Borrowed War, Busted Democracy

No strategy, no end game, no accountability. All hail, King Donald.

Fans of the Trump-Netanyahu blitzkrieg against Iran are working hard to extract a strategic triumph from what increasingly looks like a dangerously improvised war.

Conservative commentators like Bret Stephens of The New York Times argue that the strikes may yet emasculate Tehran and reinforce Israel’s long-term deterrence capabilities. Veteran interventionist Elliott Abrams, who once championed both the Iran-Contra misadventure and the invasion of Iraq, has joined the Hallelujah Chorus, predicting that sustained pressure will likely wipe Iran’s clerical crazies off the map.

More cautious observers have entertained the possibility that something positively constructive might emerge from the turmoil. The venerable Times columnist Thomas Friedman has suggested that weakening Iran might ultimately temper Israeli politics, perhaps strengthening moderates who have grown uneasy with Bibi’s increasingly uncompromising leadership.

That is the optimistic interpretation now circulating among the war’s defenders.

But before we begin celebrating the campaign as a geopolitical masterstroke, or bow at Trump’s feet as the architect of some new Middle Eastern order, it is worth paying close attention to an unusually candid remark from within his own inner circle.

Several days ago, Secretary of State Marco Rubio hinted that Washington had rushed toward confrontation partly because Israeli leaders might otherwise have struck Iran unilaterally to our detriment. If Israel had thrown such a punch without warning, Rubio explained, American troops and civilians scattered across the region might suddenly have found themselves exposed to retaliation.

The remark may have been intended simply as a pragmatic explanation of American caution. Instead, it revealed something more unsettling. The United States hasn’t been leading events. It has been scrambling to keep up with them.

Rubio and other officials later tried to soften the implication that Israeli strategy is driving American policy. Yet the impression has been reinforced by the administration’s striking inability to articulate a clear and consistent rationale for the campaign.

At one moment, the White House claimed the United States had acted to eliminate Iran’s nuclear capability—an odd assertion given Trump’s earlier insistence that previous Israeli-American strikes had already obliterated that capability. At another moment, officials invoked Iran’s long history of supporting attacks against Americans and threatening its neighbors. At still other moments, they framed the operation as a necessary demonstration of American resolve in a dangerous region.

These explanations arrived in a blizzard of overlapping justifications that seemed less designed to persuade than to pre-empt second-guessing. But in the process the administration began to sound strikingly like Netanyahu and his allies in Israel’s hard-right political camp.

And that resemblance points to the deeper problem.

For more than three decades Netanyahu has issued the same warning with remarkable consistency: Iran is on the verge of acquiring a nuclear weapon that threatens Israel, the United States, and the civilized world.

The timetable is always short; the danger, always existential.

Netanyahu advanced this argument repeatedly while campaigning against the 2015 nuclear agreement negotiated by Barack Obama and the other world powers under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. He insisted the agreement would not stop Iran from obtaining a bomb but would merely delay the inevitable while legitimizing Tehran’s ambitions.

He returned to the same claim while pressing Donald Trump to abandon the agreement in 2018. And he has revived it repeatedly whenever seeking American backing for confrontational policies toward Iran.

Perhaps Netanyahu sincerely believes the warning each time he delivers it. Israel sits within range of multiple hostile actors, and no Israeli leader can afford complacency about potential threats.

But a politics built around perpetual nuclear alarm also serves another function. A nation constantly told that it stands on the edge of annihilation cannot easily pause to reconsider its deeper political dilemmas. Above all, it cannot easily confront the unresolved question at the heart of Israel’s long-term future: Palestinian self-determination.

When national attention is fixed on an existential external threat, the contradictions posed by Israel’s continued control over Palestinian territories become easier to finesse. The prospect of a two-state solution, already complicated by the steady expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, slips further and further into the background.

Permanent emergency has a way of freezing political choices.

The military doctrine that accompanies this politics of emergency is equally stark.
Israeli strategists have long prioritized and practiced what is known as the Dahiya Doctrine, named after a southern Beirut neighborhood devastated during Israel’s 2006 war with Hezbollah. The doctrine rests on a blunt calculation: deterrence is achieved not merely by defeating enemy fighters but by destroying the environment in which those fighters operate.

The goal is not simply to eliminate militants. It is to devastate the infrastructure and civilian systems that sustain them. In effect, the strategy seeks to destroy not only the sharks but the pond in which they swim.

Applied in places such as Lebanon and Gaza, the doctrine has produced massive destruction of civilian infrastructure—power grids, transportation systems, residential neighborhoods. The overwhelming force is meant to send a message so unmistakable that future adversaries will think twice before challenging Israeli power.

But strategies that rely on wall-to-wall devastation carry their own strategic costs. The destruction visited on Gaza since the October 7 attacks has doubtless eliminated many Hamas operatives. Yet it also risks radicalizing a new generation of Palestinians who will grow up seeing Israel not as a neighbor but as an implacable enemy.

The same dynamic could unfold in Iran.

Many Iranians may quietly welcome relief from the clerical regime that has ruled them for decades. But that goodwill could evaporate if their country is left shattered and unstable. A weakened Iran might quickly become a chaotic arena of competing militias, opportunistic warlords, and black-market traders eager to profit from the remnants of the country’s once-sophisticated military and nuclear infrastructure.

In such an environment, materials or expertise connected to Iran’s nuclear program could easily drift into the hands of actors far more reckless than the regime that previously controlled them.

And there is another potential consequence that Washington appears reluctant to acknowledge.

If confrontation with Iran is perceived as a decisive victory for Israel, it could, despite columnist Tom Friedman’s fondest hopes, strengthen the Israeli political forces most determined to block creation of a Palestinian state. Indeed, a triumphant Israeli right wing would have even less incentive to compromise if it believes its strategy of overwhelming force has once again neutralized Israel’s enemies.

Yet the possibility of a two-state solution remains the one diplomatic objective capable of rallying moderate Arab governments behind a more stable regional order. Saudi Arabia and other key Arab states have repeatedly signaled that meaningful progress toward Palestinian statehood is the price of deeper normalization with Israel.

By embracing Netanyahu’s confrontational regional strategy while allowing the Palestinian issue to drift further out of reach, Washington risks undermining the very diplomatic framework that could ultimately stabilize the Middle East.

The result would be a conflict that wanders endlessly from one battlefield to another, a geopolitical nomadism in which each victory simply reveals the next enemy waiting over the horizon.

But even these dangers may not represent the most serious risk.

Whatever the strategic upsides or downsides of the current confrontation with Iran, they pale alongside another possibility: that Donald Trump emerges from this episode convinced that he is justified in playing God with the nation’s war powers.

The Constitution deliberately divides authority over war. Article I grants Congress the power to declare it precisely because the founders feared the temptations of executive adventurism. They understood that a single leader armed with unchecked military authority could easily transform a republic into something resembling a monarchy.

Trump has repeatedly displayed an instinct for unilateral action that treats constitutional limits as inconveniences rather than safeguards.

If he comes away from this confrontation persuaded that he can launch wars whenever he sees fit—without consulting Congress and without constitutional restraint—then whatever victories may have been won abroad will come at a far higher price at home.

For in that case the ultimate casualty of this war will not be Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

It will be the American constitutional system itself.