Almost four weeks into the US-Israel war with Iran, Donald Trump has offered contradictory assessments of the conflict’s trajectory. On 20 March, the US president announced that he was considering “winding down” the war as it was “getting very close” to achieving its objectives. The following day, he warned Tehran that it had 48 hours to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, or the US would “obliterate” Iran’s power plants, “STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST.”
By Monday (23 March), Trump had suspended his ultimatum, claiming that the US had held “very good and productive” talks with Tehran, which Iranian officials promptly denied. Twenty-four hours later, Trump declared, “nobody knows who to talk to, we have killed everybody,” but also that the US was “talking to the right people” in Iran. Meanwhile, the Pentagon was reportedly preparing to deploy around 3,000 soldiers from the US Army’s elite 82nd Airborne Division to the region, where they will join approximately 2,200 Marines who are expected to arrive in the coming days from Japan, bolstering speculation that Trump is weighing a possible ground offensive in Iran.
Phillips O’Brien, professor of strategic studies at the University of St Andrews and author, most recently, of War and Power: Who Wins Wars – And Why, spoke to the New Statesman about Trump’s unpalatable options in Iran, the parallels with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and what this war is revealing about US military capabilities.
(This conversation has been lightly edited.)
Katie Stallard: What are the most important lessons we’ve learned from this war so far about US military capabilities?
Phillips O’Brien: Well, we’ve learned that they’ve got to plan things a lot better. If you are going to use military force, it is incumbent upon you to have a plan – a set of strategic goals that you’re trying to meet and at least a coherent idea of how you might get there. Looking at what we’ve seen, I don’t think we can say that this operation was started with any idea about what would happen. The United States was not prepared for the Strait of Hormuz to be closed; thought this operation would be over relatively soon; and believed that by decapitating the regime militarily, this would get them a strategic result.
But military power has real limitations. It is great at blowing things up, but it is not very good at putting anything in its place. Military power gives you the ability to destroy, but it doesn’t give you the ability to create, and I think the US is being faced with that dilemma right now.
I hear some parallels there with the Russian approach to the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine. Is that a fair comparison to make?
That’s a very fair comparison. In both cases, we have rulers who are supremely confident in their own ability to make decisions. Both Trump and Putin are very arrogant people who believe that they understand things and that their instincts are right. They started these military campaigns based on the assumption that they would overwhelm the enemy. That was very much what Putin was doing, he really did believe there would be a parade in Kyiv a few weeks down the road – that this would be over and Ukraine wouldn’t fight, or certainly not fight effectively.
It seems that Trump believed that the Iranians were really doomed, that they couldn’t strike back against the United States, and that if he demonstrated awesome military power, the Iranian regime would be replaced by something more amenable to his needs. So in both cases, these leaders talked themselves into positions that they wanted to take. And I think we can say in both cases, they disregarded advice they didn’t want to hear. Some in Putin’s inner circle, at least from what we believe, were not in favour of that invasion. Clearly there were elements of the US military who understood the risks that were being run [in Iran], but in both cases the leaders disregarded those risks.
You’ve studied the processes through which countries go to war, and how those wars are fought, so how does this happen on a systemic level, despite these leaders presumably having access to good advice and brilliant strategists?
This is slightly destabilizing to the way international relations have been taught. We like to talk about states as if there is something called “the state”, which makes a decision based on rational discussion or debates amongst bureaucracies that come up with a considered opinion, and act in the state’s perceived national interest. I think that has made states’ behavior seem too similar, as though most states behave in a relatively similar fashion, and we can say now that this is probably a largely artificial view. What we really see in many of these situations is leaders relying on themselves, or a very small group of advisors, making decisions that they personally like and personally justify, but which are very hard to connect to any national interest.
What was the national interest for Russia invading Ukraine? It’s very tenuous. What is the national interest of the United States in bombing Iran. Again, it seems quite tangential, and the US government can’t articulate a consistent national interest. So I think we have to accept that this is a far more unstable and capricious process than we often like to think.
Is this a new development or do we just have a certain group of leaders coming together at the moment? What is the historical context?
Well, we might say this is actually going back to a more old-fashioned view of history, which we had tried to move beyond. If you looked at history 200 years ago, the role of leaders would have been very widely assumed – this king went to war against that king, or this political statesperson went to war against that political statesperson – the role of the individual leader was often at the heart of historical decision making. That “great man” view of history became unfashionable, and we moved towards views of history that emphasised impersonal forces or bureaucracies. But in going too far down that other road, we lost the basic reality that leaders who have power will make decisions for very unusual or selfish reasons, and we have to put those back into the mix.
Yet this is also happening within a globally interconnected economic system, so how are those two sets of forces coming together?
I think we can say that the leaders who make these decisions are not going to be swayed by short-term economic considerations. A regular myth that has popped up over the last 130 years, going back to before the First World War, is that trade will make war less likely. Once you have integrated economies and integrated supply lines – where you get things from all over the world and bring them all together in different processes – the view is that this would make war less likely, because why would you go to war with a country if it would damage your own wealth and cut into your supply lines?
The only problem is that this hasn’t actually dissuaded people from going to war. It didn’t dissuade people from the First World War, or the Second World War, and it is not dissuading people now. The problem with that analysis is that when leaders make the decision to go to war, they usually assume, as we are seeing now, that the war will be quicker and easier than it is. That was an assumption in 1914, that the war would be over by Christmas. They’re not looking at it as something that will destroy their economy. They’re usually looking at it as something that will bring a cheap and easy victory. We think we live in a time of economic dominance, but actually the economics can be subordinated in the short term to the leader’s interest.
How important a consideration is legacy? With leaders like Putin, Trump, and Xi Jinping, are they thinking less about how this plays out over the next decade, say, and more about how will history remember them and their leadership?
That is hugely important. One of the reasons Putin invaded Ukraine was for his legacy. He wanted to be like Peter the Great, or even a Stalin-like figure, expanding the country and, in his mind, restoring an imperial Russia. That is not to say any other Russian leader would have done it, but in Putin’s case, it mattered. I think in Trump’s case, he is absolutely using military power to burnish his reputation. He thought Venezuela was a great success and now he would do it on a grander scale. So reputation matters a great deal.
The last thing that would work for Xi’s legacy is to use military force to invade Taiwan and have it turn into a bloody mess. So that might actually drive him to take a different kind of policy rather than try to do it militarily because it would damage his legacy.
What do you think are the key lessons the PLA’s generals will be learning from the American way of war that we’re seeing currently on display in Iran?
If the Chinese are watching both the Russian invasion of Ukraine and what the US has done in Iran, what they’re seeing is that making a decision to go to war is a lot easier than making the decision to get out of it. That in both cases, you can start the war, but then, as the phrase goes, the enemy gets a vote, and the enemy might not vote in the way that you think.
Both the Ukrainians and the Iranians resisted the attacks in ways that the attackers did not expect. So I think that is what the Chinese might be learning, that if we go to war, we are unleashing something we cannot control. If we look at what the Chinese are doing vis-a-vis Taiwan, what we can see is that they are doing less of the direct invasion-type planning. They’re doing more blockade-type planning, more political pressure-type planning to try and compel or persuade the Taiwanese to do something like Hong Kong. [Hong Kong was transferred to China in 1997 as part of a treaty with the UK that was meant to guarantee the territory’s freedoms for the next 50 years under an arrangement known as “one country, two systems.] It might be that they have seen what has happened in these other military campaigns and said, okay, we’re gonna try something different.
Is there also a lesson in the US approach to the Strait of Hormuz and what appears to be a really difficult, yet entirely predictable situation there as Tehran has disrupted shipping through the waterway?
It was entirely predictable but wasn’t predicted. The thing about the Strait of Hormuz is that if you are going to go to war with Iran, then you have to say, well, what might the enemy do in response to this? Closing the Strait of Hormuz should not have been unexpected – it has always been an Iranian trump card that they could try to play if the worst came to the worst – you’re putting them in a pretty desperate situation and they have played it. So I think the key lesson is: don’t assume your enemy is going to do what you want. And if you keep telling yourself the enemy is going to do what you want then you’re probably opening yourself up for a major problem.
From Xi Jinping’s perspective, I think one assumption in any contingency over Taiwan has always been that the US would be supported by a network of allies. Does he now have reason to question that assumption?
The basic fact now is that I don’t think the United States would fight for Taiwan because I don’t think it can. If we look at what the US military is doing in Iran, if that’s what they can bring to the table after two months or actually a year of preparation, if you go back to last spring when they got ready for the June attacks. This is what they can do? Well, I don’t think the Chinese are going to be terribly impressed by this. It shows vulnerability. The United States Navy is terrified to go into the Gulf, as it should be. The Chinese have weapons far superior to what the Iranians have – much longer range, much more accurate, we assume, and much more numerous. China’s manufacturing capacity is massive compared to Iran. So I think we’re seeing that the United States has put itself in a situation where it really can’t fight effectively for Taiwan.
Moreover, I don’t think Trump would fight for Taiwan anyway. He’s been as critical of Taiwan as he has been of China, in some ways more so. He doesn’t show any interest in working with allies, it’s just not his way. Allies to him are either people to do what he wants or people to be insulted, they’re not actually treated as allies. We saw that the other day when Trump met with the Japanese leader and made a horribly racist insult to her face. [During an Oval Office meeting on 19 March Trump joked about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941.] That is the way he treats America’s most important strategic ally in the region. So if the Chinese were thinking America needs allies to fight for Taiwan, I think they can make the case that it’s unlikely the US is going to work well with allies.
When you say you don’t think the United States could fight for Taiwan, what are the key weaknesses or vulnerabilities that you see now?
The number one thing the United States has to do if it wants to fight for Taiwan is to keep the sea lanes open. Taiwan is an island, as you know, it has a lot of people, and it is important to keep world trade functioning. So the United States has to be able to get shipping in and out of Taiwan. The problem they face is that Taiwan isn’t far from China, and considering the range of Chinese anti-ship missiles, Chinese air power, what we can assume about Chinese drones and underwater drones, the US will have to run the risk of massive shipping losses to get those ships in and out of Taiwan. If it tries to strike China, it is going to have to get its aircraft carriers close enough that they will then be in range of those Chinese missiles and drones.
Then you’re left with a mathematical problem. If you have a large naval task force, even a large carrier task force, it can only intercept a certain number of incoming missiles or drones at any time. If the Chinese can fire ten percent more missiles than can be intercepted, there’s nothing that the force can do. Ten percent of the missiles will get through, probably more because not every interception is going to be perfect. At some point the ability to intercept by a finite number of interceptors at sea will be overwhelmed by the number that can be fired at them from land or close to land. So it is hard to see how the United States doesn’t go through a cycle of unsustainable shipping losses if it tries to fight its way to help Taiwan.
When it comes to drones, which we’re now seeing play such a central role in Ukraine, do you think the United States is learning those lessons at the same pace as Russia and, presumably, China?
The US certainly had not learned those lessons before 28 February [when the US and Israel launched the current conflict against Iran] because it hadn’t prepared properly for Iranian drone attacks and it didn’t have the right systems in place.The US military often relies on overly expensive, high-tech equipment to do what should be a simpler and what should be a cheaper job. They weren’t ready for that threat. They didn’t understand that even if only a small number of these drones could get through, they could threaten tankers, and no tanker is going to take the risk of being hit by drones. So they hadn’t done the calculations about how easy it would actually be for Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz with a relatively small number of drones.
Iran doesn’t need to fire a thousand drones to close the Strait of Hormuz. They can fire 20 or 30 a night, but if five of those get through and hit tankers, that will be enough to close the thing. The United States didn’t understand how easy it would be for Iran to react in this way.
We think a lot about the military side of these campaigns, but the Chinese leadership has spent decades at this point preparing public sentiment for the necessity of what they would call “reunification” with Taiwan. Here in the United States, it does not seem to me that there has been a great deal of similar preparation of the ground as to why Taiwan is essential to American interests, or in the current case, Iran. Is that a potential vulnerability?
One of the problems the Trump administration has faced over Iran is that it hasn’t made a clear argument as to what this is for. If you look at the original announcement that President Trump made on 28 February, it seemed to be about regime change and freedom for the Iranian people. He called for the Iranian people to rise up and seize their government. This seemed to be about freeing the Iranians from a theocratic regime. That’s now all gone. That hasn’t been mentioned in weeks. Instead, what we get is a huge range of different “mowing the grass” arguments about either permanently disabling Iran’s military infrastructure, which is unobtainable, or if you listen to the State Department it’s to sink their Navy or damage their capabilities.
There’s no consistency in the message as to what the war is for, and I think that’s one of the reasons that this is the most unpopular war in US history at the start. When wars start there’s often a rally around the flag effect in the United States, but there is none of that. This war started at a maximum of 40 percent public support, maybe even below that, and if anything, it’s dropping as the American people don’t seem to have any idea what this war is actually for. When it comes to Taiwan, I don’t think there’s been any effort to actually start preparing the American people to defend Taiwan, which is one of the reasons I am sceptical the United States will at this point.
What do you see as the realistic options for Trump at this point?
If he could, I think part of him would like to declare victory, go home, and say that he has crushed the Iranian military. The problem is that he can’t do that because he can’t guarantee the Strait of Hormuz is open. He can’t declare victory, and then actually the Iranians are sitting there, saying well, actually, we’re not going to let the shipping out, which will prove that he didn’t win the war.
Whereas part of him might like to get out, part of him is also now being pushed to escalation because, in his mind, he’s got to do something to try and get the ships going. Now, there are rumours of a ceasefire coming, and it might be that he actually has cut a deal with the Iranians to get the ships out, but that will also make declaring victory more difficult for him. That is the conundrum: he started the war without a way out and now he’s trying desperately to find one. That could be escalation or it could be almost a form of capitulation to the Iranians that says we will guarantee your regime won’t be overthrown and try to reach a deal with you.
When you talk about escalation, what kind of choices could he be looking at?
That is a hard military question. If Trump is going to say, okay, I’m escalating and I’m going to pound the Iranians and get the shipping out, he’s actually got to protect the shipping, and that will require intense patrolling over the Persian Gulf whenever ships go through. It will require the maintenance of significant military force over Iran 24 hours a day to keep the oil flowing. It might require occupying Kharg Island as a threat to them, and that’s why they’re debating different alternatives. The problem they face is they don’t actually know what would work.
Escalation could mean that you actually have to overthrow the regime. Maybe they have to go into Tehran, which would be a real scary prospect. But that’s the problem – they started the war not knowing and not having a plan for when it went off the rails, as it clearly has.
[Further reading: The everything shock]
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