Overnight into Wednesday, attacks between Israel and Iran continued, marking the sixth day of hostilities since Israel’s operation “Rising Lion” began.
These strikes have not only targeted critical elements of Iran’s nuclear program, resulting in the deaths of multiple nuclear scientists, but also high-ranking Iranian military and government officials, signaling that this operation is about not only destroying Iran’s nuclear program but ultimately the regime itself.
So far, the United States has not taken on an offensive role in the conflict, but the U.S. has participated in helping Israel intercept incoming missiles. However, the Pentagon is also sending additional warplanes, air refueling tankers, and the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier to the area, giving Trump “options” should the conflict escalate.
While this kind of posture is described as “defensive” in nature by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, it has the clear potential for offensive use, which would be a catastrophic mistake.
As Tucker Carlson correctly stated in a recent commentary, “The United States should not at any level participate in a war with Iran. No funding, no American weapons, no troops on the ground. … [D]rop Israel. Let them fight their own wars.”
Unsurprisingly, this is not the mindset of neoconservative media personalities such as Mark Levin and Sean Hannity, who are salivating at the potential for America to not only provide military aid to Israel but to help take out the Iranian regime once and for all.
And now that Israel has gained air superiority over the skies of Iran, the opportunity for the U.S. to strike Iranian nuclear facilities with “bunker buster” bombs at a minimum, or even assist in a strike that takes out Iran’s supreme leader, is increasingly becoming more likely.
The adverse consequences from a regime change due to American involvement would reverberate for decades to come, as they have after America first attempted regime change in Iran.
Hostility between America and Iran can be traced back to 1953, when the U.S. and U.K. orchestrated a coup known as Operation Ajax, which overthrew the nationalist and democratically elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh and installed the pro-Western monarch Mohammad Reza as Iran’s leader.
This coup ultimately paved the way for the Islamic Revolution of 1979, leading to the Iranian hostage crisis, the Beirut Barracks bombing, the Khobar Towers bombing, and a host of other incidents like Iran’s training of Shiite militias in Iraq, all of which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of American servicemen and women.
But rather than absorb the hard lessons of Iran, that foreign meddling often breeds long-term instability and blowback, America doubled down after 9/11, pursuing an interventionist strategy on steroids, formulated by neoconservatives and implemented by the George W. Bush administration.
In the lead-up to the Iraq war, then-National Review’s Jonah Goldberg expressed both support for the war and for something called the “Ledeen Doctrine,” named after neoconservative Michael Ledeen, which stated the following:
Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.
This doctrine has been the essence of U.S. foreign policy since September 2001, as evidenced by American misadventures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria.
But Iran, in particular, has always been the neocon holy grail. After toppling Saddam Hussein in Iraq and effectively isolating North Korea, Iran has remained the last target in the famed “Axis of Evil” that was presented to the American people back in 2002.
However, after 20-plus years of war in the Middle East, the American people rightfully grew tired of this course of action. In response, the America First/MAGA movement shunned the neoconservative foreign policy consensus and embraced a new doctrine, championed by Donald Trump: “No more stupid wars.”
While a refreshing change, this rediscovery of noninterventionism is deeply rooted in America’s DNA, tracing back to George Washington’s farewell warning about entangling alliances and John Quincy Adams’ belief that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”
Though Ledeen recently passed away, his doctrine, sadly, is still alive, as exemplified by Sen. Lindsey Graham, who recently echoed this hawkish impulse on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, saying:
So here is the task at hand. Be all in, President Trump, in helping Israel eliminate the nuclear threat. If we need to provide bombs to Israel, provide bombs. If we need to fly planes with Israel, do joint operations. But here’s the bigger question, wouldn’t the world be better off if the Ayatollahs went away and replaced by something better? Wouldn’t Iran be better off?
How would Iranians who lived between 1953 and 1979 answer that question?
The truth is, while we don’t know if Iran would be “better off,” we do know how much worse off Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria have turned out due to U.S. interventionism.
We also know how much blood and treasure these interventions have cost the United States, how little America has to show for the sacrifices of its men and women, and the instability these actions have caused not only in the Middle East but in Europe as well, due to the millions of refugees that have flooded the European continent.
But stability in the Middle East has never been the primary goal. Here we return to Ledeen, who in 2001 argued that stability in the Middle East was an “unworthy American mission” and that “we do not want stability in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, or even Saudi Arabia. We want things to change. The issue is not whether but how to destabilize.”
Ledeen’s vision, shared by many in Washington, isn’t about peace, stability, or even American security. It’s about perpetuating permanent revolution abroad, carried out in the name of “democracy,” to preserve American hegemony while safeguarding Israeli interests, all at the expense of U.S. soldiers and taxpayers.
If President Trump truly believes in “no more stupid wars,” now is the time to prove it. He must resist the siren song of neoconservative ideologues by rejecting another catastrophic misadventure in the Middle East.
Iran is not America’s war to fight. And Israel is not a country the United States is obligated to defend. Now is the time to heed the words of John Quincy Adams when he rightly stated that America “is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”
