• Interview by
• Vivek Chibber

The US-Israeli war against Iran, launched without any coherently stated goals or popular support, is already turning into a horrific quagmire. It also doesn’t look like Donald Trump and Israel will get the swift Iranian regime change they hoped for.

In this episode of the Jacobin Radio podcast Confronting Capitalism, Vivek Chibber is joined by Jason Brownlee, a professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin, to discuss the history of regime change wars, the geopolitical interests in the Middle East, and Trump’s further descent into the neoconservative blob.

Confronting Capitalism with Vivek Chibber is produced by Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy and published by Jacobin. You can listen to the full episode here. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

I thought we’d start off by trying to get some understanding of what’s behind the American attack. Normally, when the US attacks a regime, it at least puts up some show of a coherent explanation — laying out what the American interests are, what the justification of it is, trying to explain to the public that there’s some direct interest that’s at stake here — a direct threat at least — where the United States deemed it necessary to attack either preventively or in response to some sort of aggression. What really stands out here is that if there is some kind of clear objective, the US is not letting us know what it is.

It’s not even a Gulf of Tonkin kind of threat inflation. There were active diplomatic talks going on that the representative from Oman said were going very well. And then there was a surprise attack by Israel and the US more or less two days later.

The narrative that they seem to be converging on is that there was some imminent threat, either because Iran was going to attack out of the blue, or because Israel was going to attack Iran and then Iran was going to hit the US. That doesn’t seem credible.

Yeah. There’s a difference between saying that Iran is on the verge of developing a nuclear weapon or that Iran is on the verge of attacking versus saying that Israel is about to attack Iran and that might trigger a response, so we have to attack preemptively to prevent Iran’s response to an attack by Israel.

In the former case, at least you have some semblance of a justification with regard to protecting national interests and defending the nation. In the latter case, what you’re doing is saying, we’re about to wage war and we want to weaken the enemy’s ability to respond to our waging the war.

And both of them are implausible, given what the Trump administration already did last year, and claimed to have done last year, in terms of devastating Iran’s existing nuclear facilities, such as they were, along with Israel.

In the second Obama term, we used to hear this from like Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic, pressing Barack Obama, like, “What if Israel attacked Iran and then Iran struck back, would you then get involved?” So that idea of Israel dragging the US into a war has been out there. But that as well as the notion that Iran is somehow close to having a nuclear weapon are risible given the developments of the last year.

Iran and the Nuclear Question

What makes it especially implausible is that for the last ten years, Iran has been stating quite clearly and frequently that it prefers not to develop a nuclear weapon. And even if it did, it’s willing to offer conditions under which it would foreswear any such objectives. That was what the negotiations starting with Obama were supposed to be about.

That being the case, everything the United States has done in the last four years has only made it more appealing for Iran to go ahead and develop one — because the frequency of the attacks, the bellicosity of the United States and Israel, the militarism — all of it makes it pretty attractive to Iran to have a more effective deterrent if it wants to stay out of the crosshairs of these two countries.

So if you want them to not develop a nuclear weapon, why would you keep undermining your negotiations with them and thereby making it rational for them to in fact develop those nuclear weapons?

The lesson, not just for Iran but other regimes in the past, has been that moderation and reasonableness is the danger: that the US wants to attack when a country is making compromises, when a country is negotiating in good faith. In fact, exactly as you described, Iran under Ali Khamenei was at most trying to enter what is known as the “Japan club,” where you have a solid civilian nuclear program that is permitted under international law, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and that does not produce nuclear weapons but would put you a few months away from nuclear weapons if you needed to get there. That’s what Japan has; that’s what a number of other countries that are US allies have. So there’s a kind of latent potential for weaponization, but it never needs to be acted upon. And it’s absolutely within the NPT — which Iran has signed, unlike Israel.

In that respect, the US pulling out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in Trump’s first term and really tightening the screws on Iran over the past few years, including under the Biden administration, points to an attitude of grinding down a country and a government that is not presenting a threat and, on the contrary, is actually operating according to internationally recognized norms and rules.

It seems to me then that what’s emerging is, there’s a desired outcome and then a fallback outcome. The desired outcome has nothing to do with nuclear weapons, or with the threat or this or that. It’s that the US would like to see a different regime in power or, in fact, the dismemberment of the state, breaking it up into smaller units, so that it is systematically and structurally enfeebled and is no longer the regional power that it used to be.

The fallback option is what they’re kind of peddling right now, which is that it’s kind of like mowing the lawn, the way Israel deals with the occupied territories. You keep attacking it every now and then, every few years, to make sure that there’s no military threat — that whatever military capacity they build up is scaled back and neutralized. So you keep them hemmed in and powerless.

When you look at it that way, the motivation here is entirely geopolitical and about affecting the power balance of the region. It has nothing to do with direct military threats that Iran putatively poses to either Israel or the United States.

Yes. To the extent that one could talk about something that is threatening or needs to be dealt with, it is Iran’s sovereign expression of its preferences in the region, and Iran’s status as a regional power. What we’re seeing is that essentially the United States will not tolerate a nonsubservient regional power, at least when it comes to the Muslim-majority states of the region.

Suppose one part of their fantasy comes true, and they do find that they’re able to topple this regime with or without boots on the ground, with or without invasion. Now what you have is the challenge of putting somebody in place who to you is a preferred option — a new government, a new administration — and then having them actually secure some sort of anchor with the domestic population and gain some sort of legitimacy.

On the back of an unprovoked military action, toppling a regime that was not popular by any means but is being replaced by two powers that have zero interest in Iranian sovereignty or the well-being of the Iranian people, and now they’re going to put a government or administration in place that is directly associated with these foreign belligerent and invading powers . . . what are the odds that that actually works out and has some sort of stable, desirable outcome?

The odds are incredibly low. There’s no historical precedent for the United States toppling a government in a country the size and complexity of Iran and then replacing it with any type of pliant regime that is suddenly aligned with US preferences instead of the preferences of the population.

When they started out, I do think they expected some sort of outcome like Venezuela might be possible. Trump explicitly said that. The idea was that they would seek out connections with and willing partners in the military who would potentially be the people who replace Khamenei and the ruling council. One problem with that was, as they themselves admit, the initial bombing campaign that killed Khamenei also killed a score of Iranian leaders who they had pinpointed as the people who might replace him.

And once you’ve dropped the first bomb on the head of government, you’re not on the Venezuela path anymore either. In the case of Venezuela, what the United States was able to accomplish was a very circumscribed change of leader, rather than an overhaul of a regime. And the fact that there were zero US casualties suggests that this was an operation that was orchestrated well in advance.

So it bears much more similarity to Panama with the replacement of Manuel Noriega. Although in that case, with Noriega being removed December 1989 to January 1990, there was an opposition leader who had popular legitimacy who was then installed, and he lasted one term, and then basically people who were further to the left won the next election. So the US’s puppet didn’t even last that long.

In the case of Venezuela, we have a continuation of Nicolás Maduro’s government minus Maduro. There’s just no way in Iran, once you start blasting away leaders and violating Iranian sovereignty, that the rest of the government is going to somehow step aside or put forward a Delcy Rodríguez equivalent.

Another fallback option was that they were hoping that the Kurds would fill the void. Israel has been targeting all the institutions of domestic control and the avenues of domestic violence, like the police, and has been hoping that this would open the way for some kind of rebellion or some kind of incursion by the Kurds into the country. So far, there’s no indication whatsoever that that’s in the cards.

That’s the alternative to national regime change, as you spoke about earlier — some kind of balkanization or fragmentation of the entire country, unless they were dreaming of Kurds sweeping into Tehran and establishing some type of Kurdish oligarchic regime.

But the US appears interested in breaking up the country if they can’t just take it over, which is quite ironic. Because whenever I have traveled in the region, basically, since 9/11, when the regime change wars really kicked off and things were getting unstable, and then again, after Libya, in 2011, I would just regularly hear talk that the US doesn’t want to promote democracy. What the US wants to do is promote failed states. That’s obviously what it’s doing. That must be their intention. Because look what’s happening in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya. . . . It’s just civil war after civil war.

What’s interesting is that accusation is now boasted about by the Pentagon. Pete Hegseth at one point said, “This is not going to be Germany or Japan or Iraq. It’s not going to be nation-building.”

Then what is it going to be if you’re rejecting those examples? And I think this stoking of separatism shows a way of taking Iran down a peg and accomplishing these objectives of removing it from the map geopolitically or geostrategically, without inserting a US military presence that would be very vulnerable.

America’s Obsession with Iran

It seems to me that the goal really is to simply neutralize Iran as a regional player. If you go back to 9/11, regionally, there were two actors that the United States placed at the top of the list of countries that they felt posed a real challenge to Israeli and American hegemony in the region. Those were Iraq and Iran.

And the invasion of Iraq was always supposed to be just the first step in a two-step dance. It was, yeah, you can invade Iraq, but the slogan was, “but real men go to Tehran.”

This was also true inside the Clinton administration. People like Kenneth Pollack were actually pushing for a dual invasion to take out the dual threat. Syria was there, but Syria was not considered in the same league of states that these two were. The fantasy was that if you took care of these two states, now Israel is unchallenged as the local proxy of American power in that region.

Iraq has in fact been largely neutralized. It is no longer a threat in any kind of way. It has a shaky but real alliance with Iran, but really it’s more as a launching pad for Iranian operations than a threat of its own.

That left Iran as the only remaining player here. And once you have pushed back Hezbollah, as Israel did, and once you’ve dismantled Syria, as they did, my reading of it is that it’s a historically unprecedented opportunity to take on a weakened Iran — after you’ve already had the Twelve-Day War in the summer, where you weakened it to some degree. And the timing is now perfect, where you think that if you can take out Khamenei, there is a small but nontrivial possibility that you might be able to effectuate regime change.

If you can do that, then you have one of two things: either a tremendously weakened but pliant Iran, or an Iran that’s on the way to being essentially disassembled, balkanized, and broken apart. Either way, for the first time since the rise of pan-Arabism, since Gamal Abdel Nasser, you have a Middle East in which the American footprint is unchallenged. That seems to me to be what’s at stake.

Neutralizing Iran, making Iran into the next Syria: that could definitely be part of the game plan. What we have between Iraq and Syria are two models in which the cost and the investment of the United States vary dramatically; but in both instances, you have negative consequences and a lot of potential backlash from interventions, whether it takes the full form of military occupation or really trying to control the country with an American iron fist, or instead with backing proxies and separatists.

Either way, you’re going to end up with a breakup of the state, and that’s going to lead to new militant nonstate actors that could move across borders and launch attacks internationally. Essentially, you’ve come back to creating the very problem that the Bush administration in its early national security strategies was saying the US must absolutely prevent after 9/11.

The lesson after 9/11 was the danger of failed states and weak states is much greater than the danger of actually robust states like Iran, because it’s the failed states where al-Qaeda can hang out. And we learned in the 2010s, it’s the failed states where ISIS can grow. But that is exactly what one should expect if the Iranian state collapses.

What is it that has changed the calculus and the cost-benefit analysis for Trump and the people around him?

Some of it is going to remain opaque and sort of unexplainable and unintelligible. But I do think there’s been a shift since October 7, 2023, first, in Israel’s willingness to assume some risk in getting into these tit-for-tat back-and-forths with Iran. And that has worn down Iran’s conventional deterrent, and I think put us in a different balance of power than we had before October 7. So you’ve got Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel already wearing down Iran’s conventional deterrent.

Then Trump comes in, and during the Twelve-Day War he sees this opportunity to have a dramatic moment and grab some headlines with a mission that was very low risk for the US forces that bombed the three Iranian nuclear facilities. It was low risk because Israel had already worn-down Iranian air defenses, so there wasn’t much chance of Iran shooting down the US aircraft. That would be a big change.

Then Trump’s own calculus about being the center of attention and taking attention away from other issues that may play into this as well, although it’s hard to imagine how this is going to work well for the Republican Party. I shouldn’t say it’s hard to imagine, but at least right now, this doesn’t seem to be a winning move for the Republican Party in the midterms. But I don’t know if Trump really cares much about that.

There is a theory that Trump knows that he’s not going to run for president again, and he doesn’t really care. Maybe that’s true.

My own feeling is that Trump actually prioritizes the operation in Iran. He prioritizes increasing American power in the region, and he genuinely thinks that it’s worth risking the elections for this.

He was showing a sensitivity to the midterms until the attack began. He was showing a sensitivity to winning the midterms because he did have some sense of his legacy and wanting to leave a legacy.

I don’t know if one can say that the reason he’s launched this invasion is that he feels the elections don’t matter anymore. It’s more that I think he thinks they matter more than the elections.

It’s an interesting fact, because it means Trump has aligned with what “the Blob” actually is associated with — this foreign policy establishment that has long-term agendas for projecting American power abroad — which Trump was in many ways contemptuous of in both of his presidential campaigns. He insisted that it’s this — whether you want to call it the deep state or the Blob — that is committed to these forever wars and nation-building and keeps getting the US enmeshed in countries where it has no direct interest.

But it’s pretty amazing that if you look at his foreign policy ventures since he came into power, there’s a big element of traditional neocon ideology that’s associated with it. One of which is, you carry out foreign policy endeavors when the opportunity presents itself, and then you deal with the domestic consequences as a problem of opinion management. But you don’t let public opinion deter you.

This is the first war, the first major invasion that the US has launched probably since World War II, where support for it is abysmally low. He knew that going in, and he launched it anyway. That suggests what he’s saying is, this is an opportunity for us, we’re going to do it, and we’ll deal with the consequences when it comes down to it.

It’s quite a change, not only from his campaign rhetoric but also from his attitude during his first term. The trend historically has been, at least since George W. Bush, and the debates in the year 2000, for presidential candidates to condemn military intervention, because it’s a losing issue on the campaign trail. But then, once they’re in office, they get sucked into the Blob, and they adopt the orthodoxy of the foreign policy establishment.

It’s interesting about Trump in 2017 to 2021. I actually had a local op-ed in January of 2017, when he was inaugurated, where I said, nation-building intervention is kind of a bipartisan tradition going back to William McKinley at this point. So I’ll be really surprised if Trump follows through on his campaign rhetoric and actually breaks from this.

But for four years, in many respects, he did. He made a peace deal with the Taliban. He let Iran launch missiles at our troops in Iraq and didn’t respond to that. It was the biggest ballistic missile attack the US Army had ever suffered; they were just sitting in their base taking hits, and that was the end of it. That was after the assassination of Qasem Soleimani. And there are other examples as well.

But now, absolutely, he seems to be like a neocon — except a neocon without even the sort-of Wilsonian bullshit about promoting democracy and American ideals and how we’re a city on the hill. The neocons Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan would write in the 1990s about a sort of neo-Reaganite foreign policy and at least try to adorn their aggression in some type of civilizational project.

Trump and those around him don’t seem to be embracing that at all. It’s more like just kind of raw coercion and just grinding people down who disagree with them or challenge him or that he just thinks are vulnerable to attack.

The Nation-Building Playbook Doesn’t Apply

Let’s go back to the issue of potential outcomes. It’s pretty clear, and the American foreign policy establishment itself makes no bones about it, that failed states carry enormous risks for both American interests in that region and for the regional allies that they have, the other states who can be vulnerable to attacks by newly emergent forces like ISIS or al-Qaeda before that.

That’s why they’ve always relied on some version of nation-building and regime change to try to ensure that the successor states are going to be a) stable and b) pliant in the appropriate ways, so you get the best of both worlds.

Your analysis is in large measure about the contradictions of that project and why it has led to perhaps unintended but certainly undesirable consequences, even taking American goals into account. What are the institutional and structural forces that, in your analysis, push this kind of regime change into, if not outright failure, then at least incredible contradictions?

One of them is that once you get into the country, whether with boots on the ground at scale or some larger force, and you try to turn the government into a puppet and direct its policies or dictate its policies, you run into a fundamental tension, or really a catch-22. You didn’t like the old regime because they had certain preferences that you disagreed with; but the old regime had, in most cases, some type of societal base. It was actually delivering for people in some way and helping address fundamental material needs, including basic physical safety.

Now you’ve got a new government and leader that you’ve hand-picked. Let’s say, for example, they pick the descendant of the Shah, and they put him in power. Now you have someone who aligns with your preferences, but he has no loyalty in society. On top of that, he has no ability to get things done in society.

Afghanistan is a good example. Hamid Karzai, not even obviously beloved in Washington necessarily, but he was basically hand-picked by the Bush administration. He was the president that US administrations were comfortable with as opposed to the alternatives. And he ended up being known as the mayor of Kabul because he had no authority over the rest of the country. We know how the story ended, with an even less popular successor and then eventually the return of the Taliban to power.

Whether you’re going to recognize it immediately with some type of actual elections, as the US more or less did in Iraq, and allow long-suppressed preferences of the Shia majority in Iraq to be translated into political power, or you’re going to suppress it for as long as possible and then face an insurgency like in Afghanistan, those societal preferences will come back. That’s one of the fundamental reasons why regime change has not worked for the United States, and why the learning curve and the experience from the initial attempt to impose US preferences to the eventual acceptance that this is not going to work ends up being so costly and destructive.

Let me add an element to that. It’s not just that they end up finding somebody who doesn’t have a local anchor. It’s that it’s very hard to find someone who does have a local anchor who will be desirable to the United States.

The reason for that is if you are seen as a belligerent power, invading the country and overthrowing the government, the ticket to having any kind of legitimacy domestically is that you are opposed to the invasion — that you’re opposed to American power being projected in this sort of way. Which means that the people who have local legitimacy are almost always going to be people who have to take a stance against the projection and the imposition of American power.

So you set yourself up structurally that the only people who will be willing to play ball with you are the people who are locally despised.

Basically, you want a popular collaborator. If there isn’t a Philippe Pétain available — if there isn’t a war hero who’s willing to serve a foreign occupier — then you’re out of luck.

Now, how did they pull it off in Japan and in West Germany? We were entering the Cold War, and there was this new threat that got officials and presidents in Washington thinking very flexibly about working and basically giving broad discretion and leeway to recent adversaries.

Don’t forget that both the Nazis and Hirohito had lost an enormous amount of support in those countries by the time the US got in there. This is very different from invading Panama or Iraq, countries that are no threat, where the population doesn’t see your invasion as part of their own liberation.

So, by the time you set up a regime or administration that is acceptable to you, it is identified with a belligerent foreign power that invaded this country for no reason. That makes legitimacy so much more challenging for those countries.

Absolutely. In Japan and West Germany, to the extent that there was a postwar occupation, it was at the end of a much longer process and was not the objective from the outset. These were not regime change wars. In the post-WWII cases, we have this compressed process where the US is basically attacking in order to install a new government.

This has a very interesting implication, which is that the US may not be able to find a successor regime that has any kind of local authority. Reza Pahlavi is their desired outcome, but he’s pretty universally despised in the country because the memories of his father’s regime are still fresh .

If that’s the case, your two potential outcomes are pretty negative even for America’s regional allies. One is that you dismember the state. You dismember it, you dismantle it, and it becomes a failed state — and now a potential location for many kinds of negative outcomes with the rise of local militias or local terrorist groups or something like that.

The second one is that you essentially draw back, call this a mowing the lawn kind of operation, and declare victory in that you’ve pushed the military capacities of the regime back to the point where you can say they no longer pose a threat. But make no mistake: that’s going to be seen as a victory for Iran.

If the regime is left standing, and all that’s happened is that its existing military capacities have been scaled back, because you declared right at the outset that regime change was your goal — and Israel is very clear that it wants regime change — there’s no way to spin this as any kind of victory.

So either you have what is in the public eye a humiliation for Israel and Trump, or you have opened up a Pandora’s box with a dismembered regime. Because the ideal outcome, which is a replacement regime, a kind of nation-building exercise of its own, may not be in the cards for them, which means they’re really stuck.

In terms of the country fragmenting, there are strong reasons so far to think that Iran will prove much more cohesive as a country overall, and as a state, than Syria or Iraq or Libya or some of these other cases that US officials might be looking at. So that outcome of the regime sticking around in some way remains very probable.

It’s really fighting for its survival in terms of the external attack. But internally, we have not seen a major popular uprising. This is not a war that starts like the civil war in Syria, or the NATO intervention in Libya. This is not a war that is sort of boosting and augmenting an indigenous uprising against the government.

In fact, it may very likely help to consolidate the authority of the current government, even as it’s fighting for its survival against foreign states, because Iranians will be looking around at other cases and think, “Okay, do I want to be Syria? Do I want to be a fragmented state, a failed state? Or would I rather some continuation of the Islamic Republic?”

That’s been a calculus that Iranians have faced for decades. It’s part of why the Mohammad Khatami regime and the reform movement fizzled out between 1997 and 2005, because the reformists were not willing to really take on the regime: they feared a second revolution and the uncertainty that that would bring. So even at the height of the reform movement, if the public generally is reticent about radical overhaul and radical transformation of government, all of those concerns are magnified in the context of an international war.

It’s very murky as to what the domestic situation is. But from what information we have, and the experts in the United States — many of whom are expats, some of whom are people who just study Iran — from what they say, there is not an organized opposition right now in the country that is capable of stepping into the breach and organizing some sort of rebellion or quasi-revolution or whatever you want to call it. Which means that if there is a regime change, it’s going to be dictated by the belligerent powers and not by forces on the ground that have domestic legitimacy.

The problem there is Israel is one of the two belligerent powers. Whatever else the United States does, if the successor regime is viewed as having been implanted by Israel, what are the chances it’s going to have any kind of legitimacy whatsoever?

One would think it’ll last about as long as that Iraqi flag that they rolled out that looks a lot like the Israeli flag. We talked about the Pahlavis; in Iraq, of course, there was Ahmed Chalabi. Generally speaking, those who are going to be selling Israel some type of sweetheart deal are not going to be able to have any serious domestic legitimacy. Not only will they lose elections, but they could also lose their lives to violence and such.

One could start ticking off the different groups that could get involved in a free-for-all inside Iran, including the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK) that has long been the darling of neocons — so much that they lobbied for the MEK to be removed from the foreign terrorist organization list.

But to come back to the Kurds and something you mentioned earlier, in terms of this idea of stoking separatism, Iranians do have a pretty strong history of a national identity. This is not a country that was colonized. It’s not a country that was created by the Sykes–Picot Agreement. And to the extent that outside powers such as Saddam Hussein have tried to peel off Iranians through ethnonationalist appeals or ethnic appeals, they’ve generally failed. I’m thinking of the way Hussein, after he invaded Iran in 1980, tried to get Iranian Arabs to kind of come to his side under some idea of Arab nationalism, and that didn’t go anywhere.

So I think we’re in a murky situation, not a good one for any US ambitions of nation-building. Obviously, it’s a very grave situation for tens of millions of Iranians. And we’re talking about a country with roughly three times the population of Iraq or Afghanistan, so just a much larger scale in terms of any notion of political engineering coming out from Washington or anywhere else.

The Imperial Presidency Unleashed

I think we should close with some perspective on what the implications of actions like this are for the American left moving forward. Because what stands out here in this invasion in particular is that it was undertaken with not only no public support but with open contempt toward the other organs of governance like Congress.

We know that the two large protests against Trump were called the No Kings protests. There’s this perception that he’s behaving like a monarch, but there’s a deeper issue at stake here. It’s not just that Trump is, through the force of his personality, usurping the presidency and charging forward, breaking all the laws. This is in fact an imperial presidency institutionally.

What Trump is doing is pushing the boundaries of the law, but the American state is one that over the decades has been built into a structure where presidents in fact can launch aggressive, unprovoked actions abroad without first getting the stamp of approval of Congress and the Senate.

If nothing else, as we come out of this, whether or not there’s an antiwar movement, whether or not there is a resurgence of the Left, at the very least you would think that the institutions of power, the political parties, the garden-variety politicos in the country would try to reassert some sort of control by the organs of governance over a presidency that, when it is taken up by someone like Trump, can be turned into a weapon of mass destruction.

The presidency has become way too powerful, especially after 9/11, but even in earlier decades. And obviously, the legislation that was passed during the Vietnam War, the War Powers Act, which was brought into law over Richard Nixon’s veto, hasn’t done anything. . . . Well, maybe it has done something to constrain presidents, but in general it hasn’t stopped them from launching serious military action.

I’m thinking about Obama in Libya, where the administration basically tacitly recognized that they were in violation of the War Powers Act and had to start saying, “This isn’t war.” Which we’re already hearing a little bit from Trump and Hegseth.

It says something that Congress has to try to pass a whole new resolution just to stop the president from going to war. We’ll see what happens when we’re actually past the sixty-day mark, if hostilities continue that long. But I absolutely agree that the presidency has become far too powerful and fundamentally unconstrained when it comes to the use of force overseas, whether against other countries or against individuals such as with drone strikes, which was really Obama’s stock and trade when it came to counterterrorism.

What this has signaled to other countries is the way to keep the United States in check, the way to keep American presidents in check, is not through America’s own domestic laws and certainly not through international law; obviously the US has a veto on the United Nations Security Council. It’s through building your own military deterrent, nuclear if possible.

And we haven’t talked about North Korea in this conversation, but it’s worth noting that North Korea now stands alone among the original “Axis of Evil” from 2002. I don’t think anyone’s going to go for the trifecta, for the triple crown of regime change, and go after North Korea because of its nuclear deterrent, as well as its substantial conventional deterrent of missiles pointed at Seoul that would inflict carnage, tens of thousands of casualties immediately, even without a nuke.

That’s the message. When you undermine law either domestically in terms of moving away from are supposed to be checks and balances and having Congress controlling not only the purse strings . . . but also, when the United States goes to war, you push other actors into thinking about how to basically impose costs on the back end and make that type of illicit and threatening and dangerous conduct painful for whoever is carrying it out.

What we can say, then, about the domestic scene and the Left here is that the lack of an antiwar movement signals to members of Congress that they don’t really have a price to pay at the polls when they go along with this type of adventure or only rhetorically oppose it.

As for constraining the US presidency over the long term, my concern would be that like after George W. Bush, even if we get some opposition out, even if we get more No Kings protests, and even if there’s some foreign policy and anti-imperialism element that folds into them, that it will quickly become just an anti-Trump movement as soon as there’s a Democrat in office.

That was exactly what happened in 2009. We thought there was the beginning of an antiwar movement. It turned out to just be an anti–George W. Bush movement. You could see that with Democrats being totally fine with Obama’s escalation of the war in Afghanistan and then the way it’s spilled over into Pakistan as well.

And the extraordinary reliance on drones, not only for carrying out hits but hits against an American, for the first time in US history.

Anwar al-Awlaki. He was targeted, of course, and he wasn’t even the first American to be killed. And then when his family, his immediate relatives, went to court, the case was thrown out. We have a tremendously insulated and overpowered presidency, regardless of who’s in office.

What’s striking about that and what should be the broader lesson is, we knew it was bad under Obama and George W. Bush, but if you get someone like Trump, it can get even worse. So one would hope that this experience would teach both parties to want to rein in the presidency.

We’ll see what happens, if there’s any type of serious anti-imperialist kind of bipartisan alliance among Republicans and Democrats. There are sort of strange bedfellows now with MAGA people criticizing this.

He’s put them in a very difficult situation. What’s clear so far is that Trump acted so impetuously that it has left him with very few exit options. And if this thing drags out, if it actually keeps going, you could see things start to move domestically.

You might be able to even see an articulation of demands and goals that go beyond simply reining in Trump and people starting to think about the institutional foundation that enables him to carry out actions like this. So we can only hope.

Let’s hope for that.