Get audio access with any FP subscription. Subscribe Now ALREADY AN FP SUBSCRIBER? LOGIN

Get audio access with any FP subscription.

ALREADY AN FP SUBSCRIBER? LOGIN

Of all the head-spinning aspects of the ongoing U.S. war with Iran, perhaps none is greater than the fact that it was launched by a president who was partly elected on the basis that he would never commit such folly. U.S. President Donald Trump touted himself as the country’s only recent leader to have avoided war while in office and insisted that while his Democratic opponents might drag the United States into “World War III,” he, on the other hand, would keep the peace and avoid the mistakes of the past. Despite promising to tear up the playbook that previous administrations repeatedly used to launch regime-change wars in the Middle East, Trump is writing its latest chapter.

U.S. interventions to change regimes in the broader Middle East—going all the way back to the 1953 coup in Iran but more recently in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya—all followed distinctly similar patterns. Once the president decided to act, he and his top administration officials would exaggerate the threat, inflate the benefits of action, prematurely declare victory, discover a range of unintended consequences, and then find themselves facing a costly political and strategic disaster. The details were different in each case, but the pattern is unmistakable. And Trump, notwithstanding constantly shifting justifications for the war, is now well on track to repeat it.

Of all the head-spinning aspects of the ongoing U.S. war with Iran, perhaps none is greater than the fact that it was launched by a president who was partly elected on the basis that he would never commit such folly. U.S. President Donald Trump touted himself as the country’s only recent leader to have avoided war while in office and insisted that while his Democratic opponents might drag the United States into “World War III,” he, on the other hand, would keep the peace and avoid the mistakes of the past. Despite promising to tear up the playbook that previous administrations repeatedly used to launch regime-change wars in the Middle East, Trump is writing its latest chapter.

U.S. interventions to change regimes in the broader Middle East—going all the way back to the 1953 coup in Iran but more recently in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya—all followed distinctly similar patterns. Once the president decided to act, he and his top administration officials........

© Foreign Policy