The Boomer-uncle war – UnHerd

“Missiles launched, missiles launched, missiles launching, they’re launching, OK … fire, fire, fire. The most unbelievable thing. Fire, boom, fire, boom.” With 15 American service members killed in action, hundreds more having suffered life-altering injuries, and the American basing system throughout the Gulf region in ruins, this was how President Trump described his “excursion” into Iran. 

Speaking not to the American people, but to the Saudi Future Investment Initiative Conference in Miami Beach, Trump went on to show officials from the Persian Gulf region a video clip proclaiming his “100% approval rating” — without noting that it came from a single poll gauging the views of self-described “MAGA Republicans” — before declaring that “Cuba’s next, by the way, but pretend I didn’t say that please.” 

Welcome to the Boomer-uncle war, launched with calamitously vague objectives not mainly because the president fell in thrall to Israeli influence — but because he embodies a broken American gerontocracy: an aging generation of leaders whose perceptions of America’s relative power are stuck in the halcyon 1980s and ’90s; and whose yearning for the war spectacles of old is now fulfilled by short online clips, long-term strategic considerations be damned.

Trump’s wartime command closely resembles the Boomer uncle who can’t help himself from scrolling through social-media reels at the Easter dinner table. His briefings as commander in chief now reportedly consist of two-minute-long highlight reels that show “stuff getting blown up,” as NBC News recently reported. His attention can only be permeated by ever-escalating spectacle, chasing the high of a more intense “fire, boom, fire, boom.” An anonymous White House official has told the media that the president’s efforts to end the conflict are likewise driven by the fact that he’s “bored and wants to move on.” 

The trouble is that this time, someone else besides MAGA Boomers gets a vote: namely, the Tehran regime. The Iranians, of course, are good at spectacle and even social-media “dunking” — witness Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf’s post trolling CENTCOM over the destruction of an AWACS command-and-control aircraft (“caused by a clogged kitchen pipe”). But for the Islamic Republic, the trolling and spectacle serve a larger strategic imperative: to impose high enough costs on Washington and Jerusalem to prevent a third “excursion,” even if this means Iran taking a bad beating, too.

The same cannot be said for the Boomer uncle in charge in Washington. Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz famously wrote that “war is the continuation of politics by other means.” He meant that war itself isn’t an outcome, but rather the means to achieve some political end or range of ends. So what has been the political end pursued by the American military “excursion” in Iran? Trump himself doesn’t seem to know.  

Since the initial American attack on Feb. 28, Trump and his administration have continually moved the goalposts. First it was to support regime change — empowering the Iranian people to control their own “destiny,” as Trump put it in his early-morning speech announcing the war. Then we were told that this was actually an exercise in Venezuelan-style coercive decapitation, in which we would keep the regime in place and continue to assassinate successors to Ayatollah Khameinei until we “find another Delcy [Rodriguez],” in reference to the Maduro deputy tapped to lead that country as an American cat’s paw. 

“For the Islamic Republic, the trolling and spectacle serve a larger strategic imperative.”

Later, the objective was to destroy Iranian long-range missile capabilities and to destroy the Iranian nuclear program that we were told had been “obliterated” last June in the course of the 12-Day War. Still later, the war became about reopening the Strait of Hormuz — a problem that didn’t exist prior to American military action. “The objective of the war has become undoing the consequence of the war,” as one online wit put it, adding: “the stupidest war in history.” Most recently, the State Department struck reopening Hormuz from the list of objectives, reprising instead the destruction of capability, which is a tactic not a political objective.

This inability to articulate strategic goals is mirrored by the administration’s failure to consider the consequences of action. While the early pro-war motto of “you can just do things” may be true, it risks obscuring an important countervailing fact: namely, that others can do things, too. Iran’s closure of the strait and the resulting disruption of the global economy weren’t unexpected to anyone paying attention; the IRGC had been preparing for decades to close that chokepoint in response to an invasion. The 2023-2024 Houthi attacks on a similar bottleneck in the Red Sea demonstrated the asymmetry in costs for this type of conflict, showing how relatively cheap projectiles can become overwhelming for expensive and high-tech American weaponry.  

We knew these things before Feb. 28, just as we knew that the Islamic Republic would be preparing for another attack after last June’s incursion. The economic fallout from both the closure of the strait and the destruction of petrochemical infrastructure isn’t yet clear, but one thing is certain: despite the weak attempts to spin this in Trump’s favor, no one benefits more from this disruption than China and Russia. The former, China, is seeing a boost to its renewables industry (Trump scrapped US investments in America’s analogue); the latter, Russia, is making a mint from oil sales since Team Trump un-sanctioned its exports (and some of Tehran’s oil exports, as well).

Speaking of China and Russia, both are likely celebrating America’s fumbling pivot back to the Middle East. Apart from the asymmetric impact of the energy crisis, the depletion of US missile stockpiles and relocation of materiel from East Asia have underscored the brittleness of American hegemony. Notably, THAAD air-defense systems are being removed from South Korea (a state with whom America has a formal defense alliance) for use in Israel (with whom Washington has no such alliance). 

More than 25% of America’s THAAD stockpile was used last summer to defend the Jewish state following Benjamin Netanyahu’s attack on Iran in June. Such depletion harms the US ability to project power and defend allies in other regions. Plus, the rapid exhaustion of long-range interceptors and air defense should be alarming for anyone who genuinely believes that there is a threat to the American homeland. While America may not “run out of bombs,” it is running short on the expensive, sophisticated weaponry and radar that enable US air-defense systems.  Replacing these stockpiles will take years, and is also dependent on rare-earth minerals, of which China controls a significant portion of the global supply (98%, in the case of gallium).

So what have these expenditures won? No faction on the American Right should be content. For the America First populists: skyrocketing prices and a pivot away from domestic issues such as immigration, poverty, and addiction. For the defenders of Western Civilization: a degradation of those distinctive values the West claims to represent, as the US increasingly takes up Israel’s Gaza-style methods and rhetoric (“maximum lethality, not legality,” to quote Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s edifying hip-hop rhyme glorying in a new disregard for the laws of war). For the congressional Republicans who have largely ceded legislative power to the executive: a newly energized Democratic Party likely to capitalize on these blunders come November. And even for the neoconservatives and pro-Israel hawks: no regime change, no democracy, and collapsing primacy. 

None of these groups should trust that Trump will advance their policy aims, for he has no ideology but spectacle. For a man whose life has been so defined by pageantry and performance, the crowning achievement of his presidency is shattering the illusion of American invincibility.  Like a dying animal lashing out, this paroxysm is more pathetic than powerful. 

Yes, those who influenced Trump bear some blame: from the ultra-hawkish Sen. Lindsey Graham (who used childish word-association games to persuade Trump that he’d clinch a Lincolnian or Rooseveltian legacy by invading Iran); to overconfident Israeli intelligence that recently prompted Vice President JD Vance to dress down Bibi (for overselling an Iranian uprising). Yet the buck stops at the Oval Office and the Resolute Desk: susceptibility to such pressures demonstrates just how unsuited to lead Trump has become.  

Anyone who can be manipulated by Graham belongs in a care facility rather than the Oval Office, and those who continue to enable such embarrassment deserve to answer for the damage they’ve done. As long as Trump continues to seek the next “boom,” the next war, too, will have no political purpose beyond perverse spectacle.