The Moral Arc of the Universe Bends Toward Finding Out

The U.S.-Israel joint attack on Iran exemplifies the foreign policy theory guiding the Trump administration: other countries aren’t real, and they can’t hurt you. The United States, the thinking goes, has the most expensive armed forces in the world—more expensive than the next nine countries combined. Who could stand against American might? Sure, those armed forces failed in Afghanistan and Iraq, but that was because of, well, politics. Politicians in Washington muzzled the fighting power of the U.S. military, and set them to the impossible task of building democracy where none could exist. If you give the military a mission and the permission to leverage their maximum lethality, they are undefeatable.

While I have caricatured it slightly here, this is not far off from what we actually hear from various parts of the Trump administration. I have no pretensions to being able to read the algorithmic feed scrolling behind Donald Trump’s eyes, but other parts of the regime make the line of thinking clear. Stephen Miller told Jake Tapper, “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” Pete Hegseth has long blamed overly strict rules of engagement for US military failures. Marco Rubio was criticizing his colleagues for satisfaction with negotiations that “only lead to further negotiations” and fantasizing about Iran “tragically requir[ing] a military solution” back in 2012, before a Trump administration was a gleam in anyone’s eye. This is an administration full of those who have longed to see US power unbound.

Whatever the logic behind Trump’s actions in Venezuela and Iran, their results have been horrific. In both countries, US strikes have killed both soldiers and civilians. The purpose of killing foreign nationals has not been made clear, and the administration has shown no feeling of responsibility toward either the citizens in the countries it attacked or the citizens of the United States to build an understanding in advance of why they felt military action necessary. They have simply embraced the chaos of turning the United States into a rogue state, one that cannot easily be contained.

I do not, however, want to stop at calling these attempts at regime change from the air immoral. “Immoral,” after all, seems to be what the administration is going for. If we take Stephen Miller at his word, he and other Trump officials have unlocked a cheat code of sorts in international affairs, one that previous US presidents refused to use because of their so-called honor. Instead, I want to discuss why, in an international system that is not, in fact, full of moral actors refusing to use their true power, it is difficult to get countries to do what you want by bombing them.

Iran and Venezuela: Rhyming Cases

Iran and Venezuela represent two different shades of the same basic theory. Donald Trump distinguished himself in the Republican primary of 2015-2016, in part, by being willing to criticize the foreign invasions of his fellow Republican George W. Bush. His critique was, essentially, that Bush had set U.S. goals too expansively, leading the U.S. to sacrifice soldiers and resources on goals that did not directly benefit the U.S. A better strategy, in Trump’s view, was to limit U.S. goals to gaining direct benefits, while committing minimal resources to occupation. We can shorthand this as the “get out, take the oil” critique.

Trump’s policies in Iran and Venezuela put this critique into practice. In both countries, the Trump administration followed a period of negotiation with a decapitation strike. In both countries, the Trump administration has shown ambivalence about the final shape of the government in the aftermath of that decapitation. Venezuela is currently trending more toward a revised Bolivarian regime that the administration is working with, while in Iran the goal fluctuates between a complete regime change and renewed negotiations with parts of the old regime. Still, the administration is leaving itself plenty of maneuvering room to work with whoever bubbles to the top in both cases.

Trump’s objective in attacking in either of these countries is difficult to pin down. In Venezuela, the United States would supposedly get favorable oil concessions and a reduction of drugs and migrants by removing Maduro. As Javier Corrales notes, though, these goals are not served by the removal of Maduro and contradict each other. The United States can take an extractive approach to Venezuelan oil or work to reform the economy to stem the flow of migrants, but not both. This ambiguity has not cleared in the time since Maduro’s abduction. The $1.9 billion deal for Venezuelan oil signed by Trump and interim president Delcy Rodríguez is, according to Trump, paying into a fund that he will control “to ensure it is used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States!” How this money is used will be key to understanding who ultimately benefits from the Venezuela operation.

In Iran, too, the rhetoric is confused. The purpose of the strikes is to limit Iran’s nuclear capacity (which the previous U.S.-Israeli strikes has supposedly already done). It is to prevent Iran from striking the United States with long-ranged missiles (that don’t exist). It is to change the regime in Iran, but how this will benefit the United States is left completely to the imagination. 

In the absence of clear foreign policy objectives, it makes sense to instead look at domestic political objectives, where these operations appear to do much more for the administration. At a time when Epstein file releases are damaging Trump’s support among his last bastion of popular support, the operations seem calculated to appeal to his base. The tenor of government social media has changed entirely under the second Trump administration, with Homeland Security especially curating its content to “own the libs.” The Venezuelan adventure has been correctly identified as a continuation of this. It is an opportunity to deliver “entirely simulated conquests” and “make little videos and pictures to make them look manly and strong.” The same critiques can easily be leveled at the Iran strikes—that they are prioritizing the appearance of destruction over any real strategy.

That the operations are illegal and have little advanced planning is then part of their appeal. Despite his retrospective criticism of Iraq, Trump has tried to portray himself as embodying a muscular foreign policy, capable of striking his and his followers’ enemies at home and abroad. The domestic message of illegal strikes is: previous presidents refused to protect you by obeying international law, but I will do what I must to protect you.

The depiction of the operation by administration mouthpieces seems to confirm that a domestic message is at least one objective here. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was full of tough talk about how Maduro’s abduction sends a message to America’s enemies, quoting Biggie Smalls: “If you don’t know, now you know.” Media have been encouraged to run with the slogan FAFO (Fuck Around and Find Out) as a Trump “doctrine.” Even as the message to America’s enemies (and allies) is garbled, and what they will “Find Out” is unclear, the appearance of a tough foreign policy is being preserved.

The precedents: Qaddafi and Mosaddeq

If Trump’s goals are based purely on appearance, one could paint Venezuela a success of the Trump policy and Iran a failure. In Venezuela, Trump got the domestic appearance of strength and promoting U.S. interests without a long occupation. In Iran, he ran up against a leadership that would not work with him and a military that was able to maintain control over the Strait of Hormuz and immediately give lie to the idea of a quick US win. The day-to-day events of international politics and conflict, however, are unpredictable. It is possible that the situation in Venezuela could start looking much worse, and that the situation in Iran could start looking much better. In each case, however, it is unlikely for the Trump administration plan to succeed, and impossible for him to deliver on everything he has promised. To explain why, I will compare Trump’s adventurism not to the war he criticized in Iraq, but to former President Barack Obama’s intervention in Libya. Like Obama, Trump appears to think he has learned the lessons of Iraq. Like Obama, I think there are one or two more he could stand to learn.

In Libya, Obama intervened as the regime of Prime Minister Muammar Qaddafi appeared poised to brutally crush the pro-democracy movement in Benghazi. He was determined not to end up in another quagmire in the Middle East, so he did what the Bush administration had not. He enlisted the support of allies (including several Arab countries), he ensured that the U.N. Security Council was onboard, and he limited the scope of the intervention, aiming to prevent Qaddafi from bombing Benghazi from above. As the intervention continued, though, mission creep began to set in. Simply providing a no-fly zone promoted a stalemate on the ground, so the U.S military provided more active air support, striking at Libyan ground forces, finally leading to the capture and battlefield execution of Qaddafi by insurgents.

With the Qaddafi regime defeated, the Obama administration suddenly found itself responsible for a country that it had had no intention of governing. Libya’s insurgent groups had been neither unified nor strong enough to remove Qaddafi on their own, and now were neither unified nor strong enough to govern the country. Rather than allow himself to be drawn into an occupation, Obama kept the country at arm’s length, and it lapsed into division and chaos. Domestically, this hurt him the most after the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, which damaged the credibility of both Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. It also harmed U.S. credibility worldwide, made further cooperation with Russia and China unlikely, and brought chaos to Libya, its neighbors, and the migrants from the south that pass through it.

In Venezuela, the Trump administration theory was that they could switch Maduro for Delcy Rodríguez and have the appearance of a regime change without the mess. Their theory in Iran was that they could destabilize the regime and whatever comes next would be weaker and easier to coerce. The lesson they are failing to learn from Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan is that power is not something you exert once and move on. To coerce, you need to keep coercing. To prop up a government, you need to keep propping it up.

An authoritarian regime is more than a single person. It is a system with one person at the top. Removing the top of a regime and having the next person work with you only works if they are as able to fend off threats to their power as the previous incumbent. Removing an entire leadership and hoping something friendlier to you arises in its place only works if there is a viable base of support for that friendlier regime already. If these conditions do not hold, you have to either declare victory and move on, or keep exerting force to keep your favorable arrangement in place. This latter option is, in fact, not so different from an occupation.

In Venezuela, the administration appears to be able to work with Rodríguez. But what allies does Rodríguez have within the regime? Why were they not enough for her to move against Maduro alone? How will she maintain the support of the military and the party cadres in a government that has long defined itself as anti-American? How will she maintain the support of Venezuelans who support the removal of Maduro without running elections in which her party will be extremely disfavored? If any of these questions has an unfavorable answer for Rodríguez, the Trump administration’s position in Venezuela will be at risk, too, and will need more power to shore it up.

In Iran, the goal appears to have been to throw the country into chaos, with the hope that something friendlier than Khamenei would emerge. This did not happen. Iran’s government now is controlled by hardliners, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps appears as close to power as ever. Like Venezuela, Iran could take a turn, and things could look better for Trump. The regime could decide to make a deal, or it could indeed fall to a regime willing to make a deal. This would not solve the underlying problem, and the new “friendly” government would face the same problems that Rodríguez faces. A coalition that was not strong enough to challenge the previous Iranian government would then weaken itself through its association with the government that has consistently undermined Iranian security.

There is a reason why, when the U.S. has supported coups in the past, it has tried to work with individuals and groups with the ability to consolidate power on their own and to maintain plausible deniability. In one of the coups that had the most active CIA involvement, the 1953 coup in Iran, the U.S. (and U.K.) role was still mainly providing funding, organization, propaganda, and some covert operations, rather than troops to remove Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq and battle forces loyal to him. The Shah had his own forces, and at least the outward appearance when the coup was accomplished was that they had won the day on their own. Anything else would have made him a target for opponents inside and outside the regime. Of course, even this approach bought the US a mere 25 years before something worse than Mosaddeq displaced the Shah, but it was competently executed short-termism.

Opposing Trump in his own words

Because of the dangers inherent to Trump’s foreign policy, I think it is important to challenge the narrative set up by Miller, Hegseth, and others. The argument here is not between a moral foreign policy and an “America First” foreign policy. It is an argument between models of how Americans benefit from their foreign policy. It is worth arguing that spending more than $3.7 billion for a $1.9 billion oil deal is not a good deal for the American people. It is worth pointing out that losing fifteen U.S. lives (and counting) to end many more Iranian lives does not benefit Americans in any way. The monetary costs of the Iran operation are currently measured in the billions of dollars per day, plus of course between 0.2% and 1.3% of global GDP. Who in the U.S. is paying for the privilege of making Iranians’ lives worse? Not Trump. 

This is before we consider the possibility that chaos in these countries has the potential to harm Americans even further. The most evocative comparison is Afghanistan, where U.S. support for militant groups in the wake of a Soviet invasion allowed for the genesis of both Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and Al-Qaeda was later able to use its relative safe harbor in Afghanistan to plan the September 11, 2001 attacks against the U.S. A country in chaos filled with good reason to hate the United States has all sorts of pathways to blow back onto Americans. 

The lesson for us in the opposition, then, is taken from Republicans’ approach to Benghazi. You do not have to hand it to Trump for getting rid of a “bad guy.” You do not have to caveat that, of course, Maduro and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei were not good leaders. We are in an era of realpolitik where we should not care who is a bad guy or not, right? So hit them on the costs, human and material, paid for this farce of a foreign policy. Press for where the Venezuelan oil money is going, how no one seemed to think about the Strait of Hormuz until it was already closed, what steps were taken to avoid casualties in the inevitable wave of Iranian rocket fire. And again and again: who is paying for this? Who is benefiting?

Ultimately, of all the posturing and Trump doctrines, I think it is FAFO that will stand the test of time. The pull of its irony is too strong: the world’s foremost practitioners of Fucking Around admonishing the rest of the world not to Fuck Around. While they control every branch of government, our ability to end this behavior is limited. What we can do, as we appeal to the American people to end this regime, is to present the consequences in stark terms. After so much Fucking Around, someone is going to Find Out. Will it be Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, and Donald Trump? Or will it be you?

Featured image is "Mission Accomplished banner on the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72)," Photographer's Mate 3rd Class Juan E. Diaz 2003. Public Domain.