Project For The End Of The American Century
Uberhawk Robert Kagan Says Iran Has Delivered 'Total Defeat' To USA. If So, What Then?
You’re going to need to sit down for this one. It’s a short essay by Robert Kagan, an uberhawk and one of the most elite of the neoconservative elites. As Arnaud Bertrand wrote in introducing the essay on his X account:
Are you ready? Let’s go. Here’s Kagan:
It’s hard to think of a time when the United States suffered a total defeat in a conflict, a setback so decisive that the strategic loss could be neither repaired nor ignored. The calamitous losses suffered at Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, and throughout the Western Pacific in the first months of World War II were eventually reversed. The defeats in Vietnam and Afghanistan were costly but did not do lasting damage to America’s overall position in the world, because they were far from the main theaters of global competition. The initial failure in Iraq was mitigated by a shift in strategy that ultimately left Iraq relatively stable and unthreatening to its neighbors and kept the United States dominant in the region.
Defeat in the present confrontation with Iran will be of an entirely different character. It can neither be repaired nor ignored. There will be no return to the status quo ante, no ultimate American triumph that will undo or overcome the harm done. The Strait of Hormuz will not be “open,” as it once was. With control of the strait, Iran emerges as the key player in the region and one of the key players in the world. The roles of China and Russia, as Iran’s allies, are strengthened; the role of the United States, substantially diminished. Far from demonstrating American prowess, as supporters of the war have repeatedly claimed, the conflict has revealed an America that is unreliable and incapable of finishing what it started. That is going to set off a chain reaction around the world as friends and foes adjust to America’s failure.
Bob Kagan wrote that. Bob Kagan! Let me give you a sample from his piece about why he has reached that Götterdammerungy conclusion. Kagan talks about how he has no idea why a regime (Iran’s) that survived 37 days of pounding, including the elimination of its senior officials, and still hasn’t conceded an inch, would do so with anything else the US has to throw at it. Kagan:
The risk calculus that forced Trump to back down a month ago still holds. Even if Trump were to carry out his threat to destroy Iran’s “civilization” through more bombing, Iran would still be able to launch many missiles and drones before its regime went down—assuming it did go down. Just a few successful strikes could cripple the region’s oil and gas infrastructure for years if not decades, throwing the world, and the United States, into a prolonged economic crisis. Even if Trump wanted to bomb Iran as part of an exit strategy—looking tough as a way of masking his retreat—he can’t do that without risking this catastrophe.
More:
But any resolution other than America’s effective surrender holds enormous risks that Trump has not so far been willing to take. Those who glibly call on Trump to “finish the job” rarely acknowledge the costs. Unless the U.S. is prepared to engage in a full-scale ground and naval war to remove the current Iranian regime, and then to occupy Iran until a new government can take hold; unless it is prepared to risk the loss of warships convoying tankers through a contested strait; unless it is prepared to accept the devastating long-term damage to the region’s productive capacities likely to result from Iranian retaliation—walking away now could seem like the least bad option. As a political matter, Trump may well feel he has a better chance of riding out defeat than of surviving a much larger, longer, and more expensive war that could still end in failure.
Defeat for the United States, therefore, is not only possible but likely. Here is what defeat looks like.
Per Kagan’s analysis, it includes:
Iran retaining its uranium and nuclear weapons program
Iran maintaining control of the Strait of Hormuz, giving it a thumb on the carotid artery of the global economy. This makes Iran much stronger than it was before the US-Israeli war.
Israel finds itself more isolated than ever, and more at Iran’s mercy than before
“All nations that depend on energy from the Gulf will have to work out their own arrangements with Iran. What choice will they have? If the United States with its mighty Navy can’t or won’t open the strait, no coalition of forces with just a fraction of the Americans’ capability will be able to, either.”
Conclusion:
The American defeat in the Gulf will have broader global ramifications as well. The whole world can see that just a few weeks of war with a second-rank power have reduced American weapons stocks to perilously low levels, with no quick remedy in sight. The questions this raises about America’s readiness for another major conflict may or may not prompt Xi Jinping to launch an attack on Taiwan, or Vladimir Putin to step up his aggression against Europe. But at the very least America’s allies in East Asia and Europe must wonder about American staying power in the event of future conflicts.
The global adjustment to a post-American world is accelerating. America’s once-dominant position in the Gulf is just the first of many casualties.
Do read the whole thing. It’s going to be a while before it sinks in. Again: Kagan is the utter opposite of a peacenik. But his hawkish ideology has come up hard against reality. Donald Trump was supposed to be the GOP’s answer to the bellicose hubris of the neoconservative-led Republican Party. And he turned out to be far more reckless and bellicose than those Republicans he condemned!
I hope Kagan’s verdict is premature, of course. Still, the first thing that comes to my mind is the shock defeat of the Imperial Russian navy by the Japanese in their 1904-05 war. Russia expected to wipe the floor with the Japanese. Russia’s loss destroyed the myth of European invincibility (Russia was considered a European power on the world stage then), and back home, forced the Tsar to grant humiliating political concessions that weakened the autocracy. The Tsarist system never recovered from that defeat. We all know what happened in 1917.
Globally, Russia’s defeat sparked a naval arms race among the Great Powers, which contributed to the coming of World War I. We all know what that did too.
Just as few of us ever imagined that Donald Trump would start an unnecessary and unprovoked Middle Eastern war, it is equally hard to imagine that the man whose slogan was “Make America Great Again” will have left the country likely permanently diminished, and will have presided over the end of America’s global hegemony. Even if you thought “MAGA” was nothing more than cheap nostalgic sloganeering, few such critics could have predicted this.
Yet here we are. This could actually be a point of extreme danger, given Trump’s ego. Wolfgang Munchau, a smart German observer of geopolitics, says that the logic of war dictates that Trump should commit to a ground invasion. Munchau is pointedly not saying this should happen, only that it makes a certain sense. He writes that if Trump were to agree to any conceivable peace arrangement with Iran:
Even the best possible deal, from a US perspective, is inferior to anything they could have had — had they not gone to war.
Munchau’s basic argument is that the political costs to Trump for cutting and running would be worse than ramping up with a ground invasion:
The decisive argument that persuaded Trump was the idea that the costs of not acting would outweigh the costs of fighting. What has changed since is that the cost of the war is higher than Trump anticipated. But as I’ve explained, the cost of chickening out are higher still. Since the US is unlikely to achieve a military victory over Iran before November anyway, the President has only a few imperfect options left. A longer-term triumph over the Islamic Republic would destroy one of the most horrendous regimes on earth, a regime which imposes tolls on global shipping in defiance of international law, and which may one day develop nuclear weapons. A skillful communicator, which at his best Trump is, should not struggle to explain this.
I don’t have the slightest confidence that at this point, Trump could sell the American people on the wisdom of a ground invasion of Iran. This doesn’t at all mean that Trump won’t make that very move! Would he really be willing to allow himself to go down as the last president of the American Century (the term of art for the post-WW2 era dominated by the United States).
(N.B., Robert Kagan’s hawkish think tank, the Project for a New American Century, has as its goal creating the conditions to extend American hegemony into the post-Cold War era. The three events that, in my view, destroyed the idea of a New American Century are 1) the US, via economic globalism, setting China up to become the dominant global economic power; 2) the failed Iraq War; and 3) the failed Iran War.)
Trump never troubled himself to make a sustained case to the American people for the necessity of war on Iran. Yes, we all know why he launched the war. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about him making the effort to do as George W. Bush did before the US went into Iraq: going all-out on every front — public relations, diplomatic, all of it — to make the case for that war. This is why on the day bombs began falling over Baghdad in 2003, 72 percent of the American people backed the war.
It was a bad war, as most of us agree now, but give Bush credit for realizing that his government could not undertake such a massive operation without the political backing of the American people. Iran was always going to be a far, far more serious enemy than Saddam’s Iraq ever was. But Trump just barreled into it.
Munchau is certainly correct that if Trump cuts and runs now, it will mean the effective end of his presidency. But what if Trump does what Munchau suggests that logic indicates? Here, according to Munchau, is what we would be facing:
The scale would necessarily be enormous. Iran has 610,000 active soldiers, including the Revolutionary Guards. On top of this they have 350,000 reserves. Israel has 170,000 troops. A ground invasion would therefore necessarily involve hundreds of thousands of US soldiers, all of whom would first have to be mobilized, something that would take months.
So, we would be facing up to one million Iranians, fighting on their own land. Not great. Here is Nate Silver’s chart aggregating opinion polling on the war:
Does Munchau really believe that a politician as polarizing as Donald Trump really has it within him to sell a population that has never been close to approving of this war, even at the beginning, on a ground invasion? I can’t see it. What’s more, the only Americans who support the war today are Republicans, and some independents. Can you imagine being a Republican senator or Congressman up for re-election, having to campaign during a time of economic pain, because of the oil shock, and as US troops are mobilizing for a ground invasion? It would be a political suicide mission.
It would be hard even if US victory were assured. But US victory is by no means assured. What’s more, before going down, the Iranian regime would destroy everything it possibly could in terms of the Mideast’s petroleum infrastructure, plunging the world into an economic depression.
I could be wrong, but I see Trump chickening out in the face of those odds. If he doesn’t TACO, then God help us all. One way or the other, I can’t see any good way out of this for the United States.
I’m listening now to the audiobook version of Joseph Roth’s 1932 novel The Radetzky March, which I first read a decade or so ago. It’s a terrific book, one of the best novels I’ve ever read. It is a saga about the decline and fall of the Habsburg Empire, as told through the lives of three generations of the von Trottas, a Slovenian family. One of the book’s deepest lessons is that a political order cannot outlive the inability of the people who live within it to believe in the myth, or myths, that support it.
In the Roth novel, by the third generation — Carl Joseph, the von Trotta son who serves in the Austrian military in the years leading up to World War I — fewer and fewer Austrians believe in the imperial myth. There’s a haunting, lengthy passage about a pistol duel of honor. The duel is so stupid: nobody really believes that “honor” requires men to risk their lives in that way, but the officers are so trapped in the ritual formalities of a decaying system that they see no way out. What one sees as the novel plays out — and by the way, Roth was nostalgic for the Habsburgs, but did not let that fond feeling get in the way of his clear-eyed observations — is an entire social, cultural, and political order dying from lack of interest.
It looks great from the outside, but inside, it’s rotten. You also see this in Stefan Zweig’s memoir The World of Yesterday, though not told as elegiacally. As you may or may not know, the Austrian army performed badly in World War I, and often had to be bailed out by the Germans. Over one million Austrians died in the war, with total casualties more than twice that. It’s hard to say how much of this was down to sheer incompetence, or was the result of a loss of vigor and vitality, as illustrated by Roth’s novel (Roth served in the Austro-Hungarian army, but never saw combat). Roth dramatizes how as Kaiser Franz Joseph aged into decrepitude, so did his imperial system.
What does any of this say about America? Nobody can deny that the United States remains the most powerful military force on the earth, and with the possible exception of China, has the most powerful economy. We are not Austria-Hungary. I’m more interested in the role of myth in undergirding the nation.
I’m old enough to remember our Bicentennial celebrations in 1976. The US was going through a hard decade then. We had withdrawn humiliatingly from Vietnam, and the year before, Richard Nixon had resigned in disgrace. Nevertheless, there was so much pride back then in America, and it really came out in the Bicentennial year. Every night on TV, there was the “Bicentennial Minute,” in which some famous person recounted historical events on that very day 200 years earlier. They began on July 4, 1974, and ran through December 31, 1976, with President Ford delivering the final one. Even as dismal as the economy was, there was such a sense of pride in the nation’s achievements.
This year, our 250th, there is nothing like that. You’d hardly know the year had any real importance. Even though we are in far better shape economically than we were in 1976, something has died, don’t you think? You could blame woke teachers for poorly educating younger generations, teaching them to doubt America, or whatever, but I don’t think that gets you very far. I think this decay has many fathers, but it’s definitely there, and I’m not sure how we turn it around.
In 1976, the country elected Jimmy Carter, who failed as president. Then, after the Iran crisis, Ronald Reagan came to power — the cruel Iranians released the hostages minutes after Carter left office — and revived the American spirit ground down by the grim economy and the national humiliation of the Iran hostage crisis. I hope I’m wrong, but I just don’t see that we have it within us, as a people, to come back like that again. Most Americans have lost a lot of faith in institutions over the past fifty years, and you can’t command people to believe.
We all know a core myth of America, called “the American Dream”. It’s the belief that in America, you can go as far as your talents and your willingness to work hard will take you. That, and the sure confidence that your children will live better than you do. There was reason to believe that, too, especially in the post-WW2 period. But, as historian Peter Turchin has pointed out, that period of great social mobility, relatively low inequality, social stability, and broad prosperity came to an end sometime around the late 1970s.
Yes, America grew a lot richer from 1980s till today but those gains were concentrated in the upper tier. The American college lecturer (a conservative!) with whom I dined on Sunday lamented that people who take the booming stock market as the only meaningful sign of America’s economic health are completely ignoring how fragile and unstable daily life feels for more and more Americans. She talked about how her dad, who is not much older than I am (meaning, he’s in his 60s), was able to pay his way through college with summer jobs. That’s unthinkable today. She says that she sees so many young people expensively educated for jobs that aren’t there, or aren’t likely to remain for long.
It was at that point I told her about Turchin’s theory of “elite overproduction” as the main catalyst for revolutionary upheaval. This figures prominently in the final chapter of my Weimar America book. Basically, Turchin’s analysis of history finds that the main driver (though not the only one) of revolutionary upheavals throughout history has been the inability of a system to meet middle-class aspirations. In Weimar Germany’s case, as I’ve been writing in this space, the collapse of faith of young, educated, middle-class men in democracy caused them to rush into the arms of Hitler. They had grown up in a highly unstable decade, and did not have the kinds of roots and faith in institutions that might have given them the ballast to hold on through hard times.
Fortunately, the US has over 200 years of democratic tradition to rely on, but how much is that likely to keep our collective ship steady through the very rough waters ahead? We will see. It is not a good sign that here, in the 250th year since the birth of our nation, very few people seem to care about that noble and glorious history. Think of it: we roughly as close in time today to Obama’s second inaugural as Americans in 1976 were to the JFK assassination … not to mention the killings of MLK and RFK, the Vietnam War spasms, and Watergate. And still, Americans found reason to celebrate the nation’s milestone birthday! The Spirit of ‘76 just ain’t with us, even though we have done pretty well overall since 1976.
Maybe it has to do with the dying of collective memory of the great victory over Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Maybe it has to do with the story educators have chosen to tell to American students since around 1976. According to a 2008 study (the link takes you to a Smithsonian magazine article by one of the professors who conducted it):
For today’s teens, the most famous American in history is...the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., appearing on 67 percent of all lists. Rosa Parks was close behind, at 60 percent, and third was Harriet Tubman, at 44 percent. Rounding out the top ten were Susan B. Anthony (34 percent), Benjamin Franklin (29 percent), Amelia Earhart (23 percent), Oprah Winfrey (22 percent), Marilyn Monroe (19 percent), Thomas Edison (18 percent) and Albert Einstein (16 percent). For the record, our sample matched within a few percentage points the demographics of the 2000 U.S. Census: about 70 percent of our respondents were white, 13 percent African-American, 9 percent Hispanic, 7 percent Asian-American, 1 percent Native American.
For comparison, the researchers gave the same exercise (asking them to list the ten most famous Americans in the nation’s history, excluding presidents and their wives) to 2,000 adults aged 45 and over:
What about the gap between our supposedly unmoored youth and their historically rooted elders? There was not much of one. Eight of the top ten names were identical. (Instead of Monroe and Einstein, adults listed Betsy Ross and Henry Ford.) Among both kids and adults, neither region nor gender made much difference. Indeed, the only consistent difference was between races, and even there it was only between African-Americans and whites. Whites’ lists comprised four African-Americans and six whites; African-Americans listed nine African-American figures and one white. (The African-American students put down Susan B. Anthony, the adults Benjamin Franklin.)
Trying to take the national pulse by counting names is fraught with problems. To start, we know little about our respondents beyond a few characteristics (gender, race/ethnicity and region, plus year and place of birth for adults). When we tested our questionnaire on kids, we found that replacing “important” with “famous” made little difference, but we used “famous” with adults for the sake of consistency. Prompting for women’s names obviously inflated their total, though we are at a loss to say by how many.
But still: such qualifications cannot mist the clarity of consensus we found among Americans of different ages, regions and races. Eighty-two years after Carter G. Woodson founded Negro History Week, Martin Luther King Jr. has emerged as the most famous American in history. This may come as no surprise—after all, King is the only American whose birthday is celebrated by name as a national holiday. But who would have predicted that Rosa Parks would be the second most named figure? Or that Harriet Tubman would be third for students and ninth for adults? Or that 45 years after the Civil Rights Act was passed, the three most common names appearing on surveys in an all-white classroom in, say, Columbia Falls, Montana, would belong to African-Americans? For many of those students’ grandparents, this moment would have been unimaginable.
I found out about the existence of this 2008 survey when I watched this clip from a new two-part Matt Walsh special on the Civil Rights movement; it popped up on my X feed. It purports to tell the hidden truth of the movement. I had not realized until I saw that five-minute clip that the MLK family keeps incredibly strict controls on how his image is discussed. You can’t even use clips of the “I Have A Dream” speech without the family’s consent! I figured that when Civil Rights Movement historian and prize-winning MLK biographer David J. Garrow had to turn to a British magazine to publish his excruciating historical essay on King’s disgusting behavior with women, based on FBI surveillance records, it was because no US publication would touch it for political reasons. That may be, but it could also be that publications feared a lawsuit from the King family.
Anyway, the author of that piece about the 2008 survey points out that it cannot be that only educators from the 1970s onward contributed to the revolutionary change of names on that kind of list. He acknowledges that the entire culture shifted towards a more black-centric, female-centric view of American history. He’s right about that, and this is in some ways a good thing, given how past generations erased them. But when you have generations who have forgotten about the importance of the Founders, of Lincoln and the Civil War generals, and Dead White Men like that … well, is there any surprise that Americans don’t have a lot of interest in their country’s 250th birthday?
So, the myth of the Founding — and I use “myth” not to mean “a false story,” but rather, a story that gives a semi-sacred meaning to a historical narrative, one that, in the case of a people, tells them who they are — has largely been eclipsed by progressive narratives. It’s not really controversial to claim that the Civil Rights Movement is the more powerful myth in the minds of Americans today — even if they didn’t get a lot of teaching on it in school.
But no myth is forever. The fact that Matt Walsh has made a two-part documentary questioning that myth is a sign that even that myth is beginning to die. (Here’s a link to a YouTube video in which he talks about the documentary.) As recently as a decade ago, this would have been taboo. We are now over sixty years past the Civil Rights Act. The passions from that era are passing into memory, for better and for worse. Similarly, as the Second World War — the greatest of modern myths — fades into the past, what historian Alec Ryrie calls “the Age of Hitler” is going with it. Ryrie’s point is that the evil of the Nazi dictator was so overwhelming that his life and example became the founding myth, or anti-myth, of the postwar Western order. Put simply, if people post-1945 wanted to know what the Right Thing To Do was, they would ask themselves, “What would Hitler do?” — then do the opposite.
Ryrie — who describes himself as a liberal — acknowledges in his book that the era defined by the memory of Hitler is ending, and we had better all acknowledge that and think about what this means for our future. (I wrote about Ryrie’s book here.) As you regular readers know, I am extremely worried about the resurgence of racism and anti-Semitism within Generation Z. Nevertheless, we can understand this phenomenon from a neutral position: as the effect of the waning of the power of particular myths over the minds of people.
Myths don’t die easily. If it’s true that the myth of the American Century is finally having a stake put through its heart by the US’s failure to defeat Iran, then that is going to be convulsive as it makes its way through American society in the years to come. As Kagan points out in his Atlantic article, America’s defeat by Iran — and don’t lie to yourself, Iran has jiu-jitsu’d America good and hard — is so tectonic that “there will be no return to the status quo ante, no ultimate American triumph that will undo or overcome the harm done.”
We will still have our freedom, of course. We will still be rich and powerful. But Trump’s folly will have demonstrated that the US is not what it once was, and what many, no doubt most, Americans still think it is. Though I believe my country’s government has done some foolish things over the course of my lifetime, I am certain that a world without America on top will be a more dangerous world. But the die is likely cast. I hope and pray Trump can somehow work a miracle here.
If you’ve been reading me for a while, you might recall my telling you how disconcerting it was to travel through the former Communist countries of this region, in the first couple of years after I moved here, and to be confronted (politely, almost with embarrassment) by older people — Czechs, Poles, Slovaks, et alia — saying some version of this: We used to look up to America. We used to think of you as a beacon of hope. Now we are afraid of you. What happened?
Why afraid? Because of the terrible ideas and trends coming from America, against which they felt defenseless. What they call “gender ideology” — trans — was always at the top of their list, but there were other things. For these people who survived occupation by the hegemon correctly identified by Ronald Reagan as the “evil empire,” the fact that America had become decadent, and had so much power over the minds of their young by virtue of the potency of US popular culture — well, it was disorienting to them, and terribly sad. I came to know that feeling well.
One last thing. I asked Grok to examine history of the last 200 years, and tell me what happened to the internal politics of major powers after they lost a big war. It’s not a good sign. Look:
A major comparative study of 177 war participations by states (1816–1975) found that war involvement itself roughly doubles the baseline rate of violent regime change (revolutions, coups, or overthrows) from ~10% in peacetime nation-years to 18.8%. Among participants:
Losers faced violent regime change in 29.5% of cases (23/78).
Winners saw it in only 9.1% (9/99).
The risk was highest for states that initiated a war and lost (44% probability), followed by losing targets (22%), winning targets (~11%), and winning initiators (near 0%). Higher war costs (e.g., battle deaths per capita) further amplified these risks across the board. These findings underscore that defeat is punished domestically far more than victory is rewarded.
This quantitative pattern aligns with qualitative history. Great powers rarely emerge from major defeats with politics unchanged; the loss exposes weaknesses, fuels blame, and creates openings for radicals, reformers, or opportunists.
More:
In short, history of the past 200 years shows that major military defeat is rarely survivable for the incumbent regime without fundamental political transformation. It accelerates decline, reshapes ideologies, and often rewrites the social contract—sometimes toward democracy and reform, sometimes toward extremism or fragmentation. This is a consistent, if sobering, lesson from Napoleon’s France to the modern era.
I’ve been telling you — and I believe demonstrate pretty conclusively in my manuscript — that the parallels between the US in the 2020s and Germany in the 1920s are chilling. I’m talking about the psychosocial instability, mostly. If this Iran situation ends as Bob Kagan thinks it will, then honestly, I don’t know what is going to happen in the US, in terms of domestic politics. Obviously Trump and the GOP will pay a heavy price, but one has to wonder if the fallout will be much deeper and broader. History does not give us much reason to be confident. We’d better hope that America is an exceptional nation in this regard.
Barring the hoped-for miracle, Trump’s Iran hubris appears to be bringing nemesis, hard. Maybe the only hope we have for avoiding real chaos at home comes in Joseph Roth’s penetrating line about how the Great War changed the quality of cultural memory by making people eager to forget the past, which was a time when memory mattered: “But everything that had once existed left its traces, and people [back then] lived on memories just as they now live on the ability to forget quickly and emphatically.”
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