Is the war with Iran really a good idea?

On February 28, the U.S. and Israel launched a coordinated set of air strikes against Iran. Code-named “Epic Fury” in the U.S., and marketed heavily in Trumpian style, the attacks quickly killed key leaders in Iran, particularly its Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, and rapidly established air and naval superiority, as these terms have been understood since World War II.

The attack was a political success for Prime Minister Netanyahu, whose carefully curated image as Mr. Security was severely trashed on October 7, 2023, and the long, drawn-out war in Gaza that followed. Netanyahu has been trying for many years to maneuver the U.S. into a war with Iran. A successful campaign partnered with American firepower would seem to go a long way to erase the failures of the Gaza War before the Israeli elections later this year.

The war, at least initially, has been highly popular in Israel. Israelis, many if not most of whom are still living with the trauma of October 7, perceived this as a crucial preemptive strike against existential threats from Iran and its proxies that have existed for a generation. Few would shed a tear for Khamenei, who shaped and executed Iran’s foreign policy of confrontation with the West and war with Israel.

Early tactical victories fed the belief that war would degrade Iran’s military infrastructure to the point where its unpopular regime would be vulnerable to internal revolt and ultimately collapse or surrender, especially after the recent brave protests in the street against the Khamenei regime.

Get New Jersey Jewish News's Newsletter by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up

Sadly, that has been a key strategic miscalculation.

With its conventional forces degraded, Iran has pivoted to unconventional weapons to fight an asymmetric war. By closing the Straits of Hormuz to shipping of key commodities, particularly oil and fertilizer, it is imposing enormous economic costs throughout the world and directly risking the generational aspirations for economic transformation among the Sunni-led nations in the Middle East. While Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait consider Iran a serious threat, they did not ask for this war and advised against it. They wished to pursue a more complex course against Iran that avoided war. Their advice on this matter should have been heeded.

The assassination of Ali Khameini was viewed in Israel and the U.S. as a victory; it may be less of one than at first thought. Alive and aging in a country the majority of whose citizens despised the regime he led, Khamenei had been facing a very difficult economic and political situation. If left unattacked, his death or incapacitation from old age could have presented a generational opportunity for regime reform which the country’s entrenched clerical powers would have found difficult to resist. But the Supreme Leader was killed in a military strike against the nation, and Iran’s most conservative factions were able to impose Khamenei’s son in his father’s place as a nationalist assertion of resistance. Even more extreme than his father and deeply connected with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Mojtaba Khamenei’s ascendance has entrenched Iran’s most conservative elements in power.

As civilian casualties mount rapidly and attacks against civilian infrastructure impose personal costs on the Iranian people, Western influence on popular opinion will again shift. It will become even more difficult to organize internally against the regime whose nationalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-colonial messages will resonate.

Without a U.S. ground attack, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the regime in Iran has sufficient strength to survive. But a ground attack would ratchet up the costs of this already expensive special military operation enormously. So the U.S. is hoping to achieve a ground game on the cheap by arming Kurdish forces in Iraq and encouraging them to arm and organize Kurds in Iran to revolt. This approach, however, is exactly what the nations of the region do not want. All of them have borders arbitrarily shaped by a colonial past which typically compressed different ethnic groups into administrative boundaries.  None of them want to see Iran convulsed by ethnic civil wars which could destabilize their own economies and polities. What the nations surrounding Iran really want is for the war to end quickly.

They are hardly alone in this desire. While some Saudi oil output can be diverted through pipelines to Red Sea ports, oil production in the region, to an important degree, has stopped, because output can’t be shipped, and with facilities at capacity, it can no longer be stored. Producing nations fear engineering losses as capped wells degrade extraction potential. Consuming countries are starving for an essential commodity they can no longer obtain in sufficient quantities.

Although large amounts of strategic oil reserves have been set aside for release, their release rates are much lower than the daily supply that will be lost. Additionally, the reduction in fertilizer supply comes at a critical time, just before the start of the Northern Hemisphere’s growing season. America’s rivals could hardly have chosen a course more damaging to U.S. international influence. But this war of choice is not an administration anomaly; it is yet another example of Trump’s America Alone foreign policy approach, with all its attendant effects.

Already isolated diplomatically for its mishandling of the Gaza war, Israel’s government could not have chosen a course better suited to its further isolation and weakened international standing. It is now dependent more than ever on U.S. political, economic, and military backing. But this war, however popular now in Israel, is unpopular in the U.S. It is further eroding Israel’s standing in U.S. public opinion.

These are major strategic problems.

It has been said “war is a continuation of politics by other means.” Sadly the political objectives to guide the diplomacy that needs to follow this “excursion,” as Trump has called it, are missing. Israel has not presented a political proposition. Its actions represent a short-term calculus that any significant degradation of Iranian military capacities is good, and with the help of the U.S., that degradation can be significant. Trump’s objectives vary with the wind and who whispered last into his ear.

To a hammer, every problem is a nail. The military, through its air campaign, is persistently knocking out targets on its list, destroying Iranian military capacities. Those, however, are replaceable. It is simply a question of time. The lack of clarity regarding a political objective is likely due to Trump’s lack of strategic vision and his desire to keep all options open. As long as there are no clear objectives, he can claim victory when he chooses. It may not be so simple to end the war he started, however. With the Straits of Hormuz closed, Iran may believe it has some leverage to exploit.

The duration of the war, then, is difficult to predict, but increasingly there is a consensus regarding the Iranian regime’s capacity to survive it, even with reduced military capabilities. If it does, the war may be a tactical victory for the U.S. and Israel but a strategic defeat. They will have played their armed intervention card. It will be much more difficult for them to play that again in the future.

A surviving Iranian clerical dictatorship will be faced with economic problems even more dire than the ones it was confronting before the war. Its survival in the face of foreign efforts to impose themselves, however, will give it temporary strength; it will be much more difficult for domestic opponents to organize against it. And if there is one conclusion its leadership is likely to make, it is that to defend itself and Iranian sovereignty in the future, nuclear armaments are a necessity.

Dr. Mark Gold of Teaneck holds a Ph.D. in economics from NYU. He is on the executive board of Partners for Progressive Israel, a member organization of the American Zionist Movement and an affiliate of the World Union of Meretz.

Hiam Simon of Englewood is the past chief operating officer of Ameinu, the leading progressive Zionist membership organization in the United States. He lived in Israel for many years, where he was the dean of students at what is now the Alexander Muss High School, and he served in the IDF as a noncommissioned officer in the artillery.