THE ROADS NOT TAKEN?

Reason's Matthew Petti describes the current scrap with Iran as a "pointless war."

I'm tempted to crack wise about Amtrak's pointless arrow being with us for over fifty years, and this pointless war has been going on for almost that long.

Mr Petti's thesis is provocative.

Although the war came out of the blue for most Americans, the Iran hawks spent decades working to put the United States in this position. They made it politically easier to go to war than not go to war. Politicians took it for granted that Israel and the Arab monarchies' problems with Iran were also America's problems. But hawkish factions from both parties also shot down any attempt to solve those problems through compromise or even containment of Iran. They pushed the U.S. to take greater and greater risks while avoiding a public debate on war.

"If Iran presents a quasi-existential menace, diplomacy is a political liability and sanctions don't work, what is left besides military force?" Robert Malley, the Biden administration's envoy to Iran, wrote in a recent New York Times essay criticizing his former boss for helping create the conditions for war. "If the United States wants to stop plunging into Middle East wars, it needs to value its own interests more than it hates its old enemies."

The hawkish coalition's shifting goalposts, designed to make avoiding war impossible, haunted the execution of the war itself. Since the conflict began, the Trump administration has thrown out many different, contradictory victory conditions: overthrowing the Iranian government, making a deal with the Iranian government, destroying Iran's nuclear program, sending Iran's entire industrial base "back to the Stone Age," unleashing a "prosperous and glorious future" for Iran, taking control of the Strait of Hormuz, or letting the strait "open itself."

For many hawks, the specific rationales for fighting Iran don't seem to matter. What they want is someone to pay for the past decades of U.S. failures in the Middle East.

Did those "past decades" begin with an embassy seized in the fall of 1979?  When a government's spokesmen refer to the United States as a "Great Satan" and Israel as the "Lesser Satan" and riles up constituents to yell "Death to America" might one at least be a little fretful about that country developing a nuclear weapon?  That the current government is skin-suiting Persian traditions of long standing might also be reason to swap it out?

Mr Petti acknowledges as much, and yet, he suggests that officialdom in both the United States and Iran have been looking for a way out.

The Islamic Republic of Iran was founded in a 1979 revolution that intentionally antagonized America, including by taking U.S. diplomats hostage, and that announced its intention to spread that revolution by sending guns to rebels around the region, including to the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, which attacked U.S. troops sent to end Lebanon's civil war in 1983. Over the years, Iranian leaders have made threats (including the destruction of Israel) that were both aggressive enough to provoke a response and empty enough to make Iran look weak.

But a majority of Americans and Iranians weren't even born yet when most of these grievances happened—and the world has changed a lot since then. Iran, exhausted by the consequences of its revolution, has been looking for a way out.

I'm not persuaded that "not even born" is an intellectual argument, particularly when there are tribal and religious antagonisms of some two millennia still resonating in Asia Minor.  Moreover, "empty enough" is one thing when it's the sort of posturing traditional with the men of Asia Minor and quite another when the mullahs' heirs to that Persian intellectual tradition test a bomb, demonstrate a long-range ballistic missile, and flip a hot rock at Tel Aviv.  That Israeli complication might be why subsequent attempts involving Iran and the United States making nice came a cropper.

After Al Qaeda attacked America on September 11, 2001, the Iranian intelligence services actually participated in the U.S. retaliation campaign in Afghanistan. Two years later, Iran quietly shut down its nuclear weapons research, and a Swiss diplomat presented the U.S. government with a letter from Iran proposing a "grand bargain." Iran would open up its nuclear facilities for inspection, cooperate in stabilizing Iraq, support Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, and even pressure Hamas and Hezbollah to lay down their arms. In exchange, Iran asked for normalized relations and an end to U.S. regime change threats.

The Bush administration disagreed internally on whether the offer was serious and how to respond. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice argued that the seriousness of the Iranian offer was actually proof of Iran's weakness, so the U.S. should turn it down and push for more. Her view carried the day.

That became the pattern of U.S.-Iranian diplomacy for the next two decades. Every time Iran offered compromise, American hawks used that offer to argue that more pressure would lead to more Iranian concessions. This circular logic—the U.S. demand should always be something more than Iran is offering—made diplomacy almost impossible. Yet there would never be another Iranian offer as good as the grand bargain.

The next big diplomatic moment came under President Barack Obama. Though Iran had stopped its secret nuclear weapons program, it was now openly enriching uranium, ostensibly as fuel for nuclear power plants. In response, Israel threatened war and assassinated Iranian scientists while the U.S. imposed economic sanctions to cut off Iran's access to foreign trade and carried out covert sabotage against Iranian enrichment plants. But then, in agreements signed in 2013 and 2015, Iran accepted a set of temporary and permanent restrictions on its nuclear industry in exchange for the U.S. and five other world powers lifting economic sanctions.

I vaguely recall, in the buildup to ENDURING FREEDOM, Afghan partisans equipped with new uniforms assembling in eastern Iran.  I do recall President Bush, in the buildup to IRAQI FREEDOM, lumping Iraq, Iran, and North Korea into an axis of evil.  I also have vague recollections of discontent in Iran particularly during IRAQI FREEDOM that included Iranians wishing, as long as the Army was in the neighborhood, that they come over and remove the mullahs.  (Wouldn't be prudent.)  I also recall, and that might contribute to the current situation, how President Obama averted his gaze during a round of civil disturbances in Iran in 2009.  Obama Derangement Syndrome might also be a thing in United States politics.  Finally, repeat, because repeat I must, Israel and the United States have strategic goals that align but they're not congruent.

And here we are.

The debate had a bizarre quality to it: Sens. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) and John McCain (R–Ariz.), both of whom had publicly calledfor bombing Iran, feigned outrage when Obama said that the alternative to a deal was war.

Iran's regional rivals also lobbied against the agreement. They were particularly alarmed by Obama's comments that Saudi Arabia would have to learn to "share the neighborhood" with Iran while the U.S. military made a "pivot to Asia." (East Asia, that is.) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a speech to the U.S. Congress in 2015 attacking Obama's "very bad deal" with what he described as a Nazi-like regime. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman denounced "the new Hitler in Iran" to The New York Times in 2017.

The United Arab Emirates, meanwhile, played the classic game of "bootleggers and Baptists," working with the pro-sanctions lobby in Washington while continuing to profit from Iranian sanctions busting in Dubai.

Opponents of the deal often said that it failed to address two nonnuclear issues: Iran's conventional missile arsenal and its proxy wars in the region. (In addition to arming Lebanese, Palestinian, and Iraqi paramilitaries, the Islamic Republic had by now intervened in the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.) Asking Iran to leave its neighbors alone was one thing. But demanding its conventional weapons was another. Even an ability to hit back against foreign attacks was now deemed an unacceptable threat.

Yes, those Arabian Gulf countries have their own interests, and, to repeat, those might be of long standing and not well understood by anyone who did not grow up in the region.  The Emirates, in playing that double game, might also have lucked into uncovering where all the sanctions-avoiding money went, which makes Iran flipping missiles and drones their way look like a bad move.  "Trump has lost control over the conflict he has entangled the U.S. in. With its back to the wall, Iran discovered that it holds a lot of leverage over the world economy. Israel and the Arab states, meanwhile, found that they can push the U.S. to adopt maximalist goals."

True though that might be, Iran's neighbors also have permanent interests, which, to repeat, align with despite not being congruent to, those of the United States.

The new Iranian regime’s highest objective is survival. It could sacrifice its nuclear programme and its piracy in the Strait in return for some peace agreement that it can call victory – because the agreement would be made with the regime, which is to say that the US would have dropped its demand for regime change. Iran has asked also for guarantees against further attacks, which in effect would guarantee the regime.

Yet what appears sensible in theory is impossible in practice. For the IRGC, survival this year is not enough. The IRGC needs nuclear weapons to deter foreign meddling – a lesson from Moammar Ghaddafi’s overthrow in Libya, after Ghaddafi gave up his nuclear programme, and from North Korea’s long survival despite similar international terrorism. The IRGC commands Iran’s international terrorism (linked with a recent spate of anti-Semitic attacks in Europe), ballistic missiles (which bombarded neighbours initially uninvolved in the war, except to host US bases), and proxies in Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen and Oman.

It will not give up its regional imperial ambitions, or the original revolutionaries’ aims to export revolution, or its export of a peculiarly Iranian politicised Shia Islamist quest for global domination.

Those ambitions are rooted in the character of the Islamic Republic itself. Since its founding in 1979, the regime has pursued a revolutionary religious and geopolitical agenda. It has consistently invested resources in advancing that agenda, despite failed wars, economic sanctions and internal unrest.

The Iran regime’s persistency is perversely self-reinforcing, even as its economy contracts. It has survived despite its diabolical behaviour and despite the severe reactions including two pre-emptive wars against it since 2025. The regime believes that it can survive and prevail. Here it takes lessons from Afghanistan, ruled by the Taliban (in alliance with Iran), after mostly Western forces withdrew in 2021, 20 years after they toppled the Taliban.

On the other side, Iran’s ambitions are explicitly unacceptable to the US, Israel, and recently the UAE (the United Arab Emirates). Implicitly, Saudi Arabia and Qatar agree, having waged their own wars against Iran’s proxies, although their alignments are always ridiculously complex with linked issues, such that sometimes they are funding the same proxies as Iran, just to stick it to some splitter or another.

For all these states, the problem is Iran’s regime, not just its policies. The policies cannot be negotiated away until the regime falls. The regime is in the habit of negotiating compromises, international inspections, commitments to do this or that, while going on about its prior business.

Israel has realised this for decades. For Israel, the Islamic Republic is a persistent and existential threat. More surprising is the shift among Gulf Arab states. Iranian attacks unintentionally prompted their further alignment with both the United States and Israel. Tehran’s coercion has backfired, producing resistance rather than compliance.

Despite the importance of these allies, ultimate authority for this war rests in Washington. US policy is shaped by national interests, not just regional needs. But the US shares the region’s revulsion against the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran (if only because so many US assets are in the region), and shares the regional needs and thence international needs for free passage of the Strait and around the coasts of Oman, Yemen and Lebanon.

As I prepare to publish, sporadic gunplay and incoming across the Arabian Gulf continues, although neither Iran nor the United States have declared the cease-fire is over.  Buckle in.