The US-Israeli war against Iran was initiated without any coherently stated goals or popular support, and it’s already apparent that it’s turning into a horrific quagmire. It also doesn’t look like Trump and Israel will get the swift Iranian regime change they hoped for.
Our guest, Jason Brownlee, is a professor of government at The University of Texas at Austin and the author of the book, Force Without Authority: America’s Wars in the Middle East and South Asia. Below is a transcript of our March 18th episode of Confronting Capitalism, edited for clarity. You can also listen to the full episode on Apple or Spotify.
Vivek Chibber
It’s another month and another US invasion of another country, so lots to discuss. Looks like it’s becoming a habit for us now. I thought it’d be good to have Catalyst contributor Jason Brownlee on the show to discuss both the backdrop to the attack on Iran and also what the potential might be for success or failure in case they try to do, again, what they have tried in the recent past, which is to put up a regime that’s pliant and that sings to the American song. So, Jason, welcome to the show.
Jason Brownlee
Thanks. Great to be with you.
VC
Jason, I thought we’d start off by just trying to get some sort of understanding of what’s behind the American attack. Normally, when the US attacks a regime, they at least put up some show of a coherent explanation — laying out what the American interests are, what the justification of it is, trying to explain to the public that there’s some direct interest that’s at stake here, direct threat at least, where the US deemed it necessary to attack either preventively or in response to some sort of aggression. What really stands out here is that if there is some kind of clear objective, they’re not letting us know what it is.
JB
Right. It’s not even a Gulf of Tonkin kind of threat inflation. There were active diplomatic talks going on that the representative from Oman said were going very well. And then there was a surprise attack by Israel in the US more or less two days later.
And so the narrative that they seem to be converging on is that there was some imminent threat, either because Iran was going to attack out of the blue or Israel was going to attack Iran and then Iran was going to hit the US. That doesn’t seem credible.
VC
Yeah. There’s a difference between saying that Iran is on the verge of developing a nuclear weapon or that Iran is on the verge of attacking, versus saying that Israel is about to attack Iran, and that might trigger a response, so we have to attack preemptively to prevent Iran’s response to an attack by Israel.
In the former case, at least you have some semblance of a justification with regard to protecting national interests and defending the nation. In the latter case, what you’re doing is saying we’re about to wage war and we want to weaken the enemy’s ability to respond to our waging the war.
JB
Right. And both of them are implausible, given what the Trump administration already did last year and claimed to have done last year in terms of devastating Iran’s existing nuclear facilities, such as they were, along with Israel. And so that kind of argument is even less plausible than when it was rolled out.
I think in the second Obama term, we used to hear this from like Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic, pressing Obama, like, ‘What if Israel attacked Iran and then Iran struck back, would you then get involved?’ So that idea of Israel dragging the US into a war has been out there. But that as well as the notion that Iran is somehow close to having a nuclear weapon are risible given the developments of the last year.
VC
What makes it especially implausible is that for the last 10 years, Iran has been stating quite clearly and frequently that it prefers not to develop a nuclear weapon. And even if it did, it’s willing to offer conditions under which it would forswear any such objectives. And that was what the negotiations starting with Obama were supposed to be about.
That being the case, everything the United States has done in the last four years has only made it more appealing for Iran to go ahead and develop one — because the frequency of the attacks, the bellicosity of the United States and Israel, the militarism, all of it makes it pretty attractive to Iran to have a more effective deterrent if it wants to stay out of the crosshairs of these two countries.
So if you want them to not develop a nuclear weapon, why would you keep undermining your negotiations with them and thereby making it rational for them to, in fact, develop those nuclear weapons?
JB
Absolutely. The lesson, not just for Iran, but we could talk about other regimes in the past has been that moderation and reasonableness is the danger. That the US wants to attack when a country is making compromises, when a country is negotiating in good faith. And in fact, exactly as you described, Iran under Ali Khamenei, Iran was at most trying to enter what is known as the Japan Club, where you have a solid civilian nuclear program that is under international law, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and that does not produce nuclear weapons, but would puts you a few months away from nuclear weapons if you needed to get there. And that’s what Japan has That’s what a number of other countries that are US allies have. And so there’s a kind of latent potential for weaponization, but it never needs to be acted upon. And it’s absolutely within the NPT, which Iran, of course, has signed, unlike Israel.
And so in that respect, pulling out of the JCPOA in Trump’s first term and really tightening the screws on Iran over the past few years, including under the Biden administration, points to an attitude of just grinding down a country and a government that is not presenting a threat, and on the contrary, is actually operating according to internationally recognized norms and rules.
VC
So it seems to me then that what’s emerging out of this is there’s a desired outcome and then a fallback outcome. The desired outcome has nothing to do with nuclear weapons or with the threat or this or that. It’s that they would like to see a different regime in power, or in fact, the dismemberment of the state, breaking it up into smaller units, so that it is systematically and structurally enfeebled and is no longer the regional power that it used to be.
And the fallback option is what they’re kind of peddling right now, which is that it’s kind of like mowing the lawn, the way Israel deals with the occupied territories, which is you keep attacking it every now and then, every few years to make sure that there’s no military threat, whatever military capacity they build up is scaled back and neutralized. And so you keep them hemmed in and powerless.
I think when you look at it that way, the motivation here is entirely geopolitical and affecting the power balance of the region. And it has nothing to do with direct military threats that Iran putatively poses to either Israel or the United States.
JB
Yes. To the extent that one could talk about something that is threatening or needs to be dealt with, it is Iran’s sovereign expressions of its preferences in the region, and Iran’s status as a regional power. And what we’re seeing is that essentially the United States will not tolerate a non-subservient regional power, at least when it comes to the Muslim majority states of the region.
VC
Well, let’s just think this through for a minute. And this is why I was especially keen to talk to you. Suppose one part of their fantasy comes true and they do find that they’re able to topple this regime with or without boots on the ground, with or without invasion. Let’s just leave that aside for now. Suppose they’re able to topple the regime.
Now what you have is the challenge of putting somebody in place who to you is a preferred option, a new government, a new administration, and then having them actually secure some sort of anchor with the local population, with the domestic population and gain some sort of legitimacy.
Now on the back of an unprovoked military action, toppling a regime that was not popular by any means, but is being replaced by two powers who have zero interest in Iranian sovereignty or the well-being of the Iranian people. And now they’re going to put a government or administration in place that is directly associated with these foreign belligerent and invading powers. What are the odds that that actually works out and had some sort of stable, desirable outcome?
JB
Well, the odds are incredibly low. There’s just no historical precedent for the United States toppling a government in a country the size and complexity of Iran and then replacing it with any type of pliant regime that is suddenly aligned with US preferences instead of the preferences of the population.
VC
When they started out, I do think they expected some sort of outcome like Venezuela might be possible. Trump explicitly said that. And the idea there was that they would seek out some sort of connections and some sort of willing partners in the military who would potentially be the people who replace Khamenei and the ruling council.
But one problem with that was, as they themselves admit, the initial bombing campaign, which killed Khamenei, also killed a score of Iranian leaders who they had pinpointed as the people who might replace Khamenei.
JB
And once you’ve dropped the first bomb on the head of government, you’re not on the Venezuela path anymore, either. So in the case of Venezuela, what the United States was able to accomplish was a very circumscribed change of leader, rather than an overhaul of a regime. And the fact that there were zero US casualties suggests that this was an operation that was orchestrated well in advance.
And so it bears much more similarities to Panama with the replacement of Manuel Noriega. Although in that case, with Noriega being removed December 1989 - January 1990, there was an opposition leader who had popular legitimacy, who was then installed, and he lasted one term and then basically people that were further to the left won the next election. So the US’s puppet didn’t even last that long.
In the case of Venezuela, of course, we just have a continuation of the Maduro government minus Maduro. And so there’s just no way in Iran, once you start blasting away leaders and violating Iranian sovereignty, that the rest of the government is going to somehow step aside or put forward a kind of Delcy Rodriguez equivalent.
VC
Another fallback option was that they were hoping that the Kurds would fill the void. Israel has been targeting all the institutions of domestic control and the avenues of domestic violence, like the police, and has been hoping that this would open the way for some kind of rebellion or some kind of incursion by the Kurds into the country. And so far, there’s no indication whatsoever that that’s on the cards.
JB
That’s the alternative to national regime change, as you spoke about it earlier, some kind of balkanization or fragmentation of the entire country, unless they were dreaming of Kurds, absolutely, like sort of sweeping into Tehran and establishing some type of Kurdish oligarchic regime.
But the US appears interested in breaking up the country if they can’t just take it over, which is quite ironic, because whenever I travel in the region, basically, since 9/11, when the regime change wars really kicked off and things were getting unstable, and then again, after Libya, in 2011, I would just regularly hear talk that, ‘Yeah, the US doesn’t want to promote democracy, what the US wants to do is promote failed states. I mean, that’s obviously what it’s doing. That must be their intention. Because we’ll look what’s happening in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, it’s just civil war after civil war.’
What’s interesting is that accusation is now boasted about by the Pentagon. Pete Hegseth at one point said, ‘This is not gonna be Germany or Japan or Iraq, it’s not gonna be nation building.’
So like, okay, well, then what is it going to be if you’re rejecting those examples? And I think this kind of stoking of separatism shows a way of really taking Iran down a peg and accomplishing these objectives of removing it from the map geopolitically or geostrategically, without inserting a US military presence that would be very vulnerable.
VC
Yeah, it seems to me that the goal really is to simply neutralize Iran as a regional player. If you go back to 9/11, regionally, there were two actors who the United States placed at the top of the list of countries that they felt posed any kind of real challenge to Israeli and American hegemony in the region. That was Iraq and Iran.
And the invasion of Iraq was always supposed to be just the first step in a two-step dance, right? It was, yeah, you can invade Iraq, but the slogan was, ‘but real men go to Tehran,’ right?
And this was also true inside the Clinton administration. People like Kenneth Pollack were actually pushing for a dual invasion to take out the dual threat. Syria was there, but Syria was not considered in the same league of states that these two were. And the fantasy was that if you took care of these two states, now Israel is unchallenged as the local proxy of American power in that region.
Iraq has in fact been largely neutralized. It is no longer a threat in any kind of way. It has a shaky, but real alliance with Iran, but really it’s more as a launching pad for Iranian operations than a threat of its own.
That left Iran as the only remaining player here. And once you have pushed back Hezbollah, as Israel did, and once you’ve dismantled Syria, as they did, now my reading of it is that it’s a historically unprecedented opportunity to take on a weakened Iran after you’ve already had the 12-day war in the summer, where you weakened it to some degree, and where the timing is now perfect, where you think that if you can take out Khamenei, there is a small but non-trivial possibility that you might be able to effectuate regime change.
And if you can do that, then you have one of two things, either a tremendously weakened, but pliant Iran, or an Iran that’s on the way to being essentially disassembled, balkanized and broken apart. Either way, you have for the first time since the rise of pan-Arabism, since Gamal Abdel Nasser, you have a Middle East in which the American footprint is unchallenged. I mean, that seems to me to be what’s at stake over here for them.
JB
Yeah, neutralizing Iran, making Iran into the next Syria, I think that could definitely be part of the game plan. And I think what we have between Iraq and Syria, that you’ve mentioned, are two models in which the cost and the investment of the United States vary dramatically, but in both instances, you have negative consequences and a lot of potential backlash from interventions, whether it takes the full form of military occupation, or really trying to control the country with an American iron fist, or instead with backing proxies and separatists.
Because either way, you’re going to end up with a breakup of the state, and that’s going to lead to new militant non-state actors that could move across borders, launch attacks internationally. And essentially, you’ve come back to creating the very problem that the Bush administration in its early national security strategies was saying, the US must absolutely prevent after 9/11.
Like the lesson after 9/11 was the danger of failed states and weak states is much greater than the danger of actually robust states like Iran, because it’s the failed states where Al Qaeda can hang out. And we learned in the 20 teens, it’s the failed states where ISIS can grow. But that would exactly be what one should expect if the Iranian state collapsed.
VC
Jason, in your estimation, what is it that changes the calculus and the cost-benefit analysis for Trump and the people around him?
JB
Yeah, some of it is going to remain opaque and sort of unexplainable and intelligible. But I do think there’s been a shift since October 7th of 2023. First, in Israel’s willingness to assume some risk in getting into these tit for tat, back and forth with Iran. And that has worn down Iran’s conventional deterrent, and I think put us in a different balance of power than we had before October 7th. So you’ve got Netanyahu and Israel already wearing down Iran’s conventional deterrent.
And then Trump comes in and during the 12 day war, he sees this opportunity to have kind of a dramatic moment and grab some headlines with a mission that was very low risk for the US forces that bombed the three Iranian nuclear facilities. Low risk because Israel had already worn down Iranian air defenses, so there wasn’t much chance of Iran shooting down the US aircraft. So that would be a big change, I would say.
And then in terms of Trump’s own calculus about just being the center of attention, taking attention away from other issues that may play into this as well, although it’s hard to imagine how this is going to work well for the Republican Party. I mean, one can imagine, I shouldn’t say it’s hard to imagine, but at least right now, this doesn’t seem to be a winning move for the Republican Party in the midterms, but I don’t know if Trump really cares much about that.
VC
I mean, there is a theory that Trump knows that he’s not going to run for president again, and he doesn’t really care. Maybe that’s true.
My own feeling is that Trump actually prioritizes the operation in Iran. He prioritizes the increase of American power in the region. And he genuinely thinks that it’s worth risking the elections for this.
So far, he’s shown a sensitivity to the midterms until the attack began. He was showing a sensitivity to winning the midterms because he did have some sense of his legacy and wanting to leave a legacy.
I don’t know if one can say that the reason he’s launched this invasion is that he feels the elections don’t matter anymore. It’s more that I think he thinks they matter more than the elections.
And it’s an interesting fact because it means Trump has aligned with what the “blob” actually is associated with, which is this foreign policy establishment, which has long-term agendas for projecting American power abroad, which Trump was in many ways contemptuous of in both of his presidential campaigns. He insisted that it’s this — whether you want to call it the deep state or the blob — that is committed to these forever wars and nation building and keeps getting the US enmeshed in countries where it has no direct interest.
But it’s pretty amazing that if you look at his foreign policy ventures since he came into power, there’s a big element of traditional neocon ideology that’s associated with it. One of which is you carry out foreign policy endeavors when the opportunity presents itself, and then you deal with the domestic consequences as a problem of opinion management. But you don’t let public opinion deter you.
And this is the first war, first major invasion that the US has launched probably since the second world war with support for it is abysmally low. And he knew that going in, and he launched it anyway. So that suggests what he’s saying is that this is an opportunity for us, we’re going to do it, and we’ll deal with the consequences when it comes down to it.
JB
Yeah, it’s quite a change, not only from his campaign rhetoric, but also his attitude during his first term. The trend historically has been, at least since George W. Bush, and the debates in the year 2000, for presidential candidates to condemn military intervention, because it’s just it’s a losing issue on the campaign trail. But then once they’re in office, they get sucked into the blob, and they adopt the orthodoxy of the foreign policy establishment.
And it’s interesting about Trump in 2017 to 2021. I mean, I actually I had just a local op-ed in January of 2017, when he was inaugurated, where I said, well, you know, nation building intervention, it’s kind of a bipartisan tradition going back to William McKinley at this point. So I’ll be really surprised if Trump follows through on his campaign rhetoric and actually breaks from this.
But for four years, in many respects, he did. He made a peace deal with the Taliban. He let Iran launch missiles at our troops in Iraq and didn’t respond to that. It was the biggest ballistic missile attack the US Army had ever suffered. Like they were just sitting in their base taking hits. And that was the end of it. That was after the assassination of Qasem Soleimani. And there are other examples as well. But now Yeah, absolutely.
He just seems to be like a neocon. Except a neocon without even the sort of Wilsonian bullshit about promoting democracy and American ideals and how we’re a city on the hill. You know, the neocons Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan would write in the 1990s about a sort of neo-Reaganite foreign policy, and at least try to have some adorn their aggression in some type of civilizational project.
And with Trump and those around him, he doesn’t seem to be embracing that at all. It’s more like just kind of raw coercion and just grinding people down who disagree with them or challenge him or that he just thinks are vulnerable to attack.
VC
Let’s go back to the issue of potential outcomes. I think it’s pretty clear and the American foreign policy establishment itself makes no bones that failed states carry enormous risks for both American interests in that region and of course for the regional allies that they have, the other states who can be vulnerable to attacks by newly emergent forces like ISIS or Al-Qaeda before that. That is fairly clear.
That’s why they’ve always relied on some version of nation building and regime change to try to ensure that the successor states are going to be A, stable and B, pliant in the appropriate ways so you get the best of both worlds.
Now, your analysis is partly, or in large measure, about the contradictions of that project and why it’s led to perhaps unintended, but certainly undesirable consequences, even taking American goals into account. Why don’t we just dwell on that for a moment: What are the institutional and structural forces that, in your analysis, do this kind of regime change to, if not outright failure, then at least incredible contradictions?
JB
One of them is that once you get into the country, whether with boots on the ground or at scale or some larger force, and you try to turn the government into a puppet and direct its policies or dictate its policies, you run into a fundamental tension or really a catch-22. Okay, you didn’t like the old regime because they had certain preferences that you disagreed with, but the old regime had, in most cases, some type of societal base. They were actually delivering for people in some way and helping address fundamental material needs, including basic physical safety.
So now you’ve got a new government and leader that you’ve hand-pick. Let’s say, for example, they pick the descendant of the Shah and they put him in power. Well, okay, now you have someone who aligns with your preferences, but they have no loyalty in society. And then on top of that, they have no ability to get things done in society.
Afghanistan is a good example. Hamid Karzai, not even obviously beloved in Washington necessarily, but he was basically hand-picked by the Bush administration. He was the president that US administrations were comfortable with as opposed to the alternatives. And he ended up being known as the mayor of Kabul because he had no authority over the rest of the country. And we know how the story ended with an even less popular successor and then eventually the return of the Taliban to power.
And so, whether you’re going to recognize it immediately with some type of actual elections, as the US more or less did in Iraq, and allow long-suppressed preferences of the Shia majority in Iraq to be translated into political power, or you’re going to suppress it for as long as possible and then face an insurgency like in Afghanistan, those societal preferences will come back. And so that’s one of the fundamental problems why regime change has not worked for the United States and why the learning curve and the experience from the initial attempt to impose US preferences to the eventual acceptance that this is not going to work ends up being so costly and destructive.
VC
Let me add an element to that, which is that, it’s not just that they end up finding somebody who doesn’t have local anchor. It’s that it’s very hard to find someone who does have local anchor who will be desirable to the United States.
And the reason for that is if you actually are seen as a belligerent power, invading the country, overthrowing the government, the ticket to having any kind of legitimacy domestically is that you are opposed to the invasion, that you’re opposed to American power being projected in this sort of way, which means that the people who have local legitimacy are almost always going to be people who have to take a stance against the projection and the imposition of American power.
So you kind of set yourself up structurally that the only people who will be willing to play ball with you are the people who are locally despised.
JB
Yeah. Basically you want a popular collaborator. If there isn’t a Philippe Pétain available, if there isn’t a war hero who’s willing to serve a foreign occupier, then you’re out of luck.
Now, how did they pull it off in Japan and in West Germany? Well, we were entering the Cold War, and there was this new threat that got officials and presidents in Washington thinking very flexibly about working and basically giving broad discretion and leeway to recent adversaries.
VC
Yeah. Don’t forget that both the Nazis and Hirohito had lost an enormous amount of support in those countries by the time the US got in there. This is very different from invading Panama, invading Iraq, countries that are no threat, where the population doesn’t see your invasion as part of their own liberation.
And so of course, by the time you set up a regime or administration that is acceptable to you, they’re identified with a belligerent foreign power that invaded this country for no reason. So that just makes legitimacy just so much more challenging for those countries.
JB
Yeah, absolutely. In Japan and West Germany, interventions to the extent that there was a post-war occupation was at the end of a much longer process and was not the objective from the outset. These were not regime change wars.
And so yeah, in the post-World War II cases, we have this compressed process where the US is basically attacking in order to install a new government.
VC
Yeah. This has a very interesting implication, which is that the US may not be able to find a successor regime that has any kind of local authority. Reza Pahlavi is their desired outcome, but he’s pretty universally despised in the country because the memories are still fresh of his father’s regime.
And if that’s the case, your two potential outcomes are pretty negative even for America’s regional allies. One is that you dismember the state. You dismember it, you dismantle it, and it becomes a failed state, and now a potential location for many kind of negative outcomes with the rise of local militias or local terrorist groups or something like that.
The second one is that you essentially draw back, call this a mowing the lawn kind of operation, and you declare victory in that you’ve pushed the military capacities of the regime back to the point where you can say they no longer pose a threat. But that, make no mistake, that’s going to be seen as a victory for Iran.
If the regime is left standing, and all that’s happened is that its existing military capacities have been scaled back, because you declared right at the outset that regime change was your goal — and Israel is very clear that it wants regime change — there’s no way to spend this as any kind of victory.
So either you have what is in the public eye a humiliation for Israel and Trump, or you have opened up a Pandora’s box with a dismembered regime, because the ideal outcome, which is a replacement regime, a kind of nation building exercise of its own, may not be on the cards for them, which means they’re really stuck.
JB
Yeah, and I think in terms of the country fragmenting, there are strong reasons so far to think that Iran will prove much more cohesive as a country overall, and as a state, than Syria or Iraq or Libya or some of these other cases that US officials might be looking at. And so, that outcome of the regime sticking around in some way remains very probable.
I mean, it’s really fighting for its survival in terms of external attack. But internally, we have not seen a major popular uprising. This is not a war that starts like the civil war in Syria, or the NATO intervention in Libya. This is not a war that is sort of boosting and augmenting an indigenous uprising against the government.
And in fact, it may very likely help to consolidate the authority of the current government, even as it’s fighting for its survival against foreign states, because Iranians will be looking around at other cases and think, ‘Well, okay, do I want to be Syria? Do I want to be a fragmented state, a failed state? Or would I rather some continuation of the Islamic Republic?’
And that’s been a calculus that Iranians have faced for decades. It’s part of why the Mohammad Khatami regime and the reform movement fizzled out in 1997 through 2005, because the reformists were not willing to really take on the regime because they feared a second revolution, and just the uncertainty that that would bring. And so even at the height of the reform movement, if the public generally is reticent about radical overhaul and radical transformation of government, all of those concerns are magnified in the context of an international war.
VC
It’s very murky as to what the domestic situation is. But from what information we have, and the experts in the United States, many of whom are expats, some of them are people who just study Iran. From what they say, there is not an organized opposition right now in the country that is capable of stepping into the breach and organizing some sort of rebellion, some sort of quasi revolution or whatever you want to call it, which means that if there is a regime change, it’s going to be dictated by the belligerent powers and not by forces on the ground that have domestic legitimacy.
And the problem there is Israel is one of the two belligerent powers. Now, whatever else the United States does, if the successor regime is viewed as having been implanted by Israel, what are the chances it’s going to have any kind of legitimacy whatsoever?
JB
One would think it’ll last about as long as that Iraqi flag that they rolled out, that looks a lot like the Israeli flag. So no, but I mean, we talked about the Pahlavi’s, we can talk about in Iraq, of course, there was Ahmed Chalabi. Generally speaking, those who are going to be selling Israel some type of sweetheart deal are not going to be able to have any serious domestic legitimacy. So not only will they lose elections, but they could also just lose their lives to violence and such.
One could start ticking off the different groups that could get involved in a free for all inside Iran, including like the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, MEK, that has long been the darling of neocons, so much that they lobbied for the MEK to be removed from the foreign terrorist organization list.
But to come back to the Kurds and something you mentioned earlier, in terms of this idea of stoking separatism, Iranians do have a pretty strong history of a national identity. This is not a country that was colonized. It’s not a country that was created by Sykes-Picot. And to the extent that outside powers such as Saddam Hussein have tried to peel off Iranians through ethno-nationalist appeals or ethnic appeals, they’ve generally failed. I’m thinking of the way Saddam Hussein, after he invaded Iran in 1980, tried to get Iranian Arabs to kind of come to his side under some idea of Arab nationalism, and that didn’t go anywhere.
So I think we’re in a murky situation, not a good one for any US ambitions of nation building. Obviously, a very grave situation for tens of millions of Iranians. And we should note that we’re talking about a country roughly three times the population of Iraq or Afghanistan. So just a much larger scale in terms of any notion of political engineering coming out from Washington or anywhere else.
VC
I think we should close with some perspective on what the implications of actions like this are for the American Left moving forward. Because what stands out here in this invasion in particular is that it was undertaken with not only no public support, but with open contempt towards the other organs of governance like Congress.
We know that the two large protests against Trump were called the No Kings protests and such. There’s this perception that he’s behaving like a monarch, but there’s a deeper issue at stake here, which is it’s not just that Trump is through the force of his personality usurping the presidency and charging forward, breaking all the laws. This is in fact an imperial presidency institutionally.
What Trump is doing is he’s pushing the boundaries of the law, but the American state is one that over the decades has been built into a structure where presidents in fact can launch aggressive, unprovoked actions abroad without first getting the stamp, the approval of Congress and the Senate.
And if nothing else, as we come out of this, whether or not there’s an anti-war movement, whether or not there is a resurgence of the Left, at the very least you would think that the institutions of power, the political parties, the garden variety politicos in the country would try to reassert some sort of control by the organs of governance over a presidency, which, when it is taken up by someone like Trump, can be turned into a weapon of mass destruction.
JB
Yeah, absolutely. The presidency has become way too powerful, especially after 9/11, but even in earlier decades, and obviously the legislation that was passed during the Vietnam War, the War Powers Act, which was brought into law over Nixon’s veto, hasn’t done anything, well.. Maybe it has done something to constrain presidents, but in general it hasn’t stopped them from launching serious military action.
I’m thinking about Obama in Libya, where they basically tacitly recognized that they were in violation of the War Powers Act, and they had to start saying, this isn’t war. Which we’re already hearing a little bit from Trump and Hegseth.
Yeah, it says something that Congress has to try to pass a whole new resolution just to stop the president from going to war. We’ll see what happens when we’re actually past the 60-day mark, if we are, if hostilities continue that long. But I absolutely agree that the presidency has become far too powerful and fundamentally unconstrained when it comes to the use of force overseas, whether against other countries or against individuals such as drone strikes, which was really Obama’s stock and trade when it came to counterterrorism.
I would say that what this has signaled to other countries is the way to keep the United States in check, the way to keep American presidents in check, is not through America’s own domestic laws, and certainly not through international law. Obviously, the US has a veto of the UN Security Council. It’s through building your own military deterrent, nuclear if possible.
And we haven’t talked about North Korea in this conversation, but it’s worth noting that North Korea now stands alone among the original axis of evil from 2002. I don’t think anyone’s going to go for the trifecta, for the triple crown of regime change and go after North Korea because of its nuclear deterrent, as well as its substantial conventional deterrent of just missiles pointed at Seoul that would just absolutely inflict carnage, tens of thousands of casualties immediately, even without a nuke.
But that’s the message. When you undermine law either domestically in terms of moving away from what’s supposed to be checks and balances, and having Congress controlling not only the purse strings, but also when the United States goes to war, you push other actors into thinking about how to basically impose costs on the back end and make that type of illicit and threatening and dangerous conduct sort of painful for whoever is carrying it out.
And what we can say then about the domestic scene and the Left here is that the lack of an anti-war movement signals to members of Congress that they don’t really have a price to pay at the polls when they go along with this type of adventure or only rhetorically support it.
As for constraining the US presidency over the long term, my concern would be kind of like after George W. Bush, that even if we get some opposition out, even if we get more No Kings protests, and even if there’s some foreign policy and anti-imperialism element that folds into them, that it will quickly become just an anti-Trump movement as soon as there’s a Democrat in office.
And that was exactly what happened in 2009. We thought there was the beginning of an anti-war movement. It turned out to just be an anti-George W. Bush movement. And you could see that with Democrats being totally fine with Obama’s escalation of the war in Afghanistan and then the way it’s pulled over into Pakistan as well.
VC
And the extraordinary reliance on drones, not only for carrying out hits, but hits against an American for the first time in the US history.
JB
Anwar al-Awlaki, absolutely. Yeah, he was targeted, of course, and he wasn’t even the first American to be killed. And then when his family, immediate relatives went to court, the case was thrown out. And so we have just a tremendously insulated and overpowered presidency, regardless of who’s in office.
But I think what’s striking about that and what should be the broader lesson is, I mean, we knew it was bad under Obama and George W. Bush, but if you get someone like Trump, I mean, it can get even worse. So one would hope that this experience would teach both parties to want to rein in the presidency.
And we’ll see what happens if there’s any type of serious anti-imperialist kind of bipartisan alliance among Republicans and Democrats. There’s sort of strange bedfellows now with MAGA people criticizing this.
VC
Well, he’s put them in a very difficult situation. What’s clear so far is that Trump acted so impetuously that it’s left him with very few exit options. And if this thing drags out, if it actually keeps going, you could see things start to move domestically.
And you might be able to even see a kind of articulation of demands and goals that go beyond simply reigning in Trump and to start thinking about the institutional foundation that enables him to carry out actions like this. So we can only hope.
JB
Definitely. Let’s hope for that.
