If it wasn’t clear before, it is undeniable now.
President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel started a war
with Iran assuming that they would trigger quick and easy regime change. They
vastly underestimated the staying power of Iran’s surviving leadership and its
military capacity not only to inflict damage on Israel and America’s Arab
allies but also to close off the most important oil and gas shipping lane in
the world.
This is imposing serious harm on the global economy,
including the U.S. stock market, and Trump has no clue how to get out of the
mess that he has created by starting a war without thinking through the
implications.
It is actually embarrassing to watch the American
president flip-flopping around, from telling us that the surviving Iranian
leaders have pretty much agreed to his every demand, that the war is close to
being over and Trump won, to admitting that he has no idea how to get the
Strait of Hormuz shipping lane out of Iran’s grip.
If America’s Western allies,
whom Trump never consulted before the war, won’t send their armies and navies
to do the job for Trump, then it’s too bad for them, he says: We have all the
oil we need. That is, unless Trump decides to “obliterate” — his favorite word
— Iran’s industrial base and desalination plants until Iran says uncle.
In short, we are watching what happens when you put into
the Oval Office an impulsive, unstable man who ran for president largely to get
revenge on his political foes. Then he surrounded himself with a cabinet chosen
for its handsome looks and its willingness to put loyalty to Trump over loyalty
to the Constitution.
Add to that Republican majorities in the House and Senate
willing to write him blank checks, and it all eventually leads to sloppy,
undisciplined decision-making, including starting a huge war in the Middle East
with no plan for the morning after. Trump is a man-child playing with matches — the world’s
most powerful military — in a gas-filled room.
If all of that were not bad enough, we have a secretary
of defense, Pete Hegseth, who holds extreme Christian nationalist beliefs
and, last week, reportedly held a prayer session at the
Pentagon in which he prayed for U.S. troops to deliver
“overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy. … We ask
these things with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus
Christ.”
In other words, it’s now our religious warriors against
Iran’s. If this were not the leadership of my own country — and
if Iran were not, indeed, the most destabilizing force in the Middle East and
its transformation not a worthy goal for its own people and its neighbors — I’d
just sit back and watch the show, savoring the spectacle of Trump getting what
he deserves.
But it is my country. Iran going nuclear is a threat that
could unleash nuclear proliferation all across the Middle East. And we
are all going to get what Trump deserves.
What to do? Trump should set aside his 15-point
peace plan — which would be ridiculously complicated to implement —
and reduce it to two points: Iran gives up its more than 950 pounds of nearly
bomb-grade highly enriched uranium, and in return the United States gives up on
regime change.
Both sides would then agree to end all hostilities. That is, no
more American and Israeli bombing, no more Iranian and Hezbollah rockets, no
more Strait of Hormuz blockade and, for darn sure, no U.S. ground troops
landing in Iran.
“We have to realize that what the Iranian regime wants
most is to stay in power, and what the United States and Israel want most is
for Iran not to have a bomb,” said John Arquilla, a former professor of defense
analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School and the author of the forthcoming
book “The Troubled American Way of War.” “Both sides can get what they want
most if they are ready to give up what they want second most.”
For America and Israel, second prize after eliminating
Iran’s highly enriched uranium would be regime change. That doesn’t appear to
be in the offing anymore, and Trump has already begun laying the groundwork for
abandoning that objective. He told
reporters on Sunday that given how the United States and Israel have
now killed several dozens of Iran’s senior leaders, “it truly is regime change.”
Iran’s leaders were “a whole different group of people,” who
he said have “been very reasonable.”
Of course, this is ludicrous and a cover for the fact
that the United States and Israel vastly overestimated their ability to topple
Iran’s regime using air power alone.
The Trump team has reportedly been negotiating through
Pakistan with the speaker of Iran’s parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who
has strong ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which appears to
be the real power behind the scenes. The rump Iranian regime may well be ready
to consider giving up its uranium in return for its survival. Yes, a million problems would remain unresolved, but
that’s what happens when you try to use force without any long-term planning to
solve a wicked problem.
Broadly speaking, a wicked
problem is defined as a problem that resists quick fixes or permanent
solutions. It involves numerous interdependent variables. Outcomes are never
final, just better or worse, or good enough. Every wicked problem is
essentially one of a kind, meaning there is no perfect, pre-existing template
for solving one. And solutions often have irreversible consequences, meaning
that you cannot easily undo a decision. That is about the best definition of the Iran problem
that I can think of.
While he may have never spelled it out in so many words,
if you look at President Barack Obama’s actions vis-à-vis Iran, he clearly
understood that it was a wicked problem and therefore the wisest course of
action was to focus on the core American interest, try to secure that and learn
to live with the other features of the problem, mitigating them as best as
possible.
That was the logic of Obama’s 2015 deal with Iran, the
Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which put internationally verifiable limits
on the country’s uranium enrichment program, and his decision to live with its
growing ballistic missile arsenal and its cultivation of proxy militias in
Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iraq — which did not threaten America.
Obama’s Iran deal worked as designed. When Obama left
office, the curbs on Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacities — verified by
international inspectors — meant that Iran, if it broke out of the deal, would
require at least a year to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear
warhead, providing plenty of time for the world to react.
Nevertheless, Trump, at the urging of Netanyahu,
unilaterally withdrew the United States from the deal in 2018. But Trump never
forged an effective alternative strategy to prevent Iran from securing enough
uranium for a bomb. The Biden administration tried to clean up Trump’s mess but could not get Iran to agree.
When Trump came back to power, he again neglected to
forge an alternative. So, Iran went from being a year away from a bomb under
Obama’s nuclear deal to weeks away thanks to Trump’s reckless withdrawal from
Obama’s strategy without an effective replacement strategy. And now
with this war Trump has made it a really, really wicked problem.
It’s why we need to keep this as simple as possible.
America should extend assurances that we will end the war, leave the regime in
place, stop destroying Iran’s infrastructure and even offer some relief from
oil sanctions, if Iran turns over all its near weapons-grade fissile material
and halts all hostilities from its side. Everything else gets postponed for
another day. (Meanwhile a much-weakened Iranian regime would have to be more
responsive to its people.)
Trump will be a very lucky man if the surviving leaders
of the Iranian regime say yes. It’s a measure of Trump’s incompetence that they
now hold his fate in their hands.
Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs
Opinion columnist. He joined the paper in 1981 and has won three Pulitzer
Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,”
which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman • Facebook
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