The hammer and the hand that holds it

The New York Times reports that President Trump, believing himself possessed of nearly unlimited power, has discovered real limits in the matter of Iran — and that the discovery has left him, in the paper's words, "more frustrated and erratic." I am told this is the condition of a leader who commanded the world's most formidable military instrument without first settling, in his own mind, what victory would look like and at what cost it was worth purchasing.

This is not a new predicament. It is, in fact, the oldest trap in statecraft. A nation may have the largest hammer in the world and still find that not every problem submits to hammering — and that swinging without aim exhausts the arm, alarms the neighbors, and gives adversaries a map of one's impatience. The strength of the Republic is not diminished by restraint. It is preserved by it.

I counseled, in my own time, against permanent entanglements with foreign powers — not from timidity, but from the recognition that the passions such entanglements kindle at home are as dangerous as any foreign army. A president drawn into confrontation with Iran must answer several questions before the first order is given: What is the precise object? What constitutes success? What are we prepared to do if the first step does not suffice? If those questions have no settled answers, then military preponderance is not an asset — it is a temptation that courts catastrophe.

The Times' framing — that the administration appears "trapped" even while wielding enormous leverage — suggests, as inference rather than recollection on my part, that the object of policy was never fully defined, or that it was defined in terms of personal prestige rather than durable national interest. These are distinct things. A nation's interest endures past any single administration; a leader's prestige does not. When the two are confused, the nation pays the price long after the leader has departed the stage.

The office of the presidency carries with it a solemn obligation: to be the steadiest hand in the room precisely when the pressure is greatest. Erratic conduct in a foreign crisis does not project strength — it invites miscalculation by adversaries who may conclude that the person across the table cannot be read, and therefore cannot be negotiated with. Unpredictability is sometimes described as leverage. More often it is simply disorder wearing leverage's clothes.

I would counsel any executive in this position to do three things before another move is made: define the outcome the Republic can live with — not the ideal, but the acceptable; consult those who must bear the consequences, which is to say the Congress and, through it, the people; and resist the temptation to let wounded pride substitute for strategy. The Republic's security is too weighty a matter to be managed by frustration.

Force and purpose must travel together, or the Republic travels nowhere it intended to go.