On Trump's War

And Strategic Empathy

For my adult life, American foreign policy toward Iran revolved around a single issue: nuclear weapons. Television pundits, Presidents, and a parade of flag-level military officials warned that the Islamic Republic could never be allowed to obtain a bomb. Every sanction package, every covert operation, and every military threat was justified by the same premise: the nightmare scenario was a nuclear Iran.

But what, really, is the point of having nuclear weapons?

Since 1962, when the term Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was coined, strategists in all nuclear-armed nations have reached the same conclusion: these are not offensive weapons. They are defensive. They give the nation-state the ability to ensure its own survival. The cost of obtaining them is a calculated risk where the payoff is permanent immunity from outside threats. All nations that have created a nuclear capability since the US-USSR inception have done so under this same reasoning. The question currently is this: Is Iran operating under that same logic, or is it seeking such weaponry for offensive purposes to attack Israel, knowing it would lead to a war of annihilation, which it would immediately lose?

Racist tropes enable moronic thinking here. 72 virgins and all that.

The irony of Trump’s idiotic war of choice is that, if we exercise a little strategic empathy, we have to ultimately conclude that Iran never needed a nuclear weapon to deter the United States or to impose costs on the West. All it ever needed was the Strait of Hormuz.

Roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil passes through that channel. For decades, American policymakers treated Iran’s nuclear ambitions as the decisive strategic problem while largely overlooking the reality that Tehran already possessed a powerful lever over the global economy. The Ayatollahs did not need to threaten New York or Washington. They only needed to threaten numbers on the pumps at your local WaWa.

It reminds me of a quote often attributed to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev during the Cold War. Berlin, he said, was “the testicles of the West.” Whenever he wanted to make the West scream, he could squeeze Berlin. Today, the equivalent pressure point is energy. It is the Strait of Hormuz. It is the ability of a hostile regional power to create economic pain thousands of miles away.

The global economy remains astonishingly vulnerable to disruptions in energy supply. Financial markets react instantly. Insurance costs surge and the super tankers stop. Gasoline prices become political issues overnight. The modern world runs on energy, and energy still runs through geographic choke points.

Meanwhile, China is racing ahead on solar and the other renewables that are the new nukes, in that independent, sustainable energy assures a nation cannot be threatened with this new economic version of Mutually Assured Destruction.

If the objective was to weaken Iran, it is difficult to see how military confrontation accomplished it. We wiped out senior leadership of aging mullahs and handed the keys to the fresh young faces that never held the internal political legitimacy their fathers earned by standing up to the Great Satan and holding American hostages for 444 days. We just gave them that legitimacy for another 50 years. The Islamic Republic has survived revolutions, sanctions, isolation, covert action, cyberattacks, and proxy wars. It has survived Democratic presidents and Republican presidents. It has survived predictions of imminent collapse for nearly half a century, and now it just walked out of the ring like the end of Rocky where Stallone, bloody and battered after 15 rounds with Apollo Creed, yells for Adrian.

Trump just guaranteed sequels.

This is a reason the Ayatollahs have remained in power for so long. It is not because they have governed particularly well or delivered prosperity. It is because they built their legitimacy around resistance. Standing up to the United States is not a side project for the Islamic Republic; it is the foundation of its political identity.

Every time Washington turns the conflict into a test of wills, Tehran gains an opportunity to reinforce the narrative that has sustained the regime since 1979. The leadership can present itself as the guardian of Iranian sovereignty against foreign pressure. That message resonates over Iranian kitchen tables.

Trump just strengthened the men he hoped to weaken.

For many Americans, especially veterans of Iraq, that prospect is bitter. Thousands of soldiers and Marines spent years confronting Iranian influence across the region. Men drove the roads around Baghdad worrying about explosively formed penetrators supplied by Iranian networks. Intelligence officers tracked Iranian-backed militias. The struggle against Tehran’s ambitions shaped entire careers.

Yet after decades of effort, the Islamic Republic remains. More than that, it may emerge with a renewed claim to nationalist legitimacy. Ordinary Iranians will now conclude that their government stood firm against American bombs, and this military action may have accomplished the opposite of its intended purpose.

The political consequences are already extending beyond Iran into MAGA. The assumption that support for Israel automatically unites the American right has always been universal, but recent events have exposed fractures that can no longer be ignored. A movement built around skepticism of foreign intervention does not abide the neoconservative belief that American tactical and operational military prowess ensures strategic ends.

If Joe Rogan gets it, MAGA has real problems.

For Donald Trump, his supporters have long argued that he represents a break from the interventionist consensus that produced Iraq and Afghanistan. But this was an “own goal,” through and through. The result of this confrontation is a more secure Islamic Republic, higher oil prices, and a more unstable region. Iran now knows that once it obtains nuclear weapons, it will forever be able to “squeeze the testicles” of the United States, and we cannot stop them.