Trump’s Iran War Is a Familiar Middle Eastern Folly

With his rhetorical extremity and mad-king threats, Donald Trump makes every crisis seem like an end-of-empire moment, a breaking point for American power in the world. The war in Iran is the latest example, where the shadow of imperial apocalypse hangs over his flailing attempts to resolve the crisis created by his military gamble.

Maybe Trump’s America is Britain in the 1956 Suez crisis, discovering its own impotence, realizing that the sun has set on its empire. Maybe Trump himself is King Croesus of Lydia, invading Persia on an oracle’s encouragement and discovering too late that the empire prophesied to be destroyed by the invasion is his own.

But it’s also possible that the Iran war is actually less a final rupture than a return, in a shambolic Trumpian way, to familiar patterns of U.S. foreign policy.

After all, is it really such a novel experience for the United States to try and fail to impose its will on the Middle East or the wider Islamic world? For our quest some grand bargain to give way to conflict between Sunni and Shia, Israelis and Arabs? For American military power to succeed tactically even as the strategic picture darkens?

Surely not: This is the familiar story of the 21st century, a long record of American failure dating to the collapse of the Camp David negotiations between Ehud Barak and Yasir Arafat in 2000. The litany of failure includes the doomed efforts under multiple presidents to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process; the disaster of George W. Bush’s Iraq invasion and the rise of the Islamic State; Barack Obama’s reckless decision to topple Libya’s dictator during the Arab Spring; and the consistent failure of our Iranian policy, both hawkish and conciliatory, to either tame or topple the clerical regime. Widen the aperture to Central Asia, and it includes our two decades of war in Afghanistan as well.

Amid this legacy of ashes, Trump’s first term stood out as a period when more modest ambitions yielded some success — the defeat of the Islamic State, sharp blows against Iran that never escalated to war and the low but solid ambitions of the Abraham Accords.

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Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is also the host of the Opinion podcast “Interesting Times.” He is the author, most recently, of “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook

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