Connexion
The Iran catastrophe could revitalize America First.
The resumption of tit-for-tat strikes between American forces and an emboldened Iran in early September shattered any illusion of a lasting lull as the conflict entered its seventh month. Meanwhile, the escalating situation in Yemen—where the Houthis have tightened their control over strategic regions surrounding the Bab al-Mandab Strait and struck key Saudi oil infrastructure—has not only sent oil prices soaring, but also fully exposed the Iran War’s regional scale and global implications. And now, Tehran has stepped up attacks on vessels in the Strait of Hormuz as the U.S. tries to reopen the waterway.
But beyond the immediate news cycle, the tendency to fixate on shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz and similarly tactical developments leaves Washington blind to the true historical significance of the current moment. The Iran War is a structural watershed as seismic as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. We are witnessing the logical end of U.S. overextension in the Middle East and the birth of a post-American West Asia defined by a new regional equilibrium.
The combined effects of the Trump administration’s incoherent military objectives, optics-driven approach, and chaotic prosecution of the war find close parallels in the overextension of the Roman Empire. In 260 AD, Emperor Valerian marched toward the rugged terrain of western Persia anticipating a swift, decisive victory over the Sassanid Empire. Instead, plague struck and his supply lines collapsed, leaving Valerian’s legions trapped. He was taken captive by his enemy, the Shahanshah Shapur I, and forced to live out his life as a prisoner of war in Persia. This development represented far more than a simple tactical defeat. Valerian’s downfall sent shock waves across the civilized world, exposing the hard limits of imperial power projection in a faraway land. It signaled that Rome was overextended, strategically exhausted, and no longer capable of maintaining an offensive posture along its distant frontiers.
President Donald Trump’s promises to end foreign conflicts, prevent World War III, and recalibrate America’s bloated Cold War alliances played a major role in his 2024 campaign. But instead of making good on these pledges, he launched a new forever war in Iran (despite multiple warnings from officials in his own administration), undermined U.S. military credibility, and proved even more bellicose than the liberal internationalists in DC he claimed to have vanquished. MAGA foreign policy has devolved into a form of “red-pilled globalism,” driven by arbitrary executive impulse, economic coercion, and unilateral military interventions. Predictably, it has run into a brick wall: The structural limits of American power in the 21st century are now fully visible to adversaries and friends alike.
Yet, the Iran War could ultimately prove a “Pyrrhic defeat,” a strategic chastening that also serves as a necessary catalyst for long-overdue structural adjustment and a grand strategic reset. By laying bare the futility of Washington’s ideological hyper-interventionism and permanent military presence overseas, Trump’s Valerian-style fall could be a blessing in disguise, forcing Washington to finally withdraw from the Middle East and adopt a realist, clear-eyed “America First” foreign policy.
For nearly five decades, American strategy in the region has been shackled to the Carter Doctrine. Promulgated in 1980, it declared that the United States would use any means necessary to prevent outside domination of the Persian Gulf and guarantee the free flow of Middle Eastern oil. Today, the underlying rationale for that commitment has vanished. The Cold War has long ended. The United States is the world’s leading producer of crude oil and natural gas, and it now has access to Venezuela’s vast oil reserves.
Ironically, the ongoing war in Iran and the resulting closure of the Strait of Hormuz have crippled global oil supplies and sent energy prices soaring, worsening inflation and raising the risks of a global economic recession. Operation Epic Fury failed to topple the Islamic Republic. Iran’s asymmetric strategy—leveraging the country’s highland geography, its web of underground “missile cities,” and mass-produced drones—has shown U.S. military bases in the region to be vulnerable targets rather than valuable platforms for power projection. MAGA militarism has proven that the continued pursuit of global primacy in a post-unipolar era destabilizes the world order and harms U.S. interests.
The shift in the distribution of power is probably irreversible. American bases and clandestine sites have suffered repeated and debilitating attacks from Iranian forces. Given the exorbitant costs and scale of the damage, the Pentagon is considering reducing the U.S. military footprint in the Persian Gulf after the war. The conflict has also consumed massive quantities of sophisticated U.S. munitions, leading to critical shortages in both stand-off offensive weapons (e.g., PrSMs, ATACMS, Tomahawk cruise missiles) and defensive interceptors for air defense systems like THAAD and Patriot. America remains an extraordinarily powerful country, but its failures against Iran demonstrate the essence of strategic overreach: not weakness in absolute terms, but a mismatch, worsened by the emerging multi-nodal world, between expansive commitments and finite resources.
The end of the Carter Doctrine in West Asia should not be mourned. Rather, it should be seen as a vital strategic correction that could yield immediate dividends, provided the transition is handled with prudence. Extricating the U.S. military from the Middle East would save tens of billions of dollars annually while halting the diversion of critical defense hardware from the Western Hemisphere and the Pacific.
Furthermore, removing the American security umbrella would force regional powers to confront their own security environment and negotiate a pragmatic balance of power. Indeed, the Iran War’s far-reaching repercussions are already driving a new security architecture through the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement among Turkey, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. The framework could yet extend to Egypt and, perhaps, eventually Iran—creating a Nixonian concert of powers centered on these five dominant states of the Middle East plus Israel (ME5+1). A retrenched Washington could also transform itself into a neutral arbiter and reengage with the region as an economic partner, advancing its commercial ties and business interests across the greater West Asia without being dragged into local conflicts. The new equilibrium could thus serve both American interests and regional stability.
Most importantly, any path toward exiting the Iran quagmire also clears the way for an authentic, durable, and disciplined “America First” foreign policy—one properly understood not as a disguised ideology or an ephemeral political movement tied to a single personality like Trump, but as a tradition of sovereign realism rooted in the American founding and concrete national interests.
Like every great power in history, the United States faces geographical, material, and institutional constraints that cannot be wished away. America’s resources and hard-earned capital are too valuable to squander indiscriminately, myopically, or on a whim. A post-Iran War U.S. grand strategy must reorder America’s hierarchy of interests accordingly: defending the homeland and Western Hemisphere, rebuilding the domestic industrial base to ensure U.S. economic and technological competitiveness, maintaining a decisive balance of power in Asia and the Pacific by helping allies build up their capabilities to counterbalance China, and encouraging capable middle-tier and regional powers to assume primary responsibility for the peace and stability of their own neighborhoods.
The revealed hollowness of MAGA’s exceptionalist rhetoric and unilateral militarism may feel today like the reckoning undergone by Valerian, but ultimately it could unleash a sober America First realism that would remedy and revitalize American power. Still, ensuring that the Iran predicament is remembered as a “Pyrrhic defeat”—not a total loss for America’s global power and prestige—involves making a pivotal choice: Washington must forgo its hubris, resist institutionalized complacency, and adapt to the new systemic realities worldwide.
The post Trump’s Roman Empire-Like Fall in Mideast Brings Opportunity appeared first on The American Conservative.
Political leaders failed the troops and their families. Americans must wake up and demand better.
I remember September 11, 2001 clearly. Watching the attacks unfold on television while sitting in a classroom as a junior in high school, I immediately sensed the world had changed—but I didn’t know exactly how.
My oldest sister was already serving on active duty in the U.S. Navy, and less than two years later, she would be deployed on a guided-missile destroyer in the Persian Gulf to support Operation Iraqi Freedom. That same year, I was preparing to enter the Navy’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps in college, a competitive four-year program to become an officer in the Marines.
Like most veterans, I didn’t sign my contract because I wanted conflict and war. I did it because our nation had been attacked, and I felt a patriotic calling. I had a notion that military service was my responsibility.
For people around my age who entered the armed forces during those years, the Global War on Terror (GWOT) was the defining chapter of our military service. We are the post-9/11 generation of troops. Along the way, training pipelines and deployments, units, promotions, and families were all shaped by the violent conflicts in the greater Middle East.
Just a few years after the teenaged version of myself watched the terrorist attacks on TV, I had become a Marine officer serving at the international military headquarters in Afghanistan. I went from watching the towers burn to serving in the country where the attacks were orchestrated.
I was hardly unique. Countless numbers of my peers went from classrooms to battlefields in a remarkably short time.
Over the years, the GWOT nearly broke the all-volunteer force. Brutal deployment cycles placed terrible strains on service members and their families, while the Bush administration’s “stop-loss” program prevented troops from exiting the service on time.
Nearly 7,000 American service members were killed in the wars we fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. Over 50,000 were physically injured, in some cases catastrophically. And countless more suffered from less visible injuries, like horrific post-traumatic stress. Substance abuse, addiction, homelessness, and suicide have plagued this cohort of veterans. Post-9/11 veteran unemployment reached crisis levels (although we have seen some improvement in that area).
This not to suggest that these veterans should be reduced to victims. But we should be mindful that the consequences of war don’t disappear just because the headlines do.
I have no regrets whatsoever about my service; in fact, I’m proud of it beyond description. The men and women who volunteered after the attacks on our homeland did so with the best intentions. More importantly, they answered the call of duty, and performed honorably under the grimmest of circumstances. The difficult truth, however, is this: Military heroism and prudent policymaking are not the same thing. We aren’t required to believe that the decisions made by our leaders were wise or strategically competent—because they certainly were not.
The American public was given deeply misleading rationales for entering these conflicts, and the goalposts shifted constantly over two decades.
The culminating event was the chaotic 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, which came after nearly two decades of costly fighting. It was deadly and humiliating for America. And for the veterans who served there, it was especially painful to watch the Taliban return to power and realize that the entire war had been fought only for things to go right back to where they were when we started.
A quarter-century on from that fateful day in 2001, our nation still hasn’t fully learned what we should have from our efforts to spread freedom and democracy around the world. We are mired in another conflict in the Middle East, with the potential for major consequences looming. Our objectives remain vague at best: Victory has yet to be clearly defined, and there is no discernible exit strategy.
We’re at risk of another generation of service members being bogged down in far-flung fights for nebulous, unattainable strategic goals.
On this 25th anniversary of that Tuesday morning in September 2001, we will remember the nearly 3,000 who were brutally murdered in New York, D.C., and Pennsylvania. We will honor those who volunteered to serve after the attacks. And we will pray for the families of those who never came home.
But our commemorations require more than bumper-sticker slogans. The most significant and meaningful thing we can do is to learn from our mistakes.
We must demand clear objectives before American service members are put in harm’s way, and we must insist on accountability from our president, Congress, and military leadership.
Our nation’s best and brightest deserve better than another open-ended quagmire.
I am proud to have worn the cloth of my country, and it’s precisely because of my service that I want America to do better for the next generation.
The post Twenty-Five Years After 9/11, We Owe the Next Generation a Better Strategy appeared first on The American Conservative.
There are six ways the U.S. could improve its sorry record.
Nothing pleases American military men more than being fed their own bullsh*t. “We’re the greatest,” “Greatest military in all of history,” “No one can beat us, no one can even fight us,” etc. This is what they tell each other, it is what they expect to hear from civilians, and, in Washington, it is what most office-holders, including presidents and secretaries of defense, believe. The effects are currently on display in the Persian Gulf.
The scoreboard tells a different story. In the Second World War, we beat the Japanese in the Pacific fair and square. But the Red Army won the war in Europe, fielding 500 divisions against Germany’s 350 and our 90 in both theaters. Since that victory, and the end of European culture that accompanied it, we have tied in Korea, lost in Vietnam, won glorious victories against Panama, Grenada, and Iraq (the first time), lost in Afghanistan, Somalia, and Iraq (the second time), and are currently stalemated in the war with Iran. The latter, as of this writing, has descended into a siege where the usual question applies: who starves first, besieged or besieger? In this case the food is oil, but the question remains the same.
The larger issue that should dominate the defense debate in Washington, but is almost never heard, is why do we keep losing wars? It’s not that our enemies out-spend us. If you graphed the Taliban’s budget against ours, theirs would not be visible. The solution is not more money. More money for business as usual will make the problem worse. In my view, six things lie at the heart of our continued military failures.
The first is that we focus at the tactical level of war, which is the least powerful level. The strategic level is the most powerful, with the operational level (in the German sense) in between. A higher level trumps a lower, so all the tactical victories do us little good if we lose strategically, which we do. America’s greatest military theorist, Col. John Boyd, said, “When I was a young officer, I was told that if you have land superiority and air superiority and sea superiority, you win. Well, in Vietnam we had all three, but we lost. So there is obviously more to it.” That something more is the art of strategy, an art that demands more than piling up targets destroyed in a game of king of the dunghill. Our military doesn’t get that.
Second, in our quest for victory through putting firepower on targets, the essence of the French, Second Generation way of war we still practice, we overestimate what air power can do. Years ago, when I cohosted a television show called Modern War, I had an unusually thoughtful Air Force chief of staff, Gen. Merrill McPeak, as my guest. The first thing he said was, “Historically, air power has over-promised and under-delivered.” As we see in the war with Iran, neither our armed forces nor our civilian leaders have learned that lesson. A frustrated President Johnson, stuck to the flypaper in Vietnam, complained to his generals, “Bomb, bomb, bomb, that’s all you know.” It didn’t work then and it’s not working now.
A third reason we lose wars is that we put too much faith in technological superiority. The best history of the subject, Martin van Creveld’s Technology and War, argues that technical advantages have seldom won wars. Combat favors simple weapons, cheap enough to be bought in quantity, over such rococo masterpieces as the F-35. And technical marvels can often be countered simply. When we built the “McNamara Line” of high-tech sensors in Vietnam to catch North Vietnamese infiltrators, the NVA hung buckets of urine in trees to fox the sensors. In a DOD war game where I played Red, I countered the American army of robots by sending out women and kids armed with spray paint, tarps, and hammers, and kept cameras rolling. If the robots opened up on my “army,” the images would have gone all over the world and America would instantly have lost the war. The game ended with those girls and boys roasting goats on blind, overturned robots.
Fourth, the U.S. military is poor at planning. This may come as a surprise, because all our staff schools and war colleges teach is the planning process. But that’s the problem: The planning process is taught by rote, with the focus wholly on following the process, not the result. If, as is often the case, the plan is idiotic (we didn’t think Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz?), the planners can’t see that because all they know is that they followed the staff planning process. In a staff planning exercise several decades ago at Camp Pendleton, the plan had the 1st Marine Division stretched out for 40 miles along the North Korean east coast with the enemy holding highlands that in some places came down to within one kilometer of that coast. When I suggested this might be the worst military plan Ares ever saw, all the planners could do was go through the process again. Never having been taught to think militarily, it was all they knew. Not surprisingly, bad plans lose wars.
Our vastly over-large staffs—whole cities for one division (in World War II, a German Panzer division staff had in theory 27 officers, in practice often fewer)—mean we cannot act and react quickly to unexpected threats and opportunities. Had we taken out Iran’s clerical and Revolutionary Guard leadership in January when the popular rebellion was in full swing, we might have brought the system down. By the time we did it, the public was cowed and the assassinations did little strategic good.
My sixth observation brings us back to where we began: The civilian decision-makers in Washington don’t see through the “We’re the greatest” BS the military puts out. So they get caught in wars they can’t end (and expected to be over with quickly). But there is another side to that cowpatty coin: They do not understand that the U.S. military needs deep-reaching military reform. Following the defeat in Vietnam, I was a prime mover of the Military Reform Movement of the 1980s. At one point we had a Congressional Military Reform Caucus that was bipartisan and included more than 100 members of Congress (though most were just along for the ride). We pushed for adopting German maneuver warfare instead of the French war of attrition; called for major changes in the military personnel system, including dropping “up or out” that compels the vice of careerism; keeping people in the same place to generate unit cohesion; mandating deep cuts in the number of officers above the company grades; and buying simpler, cheaper weapons in larger numbers. But the reformers were armed with ideas, while the defenders of business-as-usual deployed vast amounts of money. Guess which wins in Washington?
Pentagon, White House and Capitol Hill civilians who deal with the military would do well to remember an old story from the insurance industry. An insurance company’s board meeting heard nothing but glowing reports about the business’s operations, despite a falling profit margin. The board members beamed, with one exception. Finally, the old man, who had started life poor, working in the Garment District, spoke up. “Gentlemen,” he said, “bullsh*t is our most valuable material. It is what we sell our customers. It is what we tell our stockholders. It is what we use to blind our regulators. Let us not waste such a precious commodity on one another.”
The post The American Way of Losing Wars appeared first on The American Conservative.
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