The Pathos of Power

What B2's Cannot Achieve

The B2 Stealth bomber is as potent a symbol of a country’s power as any President could wish for. Last week, it flew 18 hours from Missouri, dropped the world’s deadliest non-nuclear munitions on the Iranian nuclear sites and returned home, with Iranian air defence unable to fire a shot in reply. The B 2’s success had immediate effects. Iran quickly accepted a cease-fire, and Vladimir Putin in Moscow and Xi Jing Ping in China awoke to the reality that they should not make the mistake of believing ‘Trump Always Chickens Out’. No wonder the President was in a benign mood at the NATO meetings in the Hague this week. Using force can be very satisfying to a leader whose need for psychic reinforcement is bottomless.

Unfortunately for the President, the B 2 strikes on Iran illuminate another truth. The kinetic effects of military force—the damage it does—are frequently in inverse proportion to its political benefits. The more damage you do to the prized assets of a regime like Iran’s, the more it confirms its hatred of Israel and the United States. The more you degrade its nuclear program, the more it convinces Iran’s leaders that they were right to want nuclear weapons in the first place. The more you bomb a regime that is hated by many of its people, the more you rally the regime’s loyalists to its side. After the strikes, , as Ali Shamkhani, a senior advisor to Iran’s Supreme Leader, observed: “enriched materials, indigenous knowledge and political will remain.” When the regime manages to put these three elements together, a bomb will surely emerge-- and soon.

The Iranian regime remains in place, there is no evidence it is coming apart, and therefore, the B2’s may delay but they cannot stop Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon. Nor can the US bring about regime change. Regime change isn’t possible from the air, and it isn’t possible on the ground either. Military misadventures in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya have taught America and its allies that they can’t win over the allegiance of a people they invade, and without their allegiance, no outside power stands a chance of creating a country its people will be willing to defend.

Twenty years ago, when I was in Iran, I met many young Iranians who detested the regime, but I didn’t meet anyone who wanted a new regime imposed on them by Israel or the Americans. They longed for freedom, but they knew they would have to achieve it on their own, without outside interference.

So there is a pathos that attaches to military force. It is the ultimate symbol and expression of national power, and at the same time, its exercise brings nations face to face with what force alone can never accomplish.

It can take a long time for great power to grasp the pathos of the power that they possess. In the short run victory always blinds victors to the limits of what military power can achieve. It is defeat that teaches the real lessons. It was American defeat in Vietnam that taught the American public and its leaders to be wary of military adventures overseas, a lesson which Americans have recurrently forgotten since then.

Israel is currently rejoicing in what their military has achieved. It has crushed Iran’s proxies—Hezbollah, the Houthis and Hamas--and turned Gaza into a desert. European public opinion and American campuses are loud in condemnation, but Israel believes it can ignore these moralizing voices. It has America on its side, and its own neighbors, Jordan, Egypt, the Gulf States, Syria and Saudi Arabia, are secretly glad to see Iran’s proxies defeated. Ritual condemnations of Israel’s conduct in Gaza by the ‘international community’—that pious fiction—can be safely ignored.

Israelis believe that the only security guarantee they can trust in a hostile world is their own military. To negotiate, with anybody, is to display weakness. The horror of October 7 has convinced them that to live in peace again, they must be feared. Peace in the Middle East, they know from experience, is measured not in years, but in months or weeks, and they will claim, after their twelve-day war against Iran, and their two-year war against Hamas, that they have gained some unspecified years of quiet, if not peace. In their neighbourhood, that is the most they can hope for.

But those Israelis who refuse to live in a state of wilful blindness know that their campaign of relentless force has made enemies of an entire generation of children and young adults. Lethal violence leaves traumatic memory in its wake, and from these memories young Gazans have of being bombed, of being terrified, of losing their mother and father, nothing good can come. Sooner or later, those young Gazans will want revenge, and the cycle of violence will start again.

That is the long-term nemesis that threatens military success for Israel. In the short term American and Israeli power dominate the region. They have weakened the state-sponsored terror that originated in Tehran, and as a result, there is a new equilibrium in the Middle East. President Trump has ended America’s traditional role of balancing and deterring competing rivals in the region. He has also ended America’s long-standing support for a Palestinian state. The new equilibrium that military force has achieved is based on fear of Israel and its American ally. Fear does create order, but it cannot create peace. For peace, other emotions and qualities must take root among leaders and their citizens alike: regret, forgiveness, reconciliation and recognition. The last week has pushed these emotions—and the movement towards peace that they set in motion-- further away than ever.