US Vice President J.D. Vance has tried to spin America’s strikes on Iran as an example of overwhelming US military power fixing problems that diplomacy couldn’t. But the United States has compiled a long record of such attempts since the end of the Cold War, and almost all of them failed.
WASHINGTON, DC – US Vice President J.D. Vance recently tried to cast President Donald Trump’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure as a wildly successful example of the “Trump Doctrine.” According to Vance, the doctrine is simple: you identify a problem that threatens US interests,
which “you try to aggressively diplomatically solve.” If diplomacy fails, “you use overwhelming military power to solve it and then you get the hell out of there before it ever becomes a protracted conflict.
MARIANA MAZZUCATO & RAINER KATTEL think progressives have neglected the importance of delivering results that voters will feel in their own lives.
If only it were that easy. What Vance describes is neither a doctrine nor unique to Trump. It is the same wishful thinking that produced many of the long, costly, and unsuccessful US military interventions that Vance himself has often decried.
If Vance thinks that the strikes “solved” the problem of Iran’s nuclear program, then he must believe that they fully destroyed Iran’s nuclear capabilities: its centrifuges, its stocks of enriched uranium, and any other materials used for weaponization. Either that, or he views this display of America’s military might as powerful enough to persuade the Islamic Republic to abandon its nuclear program and not reconstitute it in the future.
There is no question that the US strike severely damaged the Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan nuclear facilities. But it is far from clear that the bombing of these sites, coupled with Israel’s assassination of senior Iranian nuclear scientists, has set Iran back to zero. It appears more likely that Iran’s program has only been delayed, though estimates of the setback vary from months to years.
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