On Feb. 28, the U.S. and Israel launched a massive air campaign against the state of Iran. The next day, President Trump announced that one of the airstrikes had killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who had ruled Iran for the past 47 years. Nobody should be sad that Khamenei is gone; the man was a brutal dictator and the world is a better place without him in it. However, killing Khamenei and plunging the region into war may have been a mistake.
There is a saying that “the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t.” Nowhere is this more true than in the realm of foreign policy. Khamenei may have been an oppressive authoritarian and a sworn enemy of America, but his regime was at least somewhat predictable. He would repeatedly try to restart Iran’s nuclear program, but his main goal was always to get his regime the best deal possible in exchange for ending the program. Despite his hardline public comments, he was always most interested in preserving his own power; that’s why Iran’s responses to previous U.S. and Israeli strikes were always largely symbolic. In one instance, he even warned the U.S. which bases would be targeted. That base was then evacuated, his attack hit an empty building, and he got his photos to run on state media without any harm to U.S. troops or any further risk of escalation.
Compare that mild, largely symbolic response to the one Iran launched after Khamenei’s death. U.S. bases and Israeli cities have been under a near-constant bombardment of drone and missile attacks since the war started last week. Additionally, Iran has targeted other Gulf countries that played no part in the U.S. or Israeli strikes. The Iranian retaliation has already killed seven U.S. service members stationed in the Middle East, and the war is costing us a billion dollars per day.
After successfully eliminating Khamenei, the administration should have had a plan for who would lead Iran. They didn’t. President Donald Trump was asked what he thought the worst-case scenario for the Iran war was. He said, “I guess the worst case would be we do this, and then somebody takes over who’s as bad as the previous person, right? That could happen. We don’t want that to happen.” These fears seemed to be largely an afterthought.
The U.S. has been attempting regime change in the Middle East for decades. Not once has it gone well. In Iraq, for instance, we successfully defeated the authoritarian regime of Saddam Hussein, but had no plan for a post-regime Iraq. The power vacuum that this created was eventually filled by the terrorist group ISIS, forcing the U.S. to remain involved in the war for a decade after Hussein’s fall. In Libya, similar to the current Iran war, the U.S. attempted to impose regime change using only air power, rather than troops on the ground. A U.S. airstrike on the convoy of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, the country’s longtime dictator, led to his death and the end of his regime. What followed Gaddafi’s death, however, was not freedom and democracy for the Libyan people, but was instead a deadly period of civil war to determine who would control the country. In Afghanistan, the U.S. invaded in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attack by al-Qaeda. The goal was to defeat the Taliban regime, which was harboring al-Qaeda’s members. The war lasted for 20 years, with a total cost of more than two trillion dollars and the deaths of 2,461 U.S. service members. American attempts to support the local government failed, and the end result of that decades-long war was the Taliban returning to power. Given this history, the possibility that the Iran war could end with a regime that is just as bad as the previous one should have been something the administration planned for before launching this war, not only after a question from a reporter a week in.
There is also the economic cost of this war. The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow passage separating the Persian Gulf from the Indian Ocean. At its narrowest point, it is only 24 miles across, with the area deep enough for large oil tankers to navigate being even narrower. Around 20% of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) passes through the Strait of Hormuz. This creates a critical chokepoint for the world economy: If the Strait gets shut down, a global energy crisis ensues. Iran has threatened to close the Strait during previous conflicts, but has never actually done so; the Iranian economy is also largely reliant on oil exports through the Strait. This time, however, Iran took the unprecedented step of declaring the Strait closed and threatening to attack any vessels passing through it, while simultaneously attacking oil production facilities in neighboring countries. The result was that many Middle Eastern countries were forced to halt or slow production, causing oil prices to spike to $120 a barrel, with the potential to rise even higher. A decision by the International Energy Agency during an emergency meeting to release 400 million barrels from its reserves has temporarily lowered the price back to around $90 per barrel, but if the Strait of Hormuz does not reopen soon, the price will go back up.
Iran has also threatened to place mines in the Strait of Hormuz. Naval mines can be deployed from even a regular fishing boat, so the U.S. destruction of the Iranian navy does not prevent this. If Iran does decide to mine the Strait, it will take years for the U.S. Navy to remove them, and shippers’ confidence may never be fully restored. The result would be to completely cut off the world from Gulf oil, causing an energy crisis far greater than the 1970s one. Iran has never closed the Strait before the war due to their own reliance on oil exports passing through the Strait. However, U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iranian oil infrastructure and export facilities threaten to change this calculus. If Iran is unable to export oil through the Strait due to these strikes, their incentive to avoid mining the Strait may disappear altogether, resulting in devastating effects for the U.S. and global economies. Naval operations to remove any mines in the Strait would require protection from Iranian attack from the coast, likely in the form of a ground invasion of the Hormozgan province in Southern Iran, which would require roughly 44,000 troops to fully secure.
The war in Iran also benefits other U.S. adversaries. Outside of the Gulf region, one of the world’s largest oil-producing countries is Russia. Russian oil sales provide funding for the ongoing invasion of Ukraine. The spike in oil prices means more money for Putin’s war machine. The current administration seems to be okay with this. They’ve even provided India with a waiver to the stringent sanctions regime targeting Russian oil to provide relief from the high prices caused by the Iran war. If the war continues to raise the price of oil, other countries may turn to Russian oil as well, further undermining our support for Ukrainian self-defense. China, our other major adversary, also benefits from the ongoing war. Although it is true that they relied on Iranian oil to power their economy, they easily made up for that loss by replacing it with imports from Russia. Meanwhile, the U.S. has shifted key assets from the Pacific to the Middle East to be used in the Iran war. This includes THAAD missile systems, which are necessary to defend Taiwan and South Korea from attacks by China or North Korea. The USS Abraham Lincoln Carrier Group was moved from the South China Sea to the Arabian Sea in preparation for this current war. These shifts leave our key allies vulnerable and reduce our ability to deter a Chinese attack on Taiwan—risking a much larger and more costly war.
Further complicating the war is the matter of Iran’s nuclear stockpile. Last June, the U.S. and Israel carried out strikes on three of Iran’s nuclear sites. However, Iran is still in possession of approximately 440 kilograms of 60% highly enriched uranium, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). This is enough to create 11 nuclear weapons, if enriched to 90%. One of the Trump administration’s stated goals for the war is to eliminate Iran’s nuclear program. The U.S. has already tried to do so through airstrikes, but has not been successful. Further complicating this objective is the fact that the IAEA believes that around 200 kilograms of the highly enriched uranium is being stored at the Isfahan nuclear site. Unlike Iran’s other two major nuclear sites, Fordow and Natanz, which are located deep in the mountains and in a small city of about 12,000, respectively, Isfahan is located in Iran’s second-largest city with a population of two million people. Securing that uranium would require a massive ground operation with thousands of military personnel operating deep in Iranian territory. Meanwhile, we don’t even know where the rest of the uranium is being stored.
On Monday, March 9, Trump declared that the U.S. was “ahead of our initial timeline” of four to five weeks “by a lot.” The next day was the heaviest in terms of U.S. strikes on Iran. The Iranian nuclear program has not been obliterated. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed, potentially for the foreseeable future if Iran decides to deploy mines. The Iranian regime chose Khamenei’s son, Mujtaba Khamenei, to replace his father as Supreme Leader, a situation very similar to the one that Trump just a few days ago declared would be the potential “worst-case” scenario. Achieving even the simplest of Trump’s declared objectives requires large-scale ground operations. Given these facts, the Iran war looks less like the “highly successful” operation that Trump claims it is, and more like another Middle East “forever war” that he promised to keep us out of.
