Is President Trump risk-seeking or risk-averse?

As I’ve said many times in the past my insight into his thought processes is very limited.

Please support you answer with examples.

IMO a lot in the U. S. war with Iran depends on the answer to that question.

I omitted a couple of other interesting things about the negative advertising I’m seeing today. Illinois negative advertising now routinely attacks characteristics that describe the Illinois political system itself.

The first example is that her opponents are trying to tie Illinois Lt. Governor Juliana Stratton to Mike Madigan who is presently serving a prison term in federal prison on charges of corruption in office. As a reminder Mr. Madigan was the long-term Speaker of the Illinois House and chairman of the Illinois Democratic Party.

The other interesting thing is Rep. Robin Kelly’s ads complaining about billionaires holding political office.

The former is interesting because given Speaker Madigan’s decades of control over the Illinois Democratic Party and House organization, a very large share of Democratic officeholders inevitably had some political interaction with his organization.. That is what decades of party control means: eventually your organization touches almost every political career in the state.

The latter is interesting because it’s not entirely clear whom Rep. Kelly’s ads are alluding to. She may believe she’s complaining about President Trump but the sitting governor of Illinois is a billionaire, too. Illinois voters have elected two consecutive billionaire governors. Complaining about “billionaires in politics” therefore risks indicting the political choices of Illinois voters themselves. Democrat JB Pritzker was preceded by Republican Bruce Rauner.

I agree with both of those points. That so many Illinois politicians are connected to former Speaker Madigan and that our last two governors have both been billionaires is suggestive of a deep pathology in Illinois politics and a reckoning is long overdue. Illinois has had four governors and literally hundreds of other elected officials imprisoned in the last half century.

Illinois politics contains the seeds of its own indictment. The question is what forces, if any, could produce the reckoning the system seems to require. More likely we will see Illinois politics as usual: complaining about the influence of billionaires, i.e. the other party’s billionaires, and ongoing corruption in office.

The primary election that is expected to determine who will be elected to the Senate post being vacated by Dick Durbin is next week. In the past I’ve mentioned how closely aligned the main Democratic candidates were on the policy front. There were three planks: fight Trump, abolish ICE, Medicare for All. Otherwise the campaign was largely what’s called a valence campaign—the candidates competed on how hard they would fight and how urgent they thought these policies were.

A week or so ago something changed. Although all three continue to campaign against President Trump and the Republicans, they are openly campaigning against each other as well. All three of the leading candidates and the PACs that support them are running strongly negative ads against their Democratic opponents. Candidates are being tarred as being financed by “MAGA donors”. That phrase is used repeatedly. I do not recall a Senate campaign in Illinois in which the candidates attacked each other quite this aggressively.

One of the things that alienates me is the constant use of the word fight. Every candidate promises to fight. I don’t want a senator who fights. I want a senator who thinks, discusses, and legislates. In the present climate “fight” seems to me a particularly poor choice of words. Legislators are supposed to deliberate and persuade, not simply posture for combat.

Julia Stratton is obviously the candidate preferred by party leaders—she’s been endorsed by the governor and other statewide officials. From that I infer that she is considered a reliable party vote. The other two appear to be House backbenchers.

I expect turnout to be low, which means that anything could happen. Watching the ads, I have the strong impression that every message has been carefully focus-grouped to appeal to the mythical “Democratic primary voter”. The difficulty is that although I am a Democrat and I vote in the primaries, I apparently do not resemble that voter very closely.

I’d like to make a few observations about what we might have learned over the last decade or so. Recent conflicts provide partial tests of several major military doctrines: Russian, Iranian, Chinese, and American.

Before I begin let me define what I mean by “military doctrine”. Military doctrine is the set of principles, command structures, and operational concepts that guide how a military organizes its forces, exercises command and control, and conducts combat operations. It reflects a military’s preferred methods of fighting, including how it integrates forces, technology, logistics, and decision-making in pursuit of tactical and operational objectives.

Russia’s military doctrine is weak.

Russia’s failure to achieve its stated objectives in Ukraine is a clear statement of the weakness of present Russian military doctrine. We cannot rely on that situation’s persisting: there is nothing like war to provoke evolution in military doctrine.

Iran’s military doctrine is focused on controlling its own population.

That has been revealed dramatically over the last week. That Iran has achieved so little success despite the large number of missiles and drones they have used is strong evidence. Despite its lack of effectiveness in dealing with attack by an external enemy, during the recent anti-regime demonstrations it was tremendously effective in controlling its own population.

China’s military doctrine remains untested.

We don’t know if China’s military doctrine is strong or weak and neither do the Chinese. The last major war in which China participated was the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War. That was over a generation ago.

Our military doctrine is strong and proven.

In every major conflict over the last quarter century the U.S. military has been able to achieve its tactical objectives quickly and decisively. Where we have failed has been at the strategic, diplomatic, and political levels.

Taken together, recent conflicts suggest that the major powers occupy very different doctrinal positions: Russia exposed, Iran internally focused, China untested, and the United States tactically dominant but strategically uncertain.

The drought on analysis of our war with Iran continues. This Wall Street Journal column from Walter Russell Mead is typical of what I’m seeing. In the column Dr. Mead divides the possible outcomes into three categories: the U.S. loses, the U.S. wins, or something in between. That taxonomy is logically exhaustive but analytically empty. Every war ends in one of those states. What is missing is any discussion of the mechanisms that would produce one outcome rather than another: Iranian escalation capacity, American political endurance, the vulnerability of Gulf shipping, or the stability of the Iranian regime. Without identifying the drivers of the conflict, the analysis amounts to little more than labeling the possible endings:

The war looks set to end in one of three ways. One would be a clear and damaging American defeat. If a mix of global pressure and domestic opposition forces the Trump administration to end the conflict before full trade is restored through the Gulf, a battered Iran will emerge having demonstrated its ability to close the Gulf against everything the world’s greatest military power can throw at it. America’s power and prestige, not to mention Mr. Trump’s, would struggle to recover from such a fiasco.

Alternatively, the Americans could reopen the Gulf as a new Iranian government more focused on developing the country than on dominating its neighbors emerges. This would be a major victory for the Trump administration.

Most likely is an in-between scenario in which the U.S. largely clears the Gulf but the current regime survives. Operation Epic Fury would in that case be remembered as the Mother of All Lawnmowers, solving nothing fundamental but preserving a fragile balance of power in a vital part of the world.

Well, yes. Even a casually informed reader could have said that six months or six years ago. It is an exhaustive list of possibilities, but it tells us nothing about which is likely or why.

This post is a response to multiple comments about the durability of the present Iranian government. Contrary to what some of my readers have said, the history of Iran is less one of stability than of change. Without turning this post into a thesis on Iranian history, Iran’s history is of one government replacing another. Individual dynasties and empires have ruled Iran for periods of slightly less than 500 years to slightly less than 50 years. Iranian regimes often appear stable for long periods but collapse suddenly and completely. Sometimes these changes of government were due to internal forces; in others governments were removed by external invaders.

The present Khomeinist government replaced the Pahlavi dynasty a little less than fifty years ago.

Over the last 2,500 years Iran has been ruled by Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Persians, Seljuk Turks, Mongols, Persians again. Afghans, and finally, Persians again from 1789 to the present, first the Qajar dynasty, then the Pahlavi.

The Persians themselves were migrants to the plateau, arriving in the second millennium BCE and displacing earlier populations. In that respect Iran is no different from anywhere else: over long enough time horizons, everyone is from somewhere else.

I wanted to call attention to this report in the Washington Post by John Hudson and Warren P. Strobel. Apparently, just a week before the onset of U.S. hostilities against Iran, the federal government’s National Intelligence Council (NIC) produced a report casting serious doubt on the likelihood that U.S. action could produce regime change:

A classified report by the National Intelligence Council found that even a large-scale assault on Iran launched by the United States would be unlikely to oust the Islamic republic’s entrenched military and clerical establishment, a sobering assessment as the Trump administration raises the specter of an extended military campaign that officials say has “only just begun.”

The findings, confirmed to The Washington Post by three people familiar with the report’s contents, raise doubts about President Donald Trump’s declared plan to “clean out” Iran’s leadership structure and install a ruler of his choosing.

The real issue is not whether Iran can be damaged militarily. Clearly, it can. The issue is whether external military pressure can produce regime collapse. The intelligence community’s answer appears to be “no.”

The WaPo goes on to explain the NIC:

The National Intelligence Council, or NIC, is composed of veteran analysts who produce classified assessments meant to represent the collective wisdom of Washington’s 18 intelligence agencies.

The Administration’s response to questions about the NIC’s report was:

“President Trump and the administration have clearly outlined their goals with regard to Operation Epic Fury: destroy Iran’s ballistic missiles and production capacity, demolish their navy, end their ability to arm proxies, and prevent them from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said in a statement. “The Iranian regime is being absolutely crushed.”

and this quote amplifies the question:

“There’s no other force within Iran that can confront the remaining power that the regime has,” said Maloney, of the Brookings Institution. “Even if they’re not able to project that power very effectively against their neighbors, they can certainly dominate inside the country.”

That shouldn’t be surprising in the least. The purpose of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is not to project power against their neighbors but to dominate Iran, i.e. to prevent exactly what our present war intends to produce. There is no united opposition to the regime in Iran. Whether the various dissident groups including ethnic dissidents like the Kurds or Balochis either singly or in cooperation with each would be able to oust the regime is an open question. These groups include monarchists, liberal reformers, various regional and ethnic separationalist movements, and student or labor movements. In some instances these groups are as opposed to each other as they are to the regime.

Yesterday I lamented the lack of serious commentary on the war in Iran. Although I found a number of such articles today, most followed the pattern I outlined yesterday. The one exception was this post at War on the Rocks by Albert B. Wolf. In the post Dr. Wolf urges the Administration in no uncertain terms not to arm the Kurds to rise up against the regime in Iran or, presumably, to arm other ethnic groups in the same fashion.

The Trump administration should abandon any plans to arm Iranian Kurdish forces before the first fighter crosses the Iraqi-Iranian border. Not refine it. Not sequence it more carefully. Drop it entirely. The operation will not topple the Iranian regime, will inflame the Persian nationalism that is the Islamic Republic’s most reliable reserve fuel, and — most damagingly — will hand Tehran a coalition-fracturing tool it did not have to build. There is no version of this gambit that serves American strategic interests.

The article goes on to defend that view. His argument rests on three claims: that Kurdish insurgency will not topple the regime, that it will strengthen Persian nationalism inside Iran, and that it will fracture the regional coalition by alarming neighbors such as Turkey and Pakistan.

I have one question for Dr. Wolf. What is it in the Trump Administration’s actions to date that convince you it is engaging in the long-term thinking you are advocating rather than focusing on the problems it would cause for the regime today? Dr. Wolf’s argument assumes that Washington is weighing long-term regional consequences against short-term tactical gains. But the administration’s behavior to date suggests something closer to opportunism: maximizing immediate pressure on the regime with little regard for downstream effects.

The real challenge is whether Iran’s is a regime that can be destabilized internally, or is Iran a civilization-state whose population will rally against external meddling?

I have been greatly disappointed by the dearth of critical analysis of the ongoing war with Iran. Although I have found a small number of generally interesting analyses, e.g. this post at The Diplomat by Youlon Nie on how the war disrupts China’s long-standing foreign policy thrust or this post at RealClearDefense by Ian Hill on how the war strengthens Russia’s position. Unfortunately, both of those articles have serious deficiencies. Dr. Nie’s analysis is interesting but doesn’t address the economic implications for China which seem immediate and grave to me. Although Mr. Hill’s analysis of the implications of the war for Russia seem sound to me and he gestures towards the implications for the war in Ukraine, he doesn’t actually examine them.

It may be that there are other worthwhile but paywalled pieces that I can’t access.

Beyond that most of what I’m seeing depends simply on the domestic political views of the author, i.e. if the author is anti-Trump, the piece opposes the war; if the author is pro-Trump, the piece supports it. I have searched the major media outlets, major policy journals, and think tank publications and found remarkably little strategic analysis.

What I find is silence.

What are the economic consequences for China? How does the war reshape Russia’s strategic position and the Ukraine war? Is regime change achievable without a ground occupation? How will the war affect America’s standing in the world?

I am neither reflexively pro-Trump nor anti-Trump. I can support good policies but will oppose bad ones. War against Iran seems like a very bad policy to me.

The arguments I have seen in favor of it tend to be consequentialist in nature. They emphasize how bad the existing Iranian regime is, a judgment with which I concur. They then make the leap that, if you oppose removing the regime by force, you either support the regime or are indifferent to the suffering of the Iranian people. Such arguments depend on the war producing regime change in Iran and I have seen no one argue convincingly that can be accomplished via air and naval power.

President Trump’s exhortation of the Iranian people which I will summarize as “We’ll remove the regime; you replace it” suffers from the weakness of going against the thrust of human history.

I have seen a few assertions that there is an active alternative “waiting in the wings” but they seem far-fetched to me. Didn’t we hear things like this about Afghanistan and Iraq in the early days of the wars there?

So, that’s where things stand as I see it. I’m confident that the U. S. can achieve every military objective with alacrity. Whether it can achieve the foreign policy objective of regime change is something else again.

If you can refer me to any good, well-argued, evidence-based pieces on the war, please leave links in comments.