American Folly in the New Age of Gunboat Diplomacy

Illustration by Jonathan Rockford

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On February 28th, the United States of America and the State of Israel initiated a campaign of airstrikes against the Islamic Republic of Iran, eliminating the country’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, and vast swathes of the upper echelons of the Iranian leadership. These two states then progressed on to an effort at degrading Iranian military capabilities and industry. From the outset, it looked like Washington aimed to replicate the rapid success it had seen in its decapitation strike against the Maduro regime in Venezuela while neutralizing the threat to Middle Eastern stability that Iran’s nuclear and conventional weapons programs represent. The latter objective would be achieved through undermining Iranian efforts to reconstruct their ballistic missile program and deterring any progress towards a nuclear weapon. Months later, it looks more and more like any American ambitions of obtaining a quick strategic victory in Iran along those lines were predicated on a fundamental misestimation of Iran’s capacity for resistance.

On the political front, the regime remains intact and, in fact, more willing to resist American efforts to facilitate its overthrow or force any major change in its behavior. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and paramilitary Basij appear empowered, even while their actual capacities have degraded, leading to a deepening of hardline policy. On the military front, Iran has leveraged its asymmetric advantages against the US to a profound effect. Tehran has blockaded the Strait of Hormuz, thus disrupting global shipping and sending oil prices soaring, while also using its Shahed drones to inflict damage on US and Israeli assets, attacking Iran’s Persian Gulf neighbors to boot.

In the coming days and weeks, there may be a negotiated settlement or a further escalation of the conflict. The actual progression towards some kind of agreement is something that the eyes of the global public have rarely seen, outside of recent talks in Pakistan as part of an abortive ceasefire. This has created a dynamic where it’s difficult to assess whether or not they even have a remote likelihood of success. Escalation would likely include tit-for-tat strikes by the Iranians and the Gulf States on each others’ energy infrastructure and desalination plants, as foreshadowed by previous developments. This would be coupled with something like an attempted takeover of the Iranian military complex at Kharg Island and/or the Strait of Hormuz by the US, moving beyond the existing American blockade, in addition to the continuation of Israel’s airstrikes and operations against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.

Regardless of where this conflict is headed, it is worth considering how American strategy has impacted the actual play-by-play of the conflict in order to assess how the current situation developed. To a large extent, the current war is the direct product of a desire to promote full-on regime change premised on opportunistically attacking at a time when the Islamic Republic appeared weak. As international media have extensively documented, US President Donald Trump originally threatened intervention after the Iranian regime’s brutal crackdown on widespread protests began in late January. These protests, stemming from frustrations with Iran’s recent economic downturn, saw the heavy involvement of figures like Reza Pahlavi, the exiled crown prince of Iran, in catalyzing protests and coordinating some international anti-regime efforts. Public life was fully disrupted, protests grew violent, and the regime responded with what amounts to a brutal politicide: likely killing more than thirty thousand protestors, hunting wounded dissidents down in hospitals, and imprisoning many thousands more.

It was assessed by Iranian experts like Karim Sadjadpour that no actual regime change would come from these particular protests, barring the sudden defection of security forces like the conventional military, the Artesh, from the regime. Regardless, the way they proceeded proved that the Islamic Republic was highly vulnerable and could no longer rely on anti-Western nationalism and national security as an airtight source for legitimacy. After all, the regime casting protestors as Western stooges failed to stymie further participation. In the midst of this, Washington and Jerusalem likely perceived an opportunity to incapacitate the regime militarily and kill its most prominent leaders. It was believed that, then, either their successors would calculate that capitulation was in their best interests or a new, more vigorous popular uprising would start, with enhanced potential to overthrow the regime.

In this, both Israel and the US fatally miscalculated. They failed to apprehend the extent of the regime’s entrenchment in Iranian society, as well as its capacity for resistance along the aforementioned asymmetric line. The result has been a turn towards a longer war, now concluding its second month. Behind this failure, there is a fundamental strategic sickness, one that comes out of the specific policy preferences Trump has avowed and a failure to appreciate the limits of American military power, one which I have previously discussed.

Late last year, I proposed a new foreign policy paradigm for the US premised on leveraging the proximity of America’s allies to major destabilizing challenges as a means of mitigating their effect. I called this approach “sponsorial hegemony” and cast it against comparatively wrong-headed kinds of unilateralism that the US has previously pursued. This would mean giving less powerful countries aligned with the United States the room and resources necessary for deterring aggressive policy actions by states opposed to American and allied interests, while also creating ways for stable commerce and diplomacy to continue in their respective regions. While I was cautiously hopeful for what the Trump administration could achieve via its possible employment of sponsorial hegemony, it seems clear to me that it has little interest in recalibrating in that direction. Instead, we are seeing something I feared: a movement towards the revival of 19th-century gunboat diplomacy.

Gunboat diplomacy is an interventionist method of foreign policy premised on using limited military actions to either destabilize a foe or extract a certain concession or set of concessions from them. This policy was traditionally the domain of globe-spanning empires, like the British, prior to the creation of the post-World War II international system, and it gave way to multilateral military action and/or extended interventions on the part of major superpowers, as in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. To a large extent, this was a positive change, as the insistence on multilateral and democratic consultations before an intervention made certain powers less likely to engage in interventions while creating a way for states that did pursue unilateral action to see immediate economic and political consequences for their actions, either at a ballot box influenced by the global public square or in the form of increased isolation. In another sense, the fixation on large-scale operations with open-ended ambitions like “nation-building” produced risks of long-run strategic miscalculation and the constant risk of the US biting off more than it could chew, leading to notable failures, something which has directly motivated the turn towards gunboat diplomacy.

What is lost in the pursuit of this new mission is a capacity for risk management. Now fully abandoning the Powell Doctrine, the US and Israel proceeded with these strikes without seeking international support for military action or coordination with Persian Gulf allies. As a result, Iran’s deployment of a decentralized “mosaic defense” and its initiation of a widespread campaign of airstrikes and commercial disruption against its neighbors expanded the conflict.

Now, with further destruction potentially on the horizon, a rethink of American foreign policy’s current descent into gunboat diplomacy appears worthwhile. The emerging multipolar world is extremely complex. A simplistic foreign policy built on ham-fisted intervention cannot deal with this new international system in a comprehensive way. The US carries along with its desire to revive the style of 19th-century imperialism at its – and all the world’s – peril, and one can only hope for a change of course.

Nikolas Vacano is a master’s candidate in international security at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs, specializing in the study of geoeconomics and grand strategy.

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