When John Kerry was secretary of state under Barack Obama, he was widely mocked for saying a proposed military strike on Syria would be “unbelievably small.”
Few on either side of the 2013 Syria debate found those assurances believable. There was limited appetite at the time for even an unbelievably small war in the region, given recent experience with the bigger ones.
Can Israel fight such a war against Iran, with the U.S. role never growing beyond unbelievably small at the most? That is what President Donald Trump appears to be betting, based on the early promising results of the Israeli military strikes.
It’s certainly true that military interventions do not have to grow into full-blown occupations and nation-building projects. Trump’s first-term military campaign against ISIS was largely successful without metastasizing into Iraq War 2.0.
Afghanistan could have been conducted in a way more like the anti-ISIS blitz than the ill-fated 20-year war to transform that barren wasteland into something approximating a normal country that the Afghan conflict ultimately became.
From Grenada to the Persian Gulf War, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush governed as if they learned some lessons from the Vietnam debacle even though they both supported that war at the time, and neither of them condemned it in retrospect (though there were at least arguably negative downstream effects from the first Iraq war that contributed to the second, far less successful one). The U.S. and its allies were also able to win the Cold War despite the failures in Vietnam.
If a more limited intervention is possible here, it will be because Trump is differently motivated than past interventionists. I was among those worried his strike against Iranian military officer Qasem Soleimani would lead to war. It did not at least in part because Trump quit while he was ahead rather than use Iran’s retaliation, which some described as “calibrated” at the time, as a pretext to keep going.
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