A divided and distracted America edges towards another major Middle East war

As the world watches and waits to see whether the conflict between Israel and Iran escalates into a wider war and whether the United States gets more directly involved, Americans remain sharply divided and mostly distracted by events closer to home, for now.

US President Donald Trump met with his top national security team in the White House situation room yesterday to discuss policy options, hinting that he did not leave the G7 meeting in Canada a day early to work on diplomacy for a cease-fire but for something “much bigger than that.” He used his unique brand of troll power to hurl threats at Iran’s leaders over social media and offer support to Israel.

Most foreign policy experts in America did what they do best these days: gather in their comfortable echo chambers to engage in left-versus-right tribal politics blended with neo-Orientalism.

But this time the dividing lines do not fit neatly along a Democrat-Republican partisan divide — and the sum total of these usually caustic debates has been less than the individual parts when it comes to strategic insights about the best pathways forward for America on the complicated issue of Iran.

The state of the union is fragmented

Millions of Americans took to the streets in protests across the country a day after Israel launched bold strikes against Iran’s military leadership and nuclear infrastructure and Iran retaliated with ballistic missiles and drones of its own.

But they were not protesting the war or the increasing chances that America’s military might get directly involved. These “No Kings” rallies, coming about a month after Trump visited three monarchies in the Middle East, were focused on Trump’s harsh immigration policies and other concerns about the president’s power grab and executive branch overreach that continue to strain America’s political system.

Unlike the 2003 Iraq war or the earlier 1991 Gulf War, when Americans marched in the street voicing opposition or support, the broader public debate about the risk of another Middle East war has for now largely been pushed to the sidelines of the national debate, constrained mostly to draft Congressional resolutions with low probability of passing and remarks by members of Congress. If America gets more deeply involved in another war, this relative inattention at the public level could shift quickly — and it will likely do so in an environment where the country remains sharply divided on most key public policy issues. America’s adversaries and competitors in the world continuously seek to exploit such divisions to their advantage.

On the issues closer to home, like the economy and immigration, American voters remain sharply divided along traditional partisan lines, although overall support for his policies is slipping. The stalemate in the Republican-controlled Congress over Trump’s budget and tax bill, which now faces 2-to-1 opposition among Americans, is yet another sign of Trump 2.0’s inability to get big things done in a way that produces gains for America’s economy and security, matching the president’s overall weak record on foreign policy five months into his second administration.

Republicans: MAGA-Trump divisions

Trump’s hints that the United States might agree to carry out direct military strikes against Iran have sparked a major fight within the Republican Party over what it stands for on national security, as leading conservative thinker Bill Kristol recently told my Middle East Institute colleague Gonul Tol on her must-listen-to podcast, Rethinking Democracy.

A fierce fight has erupted on the political right over what Trump might do on Iran, pitting elected GOP officials against Make America Great Again (MAGA) pundits like Tucker Carlson who are skeptical of US military intervention in the continued fracturing of whatever remains of a foreign policy consensus among Republicans.

These divisions are not new. A major split emerged within the Republican camp on foreign policy more than a decade ago in response to the unpopularity of then-President George W. Bush’s foreign policy approach, as neo-isolationist voices became more organized and vocal inside of the Republican Party. The quick end of Trump’s political honeymoon in the opening months of his second term, with his approval rating sharply underwater now for two months, creates even more incentives for Republican voices to defect and split from the president, particularly if he takes more steps out of sync with the base and the broader American public.

Democrats: Stuck in the past, fighting the last battles

Democrats are facing major political divisions of their own, which the party has not yet been able to bridge on a range of issues beyond foreign policy and the Middle East. The absence of clear leadership, combined with internal factionalism on a set of social and economic policy topics, has forced the party into a mode where it is reacting to the frame set by Trump on all issues, including the Middle East.

Here, the Democratic Party’s main deficit is a lack of new ideas on foreign policy, especially Iran. Most elected Democrats or leading foreign policy voices in this camp speaking about the Israel-Iran war sound a lot like Shoichi Yokoi, the Japanese soldier who fled to the jungles of Guam and surrendered 27 years after World War II ended. Stuck in the past fighting battles that concluded years ago, these voices advocate for an Iran nuclear deal that was signed about a decade ago — but their ideas mostly have no ability to capture the imaginations of those outside of their own closed circles, because they have little connection to the new reality unfolding in the Middle East.

America: Its own worst enemy in geopolitics

In the bigger picture, the United States remains a strong military and economic power, and its diplomatic weight is still considerable despite Trump 2.0’s unilateral disarmament campaign to gut and cut key institutions. The biggest deficit the US faces as it stands on the brink of another Middle East war is its own internal divisions. But this is sharply exacerbated by the lack of effective leadership and credible opinion leaders to build new coalitions and come up with fresh ideas relevant to a changing geopolitical landscape.

America is led by a president who engages in the politics of division and subtraction. He consciously divides people into different camps in order to create more leverage to do what he decides to do. But this fragments and shrinks the coalitions needed to take on big challenges like Iran. Trump’s domestic opposition engages in similar tactics, which further splits the country and increasingly leaves a growing number of Americans feeling discontent with the two main parties.

The irony about the current politics of division in America when it comes to Iran is that a pathway is open to build a new consensus. Three-quarters of Americans see Iran under its current leadership as either an enemy or unfriendly, though a strong majority of Americans do not think the US military should get involved in the conflict. At the same time, there is significant support for engaging in diplomacy with Iran over its nuclear program — 56 percent favor negotiations, and only 18 percent oppose the idea, according to a recent poll.         

A better policy and political approach should instead focus on adding to the domestic coalitions and leading different camps to work together on a new Iran policy — one that avoids wider escalation in the region but also one that does not engage in passive appeasement of the Iranian regime.

 

Brian Katulis is a Senior Fellow at the Middle East Institute.

Photo by Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images