After the Trump administration called off this weekend’s strikes, it’s clear the US is unwilling to escalate hostilities with Iran.

Although President Donald Trump has once again threatened to escalate the conflict with Iran and then backed away from the abyss (for the ninth time), troubling indications are that the US military was planning to strike Iran’s energy infrastructure. Those targets would likely include hitting the Iranian power grid and oil refineries—aimed at renewing the administration’s initial goal of regime change by impeding Iran’s government from providing services for its supposed restive population. 

And Iran already has been widening the war by showing it can strike, directly or through proxies, the world’s energy prices through strikes on energy facilities of the Gulf states and Iranian proxy attacks in another maritime oil choke point—the Bab El-Mandeb Strait, gateway to the Red Sea and Suez Canal. For good measure, Iran may have conducted a cyberattack on water facilities in Minnesota, one of the worst cyberattacks in the United States in recent memory. Iran has been demonstrating that it can conduct worldwide retaliation for any US escalation to regime-change attacks on its energy infrastructure.  

US escalation would likely fail to produce the collapse of the Iranian regime. As Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago has demonstrated in his exhaustive study of past attempts to achieve regime change through aerial bombing alone, none have succeeded. In May, the US military told President Trump that there are fewer and fewer Iranian military or Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps targets left to hit. Regime change initiated by a popular revolution seems further away than ever.

History also shows that mass bombing campaigns can cause a rally-around-the-flag effect among their victims, even those living under despotic and corrupt regimes. No matter how bad the regime, hatred of the external enemy responsible for the daily pounding seems greater. In democratic countries, the same dynamic often prevails, as US mobilization after the attacks on Fort Sumter and Pearl Harbor attest. After the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush’s approval ratings soared to 90 percent, an all-time high in presidential polling.  

So if the US escalation to striking Iran’s energy targets likely would not bring down the governing regime and instead would trigger a further skyrocketing of world energy prices by retaliatory Iranian attacks on vulnerable Gulf Arab energy targets and continued Houthi attacks on the Bab El-Mandeb Strait, as well as more Iranian cyberattacks on the United States thrown in, what is to be done? 

As good investors know, it is often better to cut your losses and move on rather than ride a bad investment to the bottom. Despite his bluster, Trump is reluctant to pull the trigger on attacking Iran’s energy structure. He should follow that instinct and avoid such escalation. The next step will be harder for him, however. His psychology seems to prevent him from admitting that his war on Iran has failed.  

Yet, as a master of bending perceived reality to fit his own ends, Trump should take the famous advice that Rudy Giuliani gave him for a previous caper: “Just say we won.” In other words, declare victory and end this Middle Eastern fiasco now, before it turns into a massive regional or worldwide conflagration.  

About the Author: Ivan Eland

Ivan R. Eland is a senior fellow at the Independent Institute and director of the Independent Institute’s Center on Peace & Liberty. He is the author of War and the Rogue Presidency, A Balance of Titans: Peace and Liberty in the New Multipolar World, and Domestic Causes of American Wars: Economic & Political Triggers. He was previously the director of Defense Policy Studies at the Cato Institute. He spent 15 years working for Congress on national security issues, including stints as an investigator for the House Foreign Affairs Committee and as a Principal Defense Analyst at the Congressional Budget Office. He tweets at @Ivan_Eland.

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