The Stunning Lack of Strategy Against Iran

The bizarre combination of emotion and improvisation is unprecedented in the long and lamentable history of warfare.

In his famous treatise On War, Carl von Clausewitz’s famously remarked that one should never start a war without first saying to himself what he wants to achieve with war and how he wants to achieve it. Both the goal and the means of reaching it should be understood and defined as carefully and realistically as possible before one starts a war.

I suspect the guys currently in charge of US military affairs are not capable of understanding von Clausewitz because they do not share his underlying assumption that it is impossible to make sense of war—and therefore to wage it in a sensible way—unless one regards the enemy as another human with intelligible interests and wishes. For, as von Clausewitz defined it, war is the act of using violence to get another man to bend to your will.

If you have no concept of what the other man wants, and nor do you even care to know what he wants, you will necessarily have a hard time getting him to bend to your will. If you understand violence as the mere elimination of a rival—that is, as a titillating spectacle such as one sees in a Tarantino film—you will fail to use it effectively against a determined adversary.

The Trump administration strikes me as having no concept of the Iranian enemy. On the one hand, we are told that they are a bunch of suicidal religious nuts that hate America. On the other hand, we are told that they will yield to economic and financial pressures exerted by Scott Bessent because, after all, what rational people wouldn’t yield to the coercion of being impoverished?

The Trump administration began the war by declaring the demand for “Unconditional Surrender”—as though irrational and suicidal religious nuts would consider for a millisecond surrendering unconditionally to the United States and Israel after they murdered the nation’s supreme religious leader and four of his family members, including his daughter and granddaughter, in the opening bombing raid they launched in the midst of what were represented as diplomatic negotiations.

Since then, Trump, his weirdo Secretary of War, and his inept military advisors have trotted out a series of improvised “strategies” that are all variations of punishing Iran into submission instead of beating Iran into submission on the battlefield. The latter would require sending at least 500,000 young men—and probably a lot more than that—to invade Iran and subdue its military. Consider that the US invasion force in Iraq in 2003 was 150,000 men, and that Iran is almost four times the size of Iraq, with twice the population, and a difficult mountainous terrain that starkly contrasts with the great plains of Iraq.

Back to Carl von Clausewitz. There was a time not so long ago when civilized people who wished to pursue a career in the military or in the foreign service were familiar his seminal work On War (1832), in which he famously declared that “war is merely the continuation of policy by other means.”

Carl von Clausewitz

As Clausewitz understood it—and as we should understand it—warfare is not an isolated enterprise, but an instrument of statecraft that is ALWAYS subordinate to political objectives and inextricably bound with diplomacy.

Diplomacy is the primary means by which states pursue their interests peacefully, employing persuasion, alliances, threats, and compromise. When diplomatic efforts reach an impasse, war becomes the adjunct of those efforts. War does not replace political conversation; it merely backs it up with force.

“The political object is the goal; war is the means of reaching it,” Clausewitz asserted. Thus, he rejected the mindless conception of war as an end in itself, and he warned against allowing the “military point of view” to dominate the enterprise.

Armies exist to advance the statesman’s objectives, not to pursue unchecked escalation or total destruction for its own sake. In the “trinity” of war—that is, violence and hatred (the people), military actions (the commander and army), and reason (the government)—it is essential for a rational government to direct the other elements to prevent war from devolving into senseless destruction.

Clausewitz observed that war is fraught with uncertainty, and that statesmen must therefore use war with restraint and careful calculation. Victory on the battlefield is only useful insofar as it translates into diplomatic advantage at the negotiating table.

It seems to me that Clausewitz’s observations are as true today as they ever were. And yet, as we have seen in the West’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine—and now in the US war against Iran—the so-called “leaders” of the West wage immensely destructive wars with no clear concept of how warfare could result in achieving rational and realistic political objectives.

Our politicians claim that diplomatic relations aren’t possible with our adversaries because, they say, our adversaries are subhuman and depraved. Increasingly, this strikes me as psychological projection. Many of our leaders remind me of accounts of jealous men and women who are themselves inclined to infidelity.

The European heads of state refuse to speak with Vladimir Putin. Now, in the latest war against Iran, we hear Christian Zionist fanatics— in the grip of eschatological fantasies—proclaiming that we cannot negotiate with the Iranians because they are Islamic religious fanatics.

And yet, when we watch interviews of Vladimir Putin or Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, we are presented with men who seem for more calm, composed, reasonable, and articulate than their counterparts in the West. They also comport themselves with far more dignity and decorum.