On Bombing Iran

THUS WE BOMB Iran.

The administration does not give consistent reasons for the attack on Iran: some say we war to change the behavior of the Iranian regime; others say the aim of the war is to end that regime outright. Many officials, including the president himself, endorse both aims.

How to make sense of this?

A consistent theme in Trumpist policy making across all domains is that Trump tends to demand the maximal aim and then climb back to an achievable one. Thus  the “TACO” memes. But it is not difficult to see a certain wisdom in the TACO approach. This is how many of our most successful men—the men Silicon Valley calls “high agency”—make their way through life. They have learned that you will not get what you do not ask for.  So ask! Often what you desire is already yours. You need only the gumption to demand it. In most settings there are no downsides to the maximalist gambit. Either you ask for what you want, and are given it; or you ask for what you want, and are given something less. In neither case are you worse for the asking.

 Young men, the lesson is clear: demand the stars! Maybe you will get them. And if you do not? You will then fall to heights that more timid men never dreamed to climb.

This is all good life advice. One might question whether this advice ports to geopolitics. But whether we think it is a wise approach to foreign policy or not, it is Donald Trump’s approach to foreign policy. It is not difficult to see this approach in play here. Maybe the Iranian regime really is a house of cards that will fall if only given a proper push. The only way to know is to attempt that push. And if the regime does not disintegrate? Well, Trump will accept rule by some IRGC general who behaves less hostilely to the interests of the United States.

As a general principle, I do not have much faith in regime disintegration. Many describe the Iranian regime as fatally wounded and chronically unstable. I have not studied Iran with any depth and cannot offer a well-reasoned assessment of this claim. I suspect, however, that most of the generalists involved in these debates have also not immersed themselves in all things Persian. Their conclusions spring from general ideas. Speaking generally then:  we do not give autocracy its due. We assume that autocratic systems are unnatural and brittle. They are always tottering on the cusp of judgement day.  I see no basis for this faith. On every continent in which civilization emerged, it emerged first in an autocratic form. Authoritarian order seems far more “natural” to our species than democracy—and in the long history of human polities may prove less brittle.

So I do not trust the notion that every autocratic regime will collapse if only a few of its unnatural supports can be knocked out from under it. May it be true in this case. That is my hope. But it is only that.

But what of the “climb-down” option—will any outcome short of regime collapse suffice? I am not so sure. By assassinating their head of state we incentivize the Persians to act outside the normal pale. That action may not come right away. As of March 2026, the Iranians have never assassinated an American of national significance. Nor have they murdered a significant mass of American civilians. Will that still be true in March 2032? What could we do to deter it? We have already gone for the jugular. “In business, a maximal ask shifts the bargaining range. In security affairs, a maximal ask can also shift the escalatory range.”1 Short of a proper ground invasion we cannot escalate our threats against this regime far beyond what we now are doing. If they survive this they will survive whatever form of retaliation we might threaten then. Our enemies are godly men: they do not fear to meet their maker if they meet him as martyrs.

A regime that lasts is a regime that will rebuild. Do we have the stomach to do this again (and then yet again?) in the decades to come? More important still: can we afford to do this again and yet again? Many serving in this administration opposed all American military aid to Ukraine for fear that it might tax our military position in East Asia. This worry presses far more urgently here than it ever did in Ukraine. The American industrial base has atrophied; American stockpiles are limited. The types of munitions we use in an air campaign over Persia come directly at the expense of the munitions we might need to wage an air campaign in the Pacific. The war of the moment can only be justified if it changes the regional dynamics so conclusively that there is no future need to spend blood or treasure there again.

One can foresee two worlds where that is not the case. The first I have described already: the world where the regime endures and we must return every half decade or so to launch a new razzia against it. The other is just as disturbing: the world where the regime endures and we do not return, and all we have done is create an enemy even more implacable than currently exists. It will eventually grow again in power. It may then elect to seek its revenge in a time and manner of its own choosing—perhaps a time when other crises and conflicts limit our possible response. (A response further limited by the likely dissolution of the US-Israeli alliance with the passing of the boomers).

Forgive me for a lack of jolly optimism. It is very possible that the brighter minds of this administration are correct, and the Iranian regime is in a fundamentally weaker position than I imagine. In that happy world all I have written will seem like a rather verbose bit of pearl-clutching.  

May this be the case.  

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Your support makes this blog possible. To get updates on new posts published at the Scholar’s Stage, you can join the Scholar’s Stage Substack mailing list, follow my twitter feed, or support my writing through Patreon. If you found the ideas explored in this piece interesting, you might also enjoy In addition to the pieces written linked to above, check out “The Eight Tribes of Trump and China,” “Gaza and the Extremist’s Gambit,” “Learning from Our Defeat: the Madrassas and the Modern,” “Pausing at the Precipice”,” “Culture Wars are Long Wars,” and “As the Generations Churn.”

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