Nothing needs to be said about the war between Israel and Iran that wasn’t already said by my colleagues Andrew Day and Jude Russo. At the time of writing, Israel is targeting the Fordow nuclear enrichment plant, and Iranian ballistic missiles are hitting Tel Aviv. 

Donald Trump won his mandate opposing wars in the Middle East. His instinct is still laudable, but it is baffling why he failed to seal a nuclear deal with Tehran, given that the Iranians agreed not to produce nuclear weapons. The administration has sought a ban on Tehran’s enrichment of uranium, though that is an Iranian redline and will continue to be. Any further military threats to the Iranian nuclear program will only incentivize them to seek further nuclear weaponization. The best we could hope for is oversight of the program.

A clever rhetorical ploy can be seen in discussions about whether the U.S. will engage militarily with Iran. Before the current strikes, the U.S. apparently told Israel that it will not join an attack in any offensive capacity, though it seemed likely to defend against an Iranian retaliation and, soon after Israel’s strikes, promised to do so. This is clever but nonsensical. The distinction to be made at this stage isn’t whether the U.S. wants to invade Iran or not; it is whether the U.S. will be dragged into war regardless. Any journalist worth his salt should ask the administration whether and why the United States should have to defend Israel from Iranian retaliation, especially considering that Israel—per Trump’s own words before the attack—brought “ruin” to negotiations between Iran and the U.S. (And yes, any negotiation at this point is ruined. That much is guaranteed.)

The Iranians saw what happened to Muammar Gaddafi in Libya (another war that wrecked a region and unleashed refugee crises in Europe, and that your humble correspondent opposed) and saw what didn’t happen to the Kim dynasty in North Korea. The lesson is stark. Deterrence is hard won, but once achieved, it remains in place. In the meantime, the Iranians have consolidated their ballistic missile program, and Tehran now has an enormous amount of conventional weapons in stock for overwhelming Israel. The Israelis, for their part, lack long-term sustained bombing capability of Iran without American support. Iran has enormous land depth (natural boundaries and terrain defenses) to make any invasion expensive. This march to war is similar to Ukraine, in the sense that it can stop the moment Washington, DC can muster the courage to say that, henceforth, anyone who opposes American intentions or strategy is on his own. 

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The fact that this is a sneaky way to engulf the U.S. in another conflict in the Middle East is evident to anyone with an above–room temperature IQ. And this is a region that remains totally peripheral to American interests, especially compared to, say, Asia, or Latin America, or even Europe. A U.S. war with Iran has bipartisan opposition from both right- and left-wing congressmen. The people hate the idea of it. 

Moreover, Israel’s attack was not “preemptive,” as claimed in the media. A preemptive strike aims to stop an anticipated attack that is yet to happen. Even by Israeli claims, this is a campaign of decapitation and prevention—top Iranian leadership is being targeted. Israelis understandably don’t want a war of attrition, for obvious reasons. Throughout its history, Israel avoided long conflicts and opted for shorter wars. The questions are whether this time Israel will get into a long, attritional conflict anyway, and whether the U.S. will then have to be involved. The expected length of conflict is not irrelevant, but rather the starting point of a plan. If analysis assumes Iranian regime fragility, sustained conflict will not be needed; the regime will collapse. Then the question will be one of pacification of the country’s disparate factions. But if the regime is stable, Iranians will rally around the flag, leading to a war of attrition in which Iranian manpower dwarfs that of Israel.

The last time Iranians were surprised by a leadership decapitating first strike, it was the 1980s and the perpetrator was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. That ultimately led to an eight-year war. Hussein and his regime are now long gone. One can only hope that this time, better sense prevails—and, more importantly for the U.S., that we have the prudence to stay out of it.