on Israel — as Iran has done in the last few days. Without missiles, an air force, or a nuclear deterrent, Iran will be completely exposed and defenseless. Once that is achieved, the Israelis will push for regime change or regime collapse.
And after that, as the Israelis have done in Syria after Assad fell, they will push to destroy the rest of Iran's conventional military so that Iran won't be able to challenge Israel's emerging regional military hegemony for decades to come. Iran's territorial integrity will also be put at risk.
As a result, Tehran does not view capitulation — even if they desired it, which I don't think they do — as a stable outcome.
In their view, their only chance is to fight back.By making the war as costly as possible for the US — even if they will lose it — they think they can either deter Trump, or make him cut the war short. As he did in Yemen.
Thus, if new talks take place and Trump insists on capitulation, he will get war. Iran will pay an immeasurable price. As will the region. But the U.S. will also pay a very heavy price. Scores of American soldiers may be killed. Oil prices will skyrocket, and gas prices in hot summer months in the US will soar. Inflation will go up.
Trump's Iran war may destroy his presidency as Bush's Iraq invasion destroyed his.
Iran will lose. But so will the US. Israel is perhaps the only country that will benefit from this war of choice.
Top photo credit: Sen. Lindsey Graham (Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons); Elbridge Colby (Photo by Michael Brochstein/Sipa USA); Sen. Mitch McConnell (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
When reports surfaced in early July that Donald Trump’s administration would be pausing some U.S. aid to Ukraine, it didn’t take long for the knives to come out.
Anonymous officials inside the administration, as well as critics on Capitol Hill who disagreed with the policy, pointed the finger at Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s top policy official and a longtime advocate of refocusing U.S. military power to the Pacific.
“He is pissing off just about everyone I know inside the administration,” one anonymous official told Politico, describing Colby as a driving force behind what they saw as a dangerously narrow foreign policy vision.
Another former U.S. official, reacting to Colby’s moves recalled hearing from a State Department colleague: “Who is this fucking guy?” The piece also looks back to past moves from Colby that apparently surprised others in the administration, including undertaking a review of the Biden-era security pact between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States; telling the UK to focus on European security rather than sending aircraft to the Pacific; and telling allies such as Japan to increase their defense budget.
The piece, which in its headline refers to the DOD policy chief as “rogue,” relies almost entirely on anonymous sources.
A Wall Street Journal editorial called the pause “a hostile act that favors Vladimir Putin,” attributing it squarely to Colby and accusing him of “demonstrating weakness that invites more war.”
While Washington media has often lumped Colby in with the MAGA movement’s restrainer camp — with some critics even calling his views akin to “isolationist” — the label does not quite fit. Instead, Colby has long argued that U.S. national security policy should focus on deterring China, even if that means reducing military commitments in Europe or the Middle East. His critics see that as a retreat; his allies argue it's overdue triage. But he has nonetheless become the flashpoint in the latest drama inside Trump’s foreign policy team.
“His crime was the most heinous one can commit in the eyes of the U.S. establishment: halting weapons shipments to Ukraine,” James Carden, a writer and former adviser to the U.S. State Department, tells RS. “He is the target, but only because he crossed that reddest of red lines.”
Shortly after the news broke, Trump reversed the pause and publicly claimed he had no idea who had authorized it, a move that only intensified scrutiny of his national security team. This was only the latest flare-up in the ongoing push-and-pull between realists inside Trump’s orbit and more traditionally hawkish Republicans. The balance between the two camps has shifted repeatedly in the administration’s first six months in office. Just weeks before the Ukraine pause, Trump had joined Israel’s war and authorized a series of strikes on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, seen as a win for the hawkish faction.
The president has since promised more military assistance to Ukraine and threatened Russian President Vladimir Putin with aggressive secondary sanctions if Moscow and Kyiv do not agree to a ceasefire within 50 days.
“May was the zenith for restrainers,” says Curt Mills, executive director of The American Conservative magazine. Trump had fired national security adviser Mike Waltz, delivered an “astonishing” speech discrediting the neoconservative legacy while in the Middle East, opened up diplomatic negotiations with Tehran, and halted American attacks on Houthis. Then came the so-called 12-day war. “It’s been a pretty crappy 45 days,” says Mills.
Hawks have moved quickly to capitalize on this apparent momentum. They have seized on the perceived success of the Iran strikes to frame the operation as a vindication of hard power and urging Trump to stay on offense. “On the Republican side, the hawks are so slavish,” Mills tells RS. “It appeals to Trump’s vanity. They’ll just say anything.”
These interventionists have greeted these new developments with glee. In The Washington Post, columnist and American Enterprise Institute fellow Marc Thiessen celebrates that restrainers are “a tiny minority” within the Republican party.
“Indeed, the only thing as satisfying as watching Trump exercise bold American leadership on the world stage over the past six months has been watching the isolationists realize that Trump is not one of them,” he writes.
Hawkish opponents of Trump’s like Bill Kristol and John Bolton offered slightly more measured approvals of the president’s decision to bomb Iran.
The pressure campaign to convince Trump and his administration to embrace certain hawkish instincts is now spreading to other theaters. After POLITICO reported that the Pentagon’s brief pause was driven by concerns from Colby over dwindling munitions stockpiles, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) responded with a pointed public statement. While crediting Trump for resuming aid, he blasted “the self-indulgent policymaking of restrainers — from Ukraine to AUKUS,” which have “so often required the President to clean up his staff’s messes.”
During Colby’s confirmation hearing, McConnell warned that his policies could amount to “geostrategic self-harm.” The former majority leader was ultimately the only GOP Senator to oppose Colby’s nomination.
“I think the pro-war, pro-intervention forces from within and without government are waging a media campaign against Colby because they know it works,” Carden says. “Trump has folded again and again in the face of demands for a war on Iran; for an attack on Syria; for full-throated support for Israel and Netanyahu; and for more arms to Ukraine. Trump is not a committed restrainer in any sense.”
Hawkish Senators like Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) have celebrated Trump’s sudden tough talk on Putin, saying that the president will sign off on his punishing sanctions bill if Congress approves it.
Elsewhere, Sen. Marco Rubio and his allies have reportedly sidelined presidential envoy Ric Grenell on Venezuela — where Grenell had shown openness to diplomacy with Caracas — in an effort to steer policy back toward pressure on the regime.
International developments and domestic pressure campaigns have coincided with tension inside the administration. Earlier this year, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth fired three close advisors on allegations of leaking that were never substantiated. “This all exists in the context of Hegseth’s operation, which is defined by incompetence mixed with panic,” Mills tells RS.
As a result of the shrinking circle around Hegseth and the reorganization of Trump’s national security team that added interim national security adviser to Rubio’s list of titles, the inter-agency process in the administration appears to have authentically broken down.
Amid the broader dysfunction, dissenting views on foreign policy have found themselves gradually sidelined as decisions are shaped by pressure from both inside and outside the White House.
“I have serious policy differences with Colby, including the decision to halt arms to Ukraine,” wrote former Bernie Sanders foreign policy advisor Matt Duss on X. “But we should all be clear that this is an effort by the nat sec establishment to discipline a policymaker who breaks from DC groupthink, which we need more of.”
Efforts to combat this groupthink have been challenged from all directions, sources tell RS, including career officials who are resistant to change, powerful members of Congress, and, increasingly, the President himself.
“I don’t think he fundamentally wants a war. Trump has changed a million times,” Mills tells RS. But in recent weeks, the people who seem to have his ear are those urging him to double down on force projection in the Middle East and maintain an aggressive posture toward Russia.
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Top photo credit: U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (shutterstock/Ron Adar) and scenes from Al-Najjar Hospital, in the southern Gaza Strip, on October 21, 2023 (shutterstock/Anas-Mohhammed)
On July 18, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) voted against the U.S. defense appropriations bill. She also voted against an amendment to the bill submitted by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) that would have cut $500 million from funds for Israel’s Iron Dome, the air defense system designed to shoot down short-range rockets.
AOC’s vote on both did not affect the outcome – MTG’s amendment failed, having received only 6 votes, while the defense spending bill passed, 221 to 209. Nonetheless, AOC’s opposition to MTG’s amendment provoked significant outcry among progressives, particularly when she defended her rejection of the amendment on X the following day:
Marjorie Taylor Greene’s amendment does nothing to cut off offensive aid to Israel nor end the flow of US munitions being used in Gaza… What it does do is cut off defensive Iron Dome capacities while allowing the actual bombs killing Palestinians to continue. I have long stated that I do not believe that adding to the death count of innocent victims to this war is constructive to its end… I remain focused on cutting the flow of US munitions that are being used to perpetuate the genocide in Gaza.
Many prominent human rights and Palestine advocates denounced her explanation in the replies, pointing out the incongruity between her charge that Israel is committing genocide and her determination to continue funding it. The virulent reaction generated its own round of media coverage, especially after her Bronx office was vandalized, and amplified the progressives’ disappointment with their rising star.
AOC’s post highlighted a flawed logic that many American politicians continue to deploy: the idea that it is both moral and possible to distinguish between defensive and offensive weapons. A similar logic was used by the Biden administration regarding support for Saudi Arabia during its bombing campaign against the Houthis in Yemen. In February 2021, President Joe Biden declared that he was “ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms sales.” Instead, Washington would only provide defensive munitions, ostensibly to help protect Saudi cities from Ansar Allah’s missiles.
In both cases, a Democratic politician depicted their actions as reflecting a responsible middle path, neither enabling aggressive behavior nor abandoning a U.S. strategic partner. They may think this helps them to appear reasonable and primarily concerned with the welfare of civilian victims of military conflict.
Yet by boosting Saudi Arabia and Israel’s ability to “defend” themselves, American politicians — from a centrist like Biden to an ostensible progressive like AOC — are enabling the aggressive behavior that they allegedly wish to curtail. Countries like Saudi Arabia and Israel are effectively encouraged to act more aggressively knowing they are protected, thanks to the United States, from costly retaliation.
Especially in the case of Israel, decades of virtually unconditional U.S. support have disincentivized any previous willingness on its part to compromise or seek peace. This is the moral hazard of Washington support whether in the form of a guaranteed supply of U.S. weaponry, or vetoes at the UN Security Council. Knowing that one will not face consequences for bad behavior tends to inspire more of it.
And yet this evident truism has not inspired a change in U.S. policy. For decades until at least the October 7 Hamas attack, successive administrations claimed that the only way to convince Israel to accept a two-state solution was to provide the weapons that would make it feel militarily invincible against any and all of its neighbors, otherwise as known as ensuring its “qualitative military edge,” or QME.
The Iron Dome, which was built with nearly $1.7 billion in U.S. funding and now depends on hundreds of millions of dollars more worth of key U.S.-provided parts to continue operating, offers an example. When it came online in 2011, one of the rationales for U.S. support was that it would actually help protect Palestinian lives as well as Israelis, ostensibly because, if fewer Israelis were killed by Palestinian rockets, Israel’s retaliation would be less severe.
Writing 10 years later in 2021, Khaled Elgindy, then a scholar at the Middle East Institute, demonstrated that Iron Dome did not appear to reduce Palestinian deaths; if anything, it allowed Israel to kill Palestinians with greater impunity. Writing in 2023, human rights attorney Dylan Saba of Palestine Legal laid out the argument for why Iron Dome “cannot meaningfully be considered 'life-saving' in any value system that recognizes Palestinian humanity” in an article in Jewish Currents magazine entitled “Iron Dome is Not a Defensive System.”
During the brief war between Israel and Iran last month, multiple Iranian missiles penetrated Iron Dome, which was intended for smaller munitions. Concerns that Israel was running low on anti-missile defenses arguably contributed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s willingness to accept the ceasefire that Trump demanded, demonstrating the restraining effect that Iranian missiles had on Israeli society’s appetite for war.
Indeed, if Israelis had to deal with a tiny fraction of the horrors that their military has meted out against Palestinians in Gaza, they would have insisted that their government agree to a ceasefire months and months ago. Instead, they are protected from the consequences of their military’s heinous violence.
Another flaw in the logic of U.S. politicians like AOC and Biden, is the idea that it is possible to distinguish between offensive and defensive weapons. In fact, this question remains a significant point of debate among International Relations scholars. Realists such as John Mearsheimer tend to believe that such distinctions are unhelpful and that, due to the absence or ineffectiveness of international laws or norms, states must always assume the worst about other states’ intentions and maximize their security accordingly.
Moreover, most IR scholars subscribe to the notion of the “security dilemma,” or the dynamic whereby any effort by a state to increase its own security decreases the security of other states. Without delving too deeply into academic debates, the point is that even scholars of war find it difficult to clearly distinguish between offensive and defensive capabilities, precisely because improving one’s defensive position makes offensive actions less costly.
According to recent polls, American public support for Israel is slipping. This is especially true on the left, where 59% of Democrats say the U.S. provides Israel with too much military aid, a figure that rises to 72% for Democrats under 35. These numbers have shifted quickly due to the war crimes committed by Israel over the last 21 months in Gaza, as documented by reputable international human rights and humanitarian groups. Yet most American lawmakers, let alone the Trump administration, have failed to act on these dramatic movements in public opinion.
As AOC’s experience demonstrates, a position that may once have appeared reasonable if perhaps shallow — that her “no” on MTG’s amendment will somehow help reduce civilian casualties — is no longer acceptable to people who can see exactly what is going on in Gaza today.
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Top photo credit: Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi shake hands as they visit the Hubei Provincial Museum in Wuhan, Hubei province, China April 27, 2018. China Daily via REUTERS/File Photo
This past June marks five years since the Galwan Valley incident, when a series of tense standoffs along disputed areas of the China-India border erupted in a bloody melee that resulted in the deaths of at least 20 Indian soldiers and an unknown number of Chinese casualties.
As a result, China-India bilateral relations sank to their lowest point in decades, and many observers expressed grave concern about the potential for a wider conflict between the two nuclear-armed powers.
In the years since the clash, diplomacy aimed at easing tensions along the border has yielded positive results, leading some to believe that a thaw in China-India relations is underway. In 2024, for example, China and India struck a deal that allows for the resumption of patrols along the Line of Actual Control by military personnel from both countries. More recently, China agreed to reopen its borders to Indian pilgrims hoping to travel to holy sites in Tibet over the summer months.
At the same time, the border dispute itself remains unresolved, and geopolitical competition between China and India has escalated in other contexts, raising questions about the extent to which a true reset in relations can realistically be expected. Recent events — in particular, China's diplomatic response to the Pahalgam crisis last May — suggest that the supposed thaw may be based more on rhetoric than on any substantive paradigm shift in Beijing or New Delhi.
A reset in relations?
While peace at the border has held steady since the 2024 agreement, competition between China and India has escalated elsewhere. In the Indian Ocean region, for example, India recently conducted naval exercises alongside several countries, including South Africa, Tanzania, Mauritius, and the Seychelles. India has also concluded a landmark defense agreement with Sri Lanka to foster collaboration on military training, intelligence and technology. By significantly stepping up its engagement in these areas, India aims to become the preferred security partner in the Indian Ocean region, displacing China, which has also sought to expand its presence there in recent years.
Similar developments have also taken place in Southeast Asia, a region much closer to what China perceives as its immediate sphere of influence. Specifically, India has concluded a major arms export deal with the Philippines, increased its collaboration with ASEAN, and challenged China’s controversial territorial claims in the South China Sea. Given that India was more reluctant to take steps likely to provoke China’s ire prior to 2020, its growing interest in opportunities to counter China’s influence in its own backyard can be seen as a direct consequence of the border clashes.
India is also set to host the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue Leaders’ Summit for the first time later this year, underscoring its deepening involvement in the group, which China believes is a key component of a U.S.-led containment strategy in the Indo-Pacific. While India has consistently distanced itself from the hard security dimensions of the Quad, it recently signed onto the Quad Critical Minerals Initiative, which aims to significantly reduce reliance on China for supplies of critical minerals. At the Quad Foreign Ministers’ Meeting held in Washington D.C. in early July, Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar also joined with his counterparts in reiterating support for the concept of a “free and open Indo-Pacific,” which is often interpreted as a thinly-veiled critique of China’s activities in the region.
China has also taken steps that pose a clear challenge to India. Since the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine War, for example, China has cemented closer ties with Russia in what has been dubbed a “no limits partnership.” Given that Russia has historically been a major supplier of armaments to India, this has created concern in New Delhi that Beijing could leverage its relationship with Moscow to exploit vulnerabilities in India’s defense supply chains.
Beijing has also fostered closer ties with Bangladesh since the overthrow of Sheikh Hasina last year. While Bangladesh and China have historically maintained cordial relations, Bangladesh was more closely aligned with India under the previous government, which often cooperated with New Delhi on regional security and counterterrorism. Bangladesh’s pivot towards China is thus likely to sound alarm bells for the Modi government, especially given the growing anti-India sentiment within Bangladesh and the perception that the interim government is “Islamist” in character.
During the recent row over the Pahalgam terror attack, China also gave a strong show of support for its “all-weather” ally Pakistan, further underscoring the limits of any diplomatic reset. As tensions between India and Pakistan escalated in the aftermath of the attack, for example, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi backed Pakistan’s calls for an “independent and impartial probe” into the origins of the attack, a proposal which had been firmly rejected by the Indian side from the outset.
Indian commentators also accused China of watering down the U.N. Security Council statement condemning the attack, which departed from past practice by omitting calls for cooperation with the Indian government and refraining from mentioning The Resistance Front — the terrorist organization that initially claimed responsibility for the attack — by name.
Adding to India’s frustrations, China has offered to sell Pakistan advanced military equipment (including J-35 stealth fighter jets) as the latter seeks to modernize its military capabilities. Given the mixed performance of India’s aircraft against Pakistan's Chinese-origin equipment during Operation Sindoor, this will doubtless be perceived as an affront by the Indian defense establishment.
While diplomatic support for Pakistan by China is not new, India’s perception that China hedged against it as the Pahalgam crisis unfolded could undermine the progress made along the border. Add to this the escalating strategic competition in other areas of the Indo-Pacific, and there is reason to believe that an adversarial element will continue to overshadow the China-India relationship for the foreseeable future.
The trade factor
To the extent that we can expect to see some form of rapprochement, it is likely to come in the economic sphere. Lingering political tensions notwithstanding, China remains one of India’s top trading partners (in 2024, China-India bilateral trade reached $118.4 billion), which creates powerful incentives to find common ground. Indeed, when diplomatic relations hit rock bottom in 2020, the interests of the private sector provided a justification for pursuing a de-escalatory course in China and India alike.
Even here, however, there is potential for friction, especially given attempts by the Trump administration to pressure India to decouple from China. Using the threat of increased tariff rates as leverage, Trump hopes to bring India firmly into the U.S. orbit as part of his broader Indo-Pacific strategy. Should India bend to these pressures, China has numerous ways it could retaliate, including export controls that would limit the flow of raw materials essential to various Indian domestic industries.
Of course, it is also possible that Trump’s attempt to drive a wedge between the two Asian giants could end up pushing them closer together, at least where their economic interests converge. Much will depend on whether India and the U.S. work out a viable trade deal in the weeks ahead of Trump’s August 1 deadline for higher tariffs. As with so much else in international politics these days, only time will tell.
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