FA: The curse of middle-sized wars – In Iran, Trump risks falling into a familiar trap

A confused Trump with Secretary of War Hegseth and Special Envoy Witkoff
Photo: Reuters

Middle-sized wars are big enough to cause immense destruction and bloodshed but small enough that they do not engage the full home front. Generals and political leaders know what they are doing in a limited war. U.S. leaders in today’s middle-sized wars do not, ‘Foreign Affairs’ notes.

It may be uncomfortable to consider the so-called forever wars in the Middle East — which have killed or wounded tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers and left countless dead on all sides — as merely middle-sized.

For the United States, middle-sized wars present a unique problem. They ruin presidential administrations along with the American public’s regard for the U.S. government’s ability to conduct foreign policy. It would seem that the American people are finished with middle-sized wars and never want to repeat them. In fact, after each of the United States’ recent middle-sized wars, the public and politicians alike declared an end to them. This was especially true after the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, which destroyed the reputations of top policymakers. Yet the United States may be on the brink of another. The Trump administration’s war in Iran has the potential to evolve into a middle-sized war if the clerical regime does not surrender, as U.S. President Donald Trump demands, and continued U.S. and Israeli bombing leads to anarchy in Iran and destabilizes the Persian Gulf. The gap between toppling an existing order and erecting a new, more pliable one can be vast.

Dangerous miscalculations

A president often lacks complete information about the ground-level reality half a world away, but he still has to make a binary choice of whether to go to war — a choice for which he will be judged later by people with the advantage of historical hindsight.

Making decisions under these circumstances risks fundamental miscalculation. It may be widely agreed that radical actors and theocrats with nuclear weapons are dangerous, but choosing when to take military action against them is less straightforward.

Taiwan case

Tensions with China and Taiwan illustrate the challenge of decision-making in scenarios in which miscalculation is both likely and dangerous. The western Pacific is of greater consequence to U.S. interests than are Ukraine and the Middle East. The forever wars in the Middle East, by and large, have had only a limited effect on financial markets, and those markets have priced in the region’s geopolitical turmoil over recent decades. It would be a much different story if there were ever outright warfare in the western Pacific, home to the world’s most vital shipping lanes, supply chains, and economies.

To the average American, a Pacific war, if not calibrated perfectly, could dwarf the scale of miscalculation and tragedy in the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam, primarily because of the economic impact but also because of the destruction of vital materials, such as semiconductors. Yet the planning for such a conflict goes on in both Beijing and Washington, increasing the likelihood that it might one day happen. Getting into a war over Taiwan and the South China Sea, perhaps even a middle-sized war, is easy. Ending such a war is harder.

How that end comes, and what it might look like, ranges from anarchy and the end of communist rule in China to a military truce born of exhaustion following the collapse of world stock markets. Despite all the neat war games about a short, sharp conflict over Taiwan, real wars have a way of turning into all-encompassing realities of their own.

Deadly spirals

Trump promised to end forever wars. But through loose rhetoric, poor planning, a lack of policy discipline, and the normal collection of mistakes and miscalculations that any individual leader makes in a volatile world, he has found himself blundering into new ones. His administration has not included significant numbers of ground troops in its vast air and sea armada deployed against Iran. But the slippery slope of incrementalism poses a problem.

And the risks of escalation spiral from there. The war in Vietnam took years to evolve into a middle-sized war, spanning the entire Kennedy administration and the beginning of the Johnson administration. The situation in Iran might follow a similar trajectory.

Iran is not the only conflict that could spiral out of control on Trump’s watch. The administration also risks a war with the drug cartels in Mexico, which Trump has officially designated as terrorist organizations. A military conflict with the cartels would have all the makings of an irregular, grinding, middle-sized war in which locating enemies would be difficult, and permanently defeating them would be nearly impossible. The Trump administration’s military action to remove President Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and its missile strikes in Nigeria, too, are further examples of conflicts with domestic considerations that are as ambiguous and unpredictable as Iraq’s were in 2003.

Trump wars

Land engagements are especially dangerous because they can quickly become quagmires. In all his military actions thus far — Nigeria, Venezuela, Iran — Trump has used air and naval assets almost exclusively. The United States should be especially wary of land engagements in the Eastern Hemisphere, where all of its middle-sized wars have been fought since World War II. This isn’t only because of the challenges posed by the great distances involved; it is also because the quality of U.S. intelligence has generally been weaker there than in the United States’ own backyard (although even there, the United States might get into unnecessary trouble).

During his time as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the early post–Cold War era, Colin Powell, who later served as U.S. Secretary of State, argued that the United States should not commit to a war unless it has overwhelming force, an exit strategy, a vital national interest, a clear objective, and broad support. This idea, which became known as the Powell Doctrine, has been sidelined in recent years. Yet it remains relevant.

The empires and great powers that have survived longest are those that have avoided middle-sized wars. The Byzantine Empire, for instance, lasted over a thousand years by doing everything possible to avoid open warfare. As the United States celebrates its 250th year, it also faces a series of escalating conflicts. If it cannot avoid the middle-sized wars that have plagued it in the past, there may be a fatal split between the public and its governing elite. The effects are unlikely to be immediate, but such divisions are how republics slowly die.

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