Last week, Michael Doran wrote for Tablet about what the Iran war’s critics have been getting wrong—in the immediate aftermath of the Islamabad peace talks collapsing and President Trump announcing a naval blockade of Iranian ports. In the week since, Iran has opened, then re-closed, the Strait of Hormuz; its navy has fired on commercial vessels attempting passage; and the U.S. has seized an Iranian-flagged cargo ship in the Gulf of Oman. The two-week ceasefire expires this week, and a second round of talks remains unconfirmed, with Iranian officials denying any agreement to negotiate.
Contrary to a tide of commentary from both the progressive left and isolationist right, Doran argues that the American-Israeli campaign against Iran was the foreseeable consequence of decades of failed diplomacy. He dissects, one by one, seven myths that have shaped opinion on the war. With the situation still unresolved, his argument is as important now as when he first wrote it. And so we’re republishing it in our pages today.
—The Editors
Donald Trump’s actions in the Middle East continually surprise the foreign-policy establishment and the media elite. According to commentators on both the right and the left, the reason is that Trump is a megalomaniac—or, as Jon Stewart and former U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan recently agreed on The Daily Show, perhaps addicted to cocaine.
Yet while Trump has repeatedly defied the Beltway consensus on Iran and its allies over the past year and a half, none of the dire consequences that influential commentators predicted have come to pass. World War III hasn’t erupted. The global economy hasn’t collapsed. Instead, the Iranian leadership is dead or decapitated, its nuclear weapons program is buried beneath mountains of rubble, and most of its navy lies at the bottom of the sea. While the loss of 13 U.S. servicemen is a serious matter, it is hardly the thousands of dead and wounded that were routinely predicted as the consequence of any major U.S. action. Israel still exists. So do Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait, along with their oil reserves.
Trump has inflicted heavy punishment in return for relatively light consequences, but pundits insist that a masterful Iran is dictating events. Tehran’s “successful” war-fighting tactics supposedly forced Trump to accept a ceasefire. Onlookers were then baffled when the United States walked away from talks in Islamabad and took steps to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, to the strategic detriment of China and the benefit of U.S. energy producers.
