The day America lost the Middle East

For years, the hawks in Washington and Jerusalem insisted that military force against Iran was not only inevitable but manageable — a clean, decisive strike that would set back Tehran’s nuclear program, chasten the mullahs and demonstrate that American deterrence still meant something in a multipolar world.

Well, the bombs have fallen. And those of us who warned that this would be anything but clean and decisive are watching events unfold with no satisfaction whatsoever.

Let’s be honest about what has happened. The United States and Israel have launched what amounts to a war of choice against a nation of 90 million people, with a government that — however odious — retains genuine popular legitimacy on the question of national sovereignty.

Whatever tactical successes the strikes achieved in the first hours, Washington has now handed Tehran something invaluable: victimhood. Iran’s hardliners, who have spent decades arguing that America seeks regime destruction regardless of any diplomatic accommodation, have just been handed the most powerful recruiting poster in their history.

The architects of this operation will tell you this was about preventing a nuclear-armed Iran. Perhaps. But they have been telling us that story for 30 years, and in those three decades, the US has not managed to produce a single durable strategic outcome in the broader Middle East through military force.

Iraq is a fractured state still tilted toward Iranian influence. Libya is a failed state. Afghanistan returned to the Taliban. Syria is a ruin. At what point does Washington ask itself whether the pattern is the policy?

I have spent considerable time covering Israeli security politics, and I understand the genuine fears that drive Israeli strategic thinking on Iran. Those fears are not invented. But there is a profound difference between Israel’s legitimate security concerns and the American interest, which the Biden and Trump administrations alike have consistently failed to disaggregate.

When American carriers steam toward the Persian Gulf and American munitions hit Iranian soil, it is not Israel that becomes the face of the attack in the minds of a billion Muslims — it is the US.

The regional fallout is already visible. Iraq’s government is under enormous domestic pressure to expel American forces. The Gulf monarchies, who privately may have nodded along, are publicly scrambling for distance.

Turkey, never fully in the Western camp on this, is positioning itself as a mediator and a critic simultaneously. And China — which has spent years patiently building economic relationships across the region — will now deepen its role as the partner that does not bomb you.

None of this means the Iranian government is sympathetic. It is not. But foreign policy is not a morality play, and the relevant question is not whether the mullahs deserve what they got — it is whether the US and Israel will be more secure, and the region more stable, in five years than they were last week.

The historical record of military strikes producing durable nonproliferation outcomes is, to put it charitably, poor. North Korea was not bombed and has nuclear weapons. Libya gave up its program voluntarily and Gaddafi was killed by a NATO-backed rebellion anyway.

The lesson every proliferator draws from American behavior is that deterrence requires the bomb, not the promise not to build one.

What comes next is the question no one in Washington seems to have war-gamed seriously. Iran has multiple levers — Hezbollah, the Houthis, Shia militias in Iraq and Syria, and the capacity for maritime disruption in the Strait of Hormuz.

A wounded, humiliated Iran is not a compliant Iran. It is a dangerous one. And when the retaliation comes — as it will — the American public, which was never meaningfully consulted about this decision, will discover that a war begun with airstrikes rarely ends with airstrikes. I hope I am wrong. I have hoped that before.

This article was originally published on Leon Hadar’s Global Zeitgeist and is republished with kind permission. Become a subscriberhere.