Michael Schiffer
A war with Iran will be a disastrous strategic detour for the United States as it seeks to compete diplomatically, economically, militarily, and technologically with China.
In the span of a few months, President Donald Trump has threatened to seize Greenland, staged a military raid on Venezuela—hauling its president to New York to face trial and claiming its oil fields as the spoils—and has now launched a war with Iran aimed at dismantling its nuclear and missile programs and toppling its government. His defenders call this strength. His critics call it recklessness. Both are missing a more fundamental problem: these moves reflect a worldview built for a world that no longer exists.
President Trump sees power the way some 19th-century geostrategists did, in terms of territory, fossil fuels, corruption, and coercive military dominance over rivals. Control the Arctic routes. Control the oil. Suppress a hostile regime’s most dangerous capabilities. Each of these objectives has a certain logic. The problem is that logic made more sense in a different century, not the current one.
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