Cutting Off the Head of the Snake

Or maybe the Gordian Knot

November 4, 1979 — almost 47 years ago — Iran seized the American embassy in Tehran and held its staff hostage. Ever since then, American presidents have struggled with what to do.

Jimmy Carter temporized for many months, even as ABC’s newly created Nightline — a nighttime news show created specially to cover the hostage crisis — opened every night with “America held hostage, day XXX.” His wife, First Lady Rosalynn Carter, finally prodded him to do something. The “something” turned out to be a shambolic rescue mission that ended in disaster.

President Reagan intimidated the mullahs a bit, but never seriously retaliated for the Beirut barracks bombing that killed over 200 Marines along with over a score of other service personnel. George H.W. Bush invaded Iraq but left the mullahs largely alone. Bill Clinton did nothing of substance. George W. Bush had a chance to bring the Iranians to heel after the conquest of Iraq, but inexplicably failed to press his advantage. Barack Obama was, basically, complicit in their nuclear program, to the point of famously sending them pallets of cash totaling over a billion dollars.

President Trump, on the other hand, killed General Soleimani and told other Iranian leaders that they could be next. And now they are next.

So what have we learned, and what’s likely to happen in the future?

Well, first, with the capture of Maduro and now this, we’ve learned that our military can do things no one else can. We seized a leader of a hostile nation from his largest military base and brought him to custody without losing a single American life. Now we’ve killed the single biggest threat to American interests in the Mideast, along with much of his senior leadership, again without losing a single American life.

Why didn’t we do this before? And why could we do it now? The reason we can do it now is mostly leadership. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth quickly prioritized precision and lethality in the military; President Trump was willing to use the military in ways prior presidents were not.

Why didn’t we do this before? Part of that is because the foreign policy establishment, like the domestic policy establishment, doesn’t exist to solve problems. It exists to manage those problems in ways that keep its members cushily employed. To, in Myres McDougal’s words, “maintain tensions at a level short of unacceptable violence.”

Trump, on the other hand, wants to solve things, even if it involves inflicting unacceptable violence on the enemy. Also, he regards our enemies as actual enemies, not as “foreign colleagues” or “partners in peace.” To quote author Keith Laumer, “there’s nothing as peaceful as a dead troublemaker.” Khamenei is now peaceful.

In fact, Trump’s approach across the board, which has brought him success after success in his first 13 months back in office, is to solve problems the way the guys in the bar say they would do it. Too much illegal immigration? Close the border and deport the illegals. Problems with Iran? Kill their leaders and encourage a revolution. Venezuela shipping drugs and gangs to the U.S.? Capture their leader and encourage his successor to cooperate or share his fate. You can just do things.

The thing is, though, that there’s a subtlety in this approach. Just doing things turns out to work. But if you take a step back from these actions of Trump’s, the big picture shows a pretty coherent strategy. Trump wants to weaken China without going to war with China. He has now cut off two major suppliers of oil to the PRC, which produces hardly any oil of its own. (It’s worse than that, because China wasn’t paying for that oil with dollars, and now it will need dollars to buy oil elsewhere.) That applies a squeeze to an already squeezed CCP, and will make Xi’s position, domestically and internationally, weaker. Also the military excellence recently displayed has to inspire second, third, and fourth thoughts about invading Taiwan.

Trump’s tactics typically have two characteristics: He goes after his opponents’ source of sustenance (usually that means money, but not always) and he accomplishes more than one thing at a time. In neutralizing Iran, Trump accomplishes a lot of things. First, of course, he neutralizes a major hostile regional threat.

But second, he cuts the ground out from under what’s left of Hamas and Hezbollah. He also shuts off the pipeline of cash that was being used to bribe politicians and journalists in Europe (the Iranians have basically admitted that they do that) and support various NGOs and the like that serve anti-American and anti-Israeli ends. Iran has been a major sponsor of terrorism around the world; that will end.

With Iran gone (and India, thanks to tariffs, eager to be on our team) the threat of the BRICS has been sharply reduced. Brazil under Lula isn’t friendly, but isn’t a power house. Russia and China don’t like us but China needs oil and Russia is broke and mired in an endless and ruinous war of its own devising.

With Iranians free to say what they think of the mullahs’ regime, he also delegitimizes the left’s narrative that fundamentalist Islam somehow has some sort of anti-colonial virtue. In fact, the mullahs ran Iran as a Persian colony of an Arab ideology. The Iranian public is well aware of this, and will be saying that a lot.

And if he’s able to see a new pro-American government in Iran (distinctly likely) we’ll have a regional ally that will encourage the Arab states, currently friendly to us and Israel out of fear of Iran, to remain friendly to us and Israel out of a different sort of fear of Iran.

Why this could happen, of course, stems from another Trump strategy, that of promoting domestic energy independence. With the United States now the world’s largest producer of oil and gas, we weren’t dependent on the region as we used to be. In fact, closing the strait of Hormuz now only helps us by driving up the prices of our oil. Building up American oil production has made us strategically and economically much stronger.

What’s funny is that many parts of the popular press, and of the academic foreign policy community, continue to portray Trump as a strutting toddler who careens from impulse to impulse in an utterly undisciplined and unthinking fashion. Not so much.

So what’s next? Well, the attacks we’ve seen so far seem pretty clearly designed to decapitate and disrupt the Iranian leadership to prevent a response to popular revolt. I strongly suspect that we, and the Israelis, have had people helping Iranian patriots prepare such a revolt for a while. Most likely outcome is the overthrow of the current government, followed perhaps by a transitional government headed by Reza Pahlavi, the heir to the monarchy. He has talked about serving as head of a constitutional monarchy, which is not unlikely, and would be a huge improvement.

Freed from the mullahs, I would expect Iran, with a young population eager to do better, to grow rapidly. In fact, I would expect an economic boom. After a year or two to settle down, tourism will grow. I think many companies might want to invest, particularly with encouragement from the Trump Administration.

With Israel tied to the Arab countries via the Abraham Accords, and with Iran brought back into the civilized world, Trump will truly have achieved peace in the Mideast, which has been the publicly-stated dream of every presidential administration in my lifetime. With crime plummeting and the economy improving at home, and threats abroad removed, Trump should be a shoo-in for a midterm win. This is especially true because the combination of DOGE cuts to taxpayer funded media propaganda via USAID, etc., with the purchase of media organizations by Trump ally Larry Ellison, means that the left’s biggest ally and weapon, the mainstream media, will be sharply weakened too.

All of this leaves me unaccustomedly optimistic. It could still all go south, of course; it always can. But far from being a rampaging toddler, Trump seems to have thought things through during his four years in the wilderness. We may all be better off as a result.