Trump to allies: We broke it, you buy it |
In my column last month, I provided a hot take on U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to go to war against Iran. I was equally scathing and worried, qualifying the war as illegal, bad faith, badly strategized and at high risk of producing bad outcomes for most stakeholders, including the U.S. and South Korea. Not only have those initial judgments proven correct so far, but the war is trending in the wrong direction.
U.S. and Israeli tactical and operational successes via air campaign are undeniable, but this does not cash out in a “theory of victory.” That is, air power alone is highly unlikely to lead to worthwhile strategic and diplomatic outcomes — namely Iran’s democratic regime change, permanent denuclearization, inability to reconstitute a military threat and reform into a positive regional influence — that would somehow justify the war’s illegality, possibility of quagmire, casualties, depletion of military assets, economic disruption, negative geopolitical consequences and strategic risk.
Instead, the war against Iran has led to regional spillover, significant and worsening global economic downsides linked to hydrocarbon market dysfunction, the near closing of the Strait of Hormuz, and hardened U.S. and Iranian positions. As I write this, the U.S. is preparing to send ground forces into Iran for unclear objectives. No one knows what the result of such a dangerous escalation would be, but from a historical perspective, the probable outcome is bad.
In addition, the U.S. engaged Iran in war without consulting (or even informing) allies and partners. Not coincidently, their views on the war have been largely negative for both prudential and legal reasons. As Trump has struggled to impose a resolution to the war, those critical views have strengthened. Iran’s disruption of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has exacerbated the rift between the U.S. and its partners by exposing the latter to major economic security risks.
Trump’s rhetoric has vacillated between beseeching allies and partners to send naval assets to try and force open the strait against Iranian resistance, dismissing their potential efforts as weak and ineffective, claiming the U.S. does not need their help anyway, and threatening to walk away from the situation on the premise that the U.S. is largely free of reliance on the strait for hydrocarbons. In other words, the U.S. is trying to offload its self-caused problem onto its allies and partners.
At this point, dear reader, allow me to reacquaint you with the “Pottery Barn rule.” In early 2003, during the lead-up to the second Gulf War in Iraq, the cautionary phrase “You break it, you buy it” entered the Washington lexicon through both then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and New York Times columnist Tom Friedman. The point of the phrase — apocryphally borrowed from home furnishing store Pottery Barn, which supposedly required careless customers to pay for fragile items they broke — was to warn then-President George W. Bush that an attack on Iraq would make the U.S. responsible for that country’s aftermath.
Although Bush failed to heed the warning and the U.S. spent two decades and $2.5 trillion in a strategically disastrous quagmire, there was at least a patina of honor in the U.S. staying and trying to “own” its mistake.
For U.S. allies now, however, Trump’s approach to Iran is pure perfidy: “We broke it, YOU buy it.” Not content to merely further stomp on international law or cause an impending global economic crisis, the Trump administration is attempting to compel allies and partners into joining the conflict in order to try and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. There is a term for this in international relations theory: chain-ganging. Chain-ganging of smaller allies by a large patron is generally considered pathological, involving both generalized security instability and the coercion of individual allies into joining conflicts against their interests. We are seeing a contemporary variant of this in Trump’s demands that the U.S.’ Indo-Pacific and Euro-Atlantic allies join his war of choice. Trump’s behavior — nonsensical victimization narratives when allies abjure, threats to walk away from the strait disruption crisis (forcing others to clean up his mess), and claims that the U.S. will not meet its alliance commitments to (especially) NATO allies if they don’t join his Hormuz chain-gang — is sociopathic.
Trump neither understands nor cares about Washington Treaty Article 5, which he implicitly invokes when demanding NATO allies join the Iran conflict. Article 5 — the fundamental NATO collective defense clause — is limited to defensive war in the Euro-Atlantic region, while Trump appeals to it for an out-of-area war of choice. This is illustrative because Trump’s twisted logic shows his utter disregard for alliance treaties. They are at best beyond his comprehension, worth no more to him than leverage tools rather than commitments to a shared order.
NATO countries, South Korea, Japan and others must understand: the U.S. under Trump is no longer your ally. Plan accordingly.
Mason Richey is a professor of international politics at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies and president of the Korea International Studies Association.