The Nachshon Doctrine: Step First |
As Passover approaches, an ancient Jewish story offers a timely lesson for American foreign policy: a people trapped between a tyrant’s army and an unforgiving sea, paralyzed by justified fear, waiting for certainty that does not come. One man is willing to step from darkness into the unknown.
The Haggadah, read at the Passover meal, teaches that every generation must see itself as having gone out of Egypt. The point is not historical memory as much as it is recurrence: the lesson that every generation faces its own Red Sea moments, when moving from bondage toward freedom requires stepping forward without knowing the outcome.
In the traditional telling, the sea does not part because the Israelites have a plan, nor because a miracle is expected. Pharaoh’s imperial army—and enforced enslavement—is behind them, the sea is in front of them, and there is no path forward. The people panic and cry out in fear and despair. Moses reassures them, but they remain immobilized at the edge of the sea. Different tribes propose different responses. Return to Egypt and bondage? Turn and fight? The sea parts because one man, Nachshon, steps forward while others hesitate. With slavery behind him and freedom unseen ahead, he walks into the water—and he continues walking until it reaches his nostrils. Only then does the sea split.
Nachshon did not have a roadmap, a governance model, or a post–Red Sea crossing stabilization strategy.
Many pundits have treated the joint U.S.-Israel campaign against Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) regime as if it were governed by the so-called “Pottery Barn Rule”—Colin Powell’s warning to President Bush before the Iraq War: you break it, you own it. The implication is that strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites, missile arsenals, IRGC command centers, and other infrastructure must be accompanied by a comprehensive plan for Iran’s political future. If you act, you must also rebuild. If you intervene, you must also govern. If you take the first step, you must guarantee the last.
But that rule has never applied to moments of existential danger, and it should not apply to a regime that sponsors global terror, destabilizes the Middle East, conducts cyberattacks against American infrastructure, arms proxies from Yemen to Lebanon, races toward military nuclear capability, and has attempted to assassinate an American president. Twice.
Nachshon does not control the outcome. He does not know the result in advance. He simply takes the step that makes other steps possible. He steps forward in the absence of certainty, in search of freedom from tyranny. That—action without control—is largely absent from contemporary debates over American foreign policy toward Iran.
The ongoing U.S.-Israel campaign against Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard is not nation-building or regime design. It is the recognition that some threats cannot be managed indefinitely, and that waiting for guaranteed outcomes can itself be a choice—one that preserves the status quo, and a certain kind of bondage to the worst of the past.
This tension between action and uncertainty is our own American history. The United States did not emerge from a master plan with known outcomes. It emerged from contingent steps taken without certainty about where they would lead. Even at the founding, Benjamin Franklin captured this fragility: it is “a republic—if you can keep it.”
The United States cannot deliver Iran’s democracy. It cannot script Iran’s political evolution. It cannot guarantee the outcome. But it can do what Nachshon did: take the step that only it can take, the step that changes the landscape, the step that makes other steps—by Iranians themselves, by regional actors, by the unfolding of history—possible.