Opinion | Trump Has Made a Fundamental Miscalculation about Iran - The New York Times
American military policy has failed us over the past decades, but I don’t think the solution is the radical break with American tradition represented by the Trump administration. I still hold to the conservative belief that the highest ideals we find in our history can guide us. Our greatest wartime leaders thought we should wage war only when it was absolutely necessary, that we should articulate the clear moral and political objectives that we use to guide our strategy and that we should treat the shedding of blood with the seriousness it deserves.
Power does not grow out of the barrel of a gun, cruelty is not the same as strength, and a politics built on such ideas promises ruin, delusion about the limits of our power and a betrayal of the promise of our founding.
I partly agree with Phil Klay – I would add a second layer of analysis. I don’t think the Iranian people are like Americans in one important way – We are ready to commit violence in order to be free. I don’t think the Iranian people are willing to do the same. And, the Trump Administration has miscalculated on this aspect as well.
