Curb Your War: Why Didn’t Trump Go To War with Iran?
In 2020, Trump had the option of starting a hot war with Iran. Why didn’t he?
President Donald J. Trump watches the raid on Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s compound, code named Operation Kayla Mueller. He is accompanied by Vice President Mike Pence, National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark A. Milley. Photo by Shaelah Craighead, October 26, 2019.
Relations between the United States and Iran have been largely hostile since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which established the latter as an anti-Western theocracy. Even so, bilateral tensions between the two nations reached an all-time high in 2020, with then-President Donald Trump ordering the targeted killing of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani and Iran’s nuclear program increasing levels of uranium enrichment. While the initiation of an overt armed conflict had the potential to provide Trump with a favorable boost in polling vis-à-vis the rally effect—the phenomenon of increased popular support for a country’s government or political leaders during war or crisis—the former President ultimately did not pursue such an option despite record-low favorability ratings and an upcoming presidential election. Trump’s desire for further U.S. military action against Iran was constrained by forecasted political consequences as well as the influence of institutional arrangements and bureaucratic actors who presented him with unsatisfactory scenarios.
US-Iran Relations during the Obama and Trump Administrations
Some context on Iran’s nuclear program is needed in order to understand the Trump Administration’s Iran policy. From 2013 to 2015, President Barack Obama’s administration led a diplomatic effort to address growing international concern surrounding Iran’s latent nuclear capability. However, the Trump Administration withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Obama Administration’s agreement, a little over a year into Trump’s tenure, which—in conjunction with escalating regional tensions—increased hostilities between the two nations. Given the administration’s efforts to address the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, the withdrawal from the JCPOA is best understood as a significant aspect of Trump’s persistent efforts to dismantle the legacy of the Obama Administration, particularly in regards to matters of foreign policy. Trump orchestrated unprecedented, high-level meetings with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea regarding its nuclear and missile program, albeit with unconventional, saber-rattling rhetoric. Similar grand diplomatic gestures were largely absent from U.S. policy toward Iran. While the administration’s policy toward “rogue” states was largely centered around coercive diplomacy, Trump’s more conciliatory approach to Kim Jong-Un’s regime highlights a perceived need to be tougher on Iran vis-à-vis the Obama Administration’s approach.
Additionally, there has been consistent and well-founded reporting on Trump’s limited attention span, as he reportedly loses focus when working on matters of intelligence and national security. Trump—who is often recognized as irregular and unpredictable in his decision-making process—was reported as being primarily driven by his desire to be reelected in 2020, particularly when responding to political attacks with anger. The world, as he sees it, is a zero-sum game, with reputation and power separating dominant and weak actors. These factors need to be considered when thinking about the Trump Administration’s actions and negotiations with Iran.
Commitments to the Isolationist Right
Following protests at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, there is a well-defined chain of events which led to Trump’s decision to target Qasem Soleimani. In the lead-up to the targeted killing of General Soleimani, prominent voices in the Trump Administration, such as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, suggested that Trump’s commitment to withdraw from the Middle East had emboldened Iran as a regional power. Domestic political critics labeled the attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad as “Trump’s Benghazi,” and Ayatollah Khamenei disparaged the President’s seemingly lackluster response to attacks by Iranian proxies. These responses largely guided Trump to try to assert his credibility as the presiding leader in the relationship vis-à-vis the targeted killing of General Soleimani.
However, while the complete manifestation of such behavior—widespread strikes against military targets and nuclear infrastructure inside Iran—would likely have been achievable through the use of overwhelming U.S. airpower and at the cost of aircraft and pilots, Trump was bound by his prior political commitments to limit the risk of further escalation. Ultimately, in the absence of clear red lines, the execution of larger-scale strikes could have invited a multifaceted response from political actors within Iran—including the use of its expansive proxy network in the Middle East and North Africa, large conventional ballistic missile inventory, and cyber capabilities aimed at critical U.S. military infrastructure, among other approaches—which would, in turn, induce further U.S. action in an uncontrollable cycle of escalation.
During his 2016 presidential bid, Trump tapped into the growing movement of conservative isolationism in the Republican party, criticizing President George W. Bush and President Obama on their respective foreign policies in the Middle East. Isolationist rhetoric remained a consistent fixture in Trump’s foreign policy, with Democrats and foreign policy elites consistently opposing his conduct. Despite the fact that an expansion of the conflict with Iran could help Trump flex the U.S. military’s power, the initiation of such an exchange would predictably invite further criticisms of hypocrisy from Trump’s political opposition and some within his own party, diminishing any polling boost potentially derived from the rally effect. In Taken By The Storm: The Media, Public Opinion, and U.S. Foreign Policy in the Gulf War, John Zaller demonstrates that disagreement among political elites leads to polarization between different political parties on matters of foreign policy and, by extension, lower levels of support from politically-aware Americans. Since the rally effect is often attributable to increasing approval from members of the opposing political party (i.e. democrats), it is unlikely that a rally effect would follow Trump’s likely controversial initiation of an overt armed conflict.
These competing incentives led Trump to pursue a coercive approach toward Iran which demonstrated U.S. strength while minimizing the risk of escalation into a full-blown war. Therefore, the administration’s approach could be described as extreme, moderate, and predictable at the same time. Tension between isolationist campaign promises and the desire for a coercive approach guided most of Trump’s foreign policy toward Iran in 2020. However, while his political commitment against “endless wars” accounts for a significant portion of decisions made, by itself it does not explain the administration’s actions after the resolution of the 2020 presidential election. For a more complete analysis of the Trump Administration’s decision making in 2020, including his lame-duck period from November to January, another critical factor needs to be weighed.
Conflicting Bureaucratic Interests
Bureaucratic forces attempted to guide the Trump Administration’s decision making at the beginning of 2020 by shaping response options to events at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, but this did not work as intended, given Trump’s approval of the targeted killing of General Soleimani and his unpredictability in policymaking. The results of the 2020 presidential election removed immediate incentives for Trump to avoid unnecessary wars. Shortly after losing the election in November, the president held a meeting with senior advisors and cabinet members to discuss the feasibility of military action against a prominent Iranian nuclear site. While such speculation is far from concrete, the timing of Trump’s request invites the possibility that the interest in using military force was precipitated by a desire to spoil then-President-Elect Biden’s agenda of diplomatic re-engagement with Iran. In fact, while hawkish members of the National Security Council encouraged Trump to respond more forcefully to Iranian actions in mid-2020, they disapproved of his proclivity for overt force against Iran by November and into January.
This asymmetry of outlooks on Iran—which eventually led to the administration’s decision not to further escalate with Iran—is attributable to bureaucratic preferences of civilian advisors and the military’s strong influence over decisions on how to use force. Many civilian and military advisors did not share Trump’s strong personal grievance against the Biden Administration’s approach to foreign policy. Indeed, the policy preference not to use force can be derived from bureaucratic concerns, such as the possibility of the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives impeding the implementation of a decisive and sustained military campaign against Iran, and personal interests, including advisors’ respective legacies and future opportunities in the public and private sectors. In other words, outgoing technocrats and career politicians in the administration would have been at risk of losing credibility if labeled by Democrats and foreign policy elites as complicit in a short-cited and unjust armed conflict. Driven by such concerns, civilian and military advisors assisting in the administration’s formulation of policy reflected their foreign policy priorities, which can predominantly be characterized as prioritizing great power competition rather than Iran. The bureaucracy’s presented scenarios and their respective liabilities—for example, involving low probabilities of success, unacceptable risks of casualties, and risks for prolonged wars—were, in turn, unsatisfactory to Trump’s goals of being a coercive and decisive world leader, thereby holding him back from prosecuting further strikes in Iran and escalating tensions further.
However, Trump had the option to replace uncooperative members of his inner circle pursuant to initiating an overt armed conflict with Iran. Given the Trump Administration’s success with its controversial travel ban, supplating obstructive officials would not be without precedent. The fact that Trump did not oust members of the National Security Council serves to highlight other factors that were unique to the situation, one being the vague nature of Trump’s political incentives. At that point post-election, there was no need to boost favorability ratings, but it is unclear whether Trump had made up his mind on running in the 2024 Republican primary at that time. On top of Trump’s limited attention span to topics of national security, a number of critical domestic issues—including unemployment, the COVID-19 pandemic, and race relations—were increasingly salient to the American people. Trump’s distractions from his attempts to overturn the election, coupled with members of the National Security Council and their resistance to military actions that could escalate into war, likely overloaded the political capacity and emotional bandwidth needed to push bureaucratic preferences on the use of force.
Concluding Thoughts
In 2020, Donald Trump had an incentive to initiate an overt armed conflict with Iran pursuant of the rally effect. However, his decision not to further escalate a conflict with Iran was ultimately guided by the interplay of two restraints: his prior political commitments and—when considering new limitations and motivations in the lame duck period—the work of risk-averse bureaucratic actors within his administration. Both of these factors served to restrict Trump’s actions before and after the 2020 presidential election.
Ethan Lee is a junior studying Political Science and History at Stanford University. He is from Calabasas, California and currently works as a research assistant at the Hoover Institution. Ethan’s writing and commentary have appeared in the Georgetown Journal of International Law, Inkstick Media, Things That Go Boom, and the Oxford Political Review. His academic interests lie in nuclear politics, the law of war, and public opinion and the use of force.
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