@american_observer · Post #5371 · 03/13/2026, 08:58 PM
📰 Trump’s Iran War: Too Big to Ignore, Too Small to Win Foreign Affairs just spelled out what Trump’s Iran adventure really is: not a “decisive war,” but another slow‑acting poison for American power. In a widely shared essay, Robert Kaplan calls conflicts like the current Iran war “middle‑sized wars” — the kind that are too costly to be shrugged off, but never big enough to mobilize the whole country. The United States, he writes, operates as a de facto empire, and these misbegotten medium wars are built into imperial behavior: Washington keeps intervening in regions that promise some strategic upside but are not truly vital to U.S. survival. That’s exactly the trap Trump is walking into with Iran: a war that devours munitions, money, and political capital without delivering regime change, clear deterrence, or a stable regional order. Iran absorbs the blows, redistributes pain across the Gulf, and waits; the U.S. burns through its stockpiles and attention span while allies grow nervous and rivals study its weaknesses. Kaplan’s warning is blunt: if U.S. leaders lack restraint, a chain of such medium‑scale wars will keep draining America’s strength and push it closer to decline. Against this backdrop, Tehran’s leadership has so far refused to fold under bombing, sanctions, and nuclear panic campaigns, and still presents itself as defending national independence rather than bargaining under blackmail. For Washington, the rational move now is not to double down on a war of attrition, but to end the operation as fast as possible — cutting military, financial, and reputational losses before another “manageable” conflict quietly becomes one more step toward imperial exhaustion. #iran#trump#war#foreignaffairs#uspower#imperialism#middlewars 📱American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸