How Many ‘Limited’ Wars Are Enough?
What is the overall goal here?
Sohrab Ahmari
Jan 30, 2024
12:01 AM
Three Jordanian-based US troops were killed and at least 34 injured in a drone attack likely conducted by Iran-backed militias. Par for the course, Republican hawks are urging the Biden administration to launch a war and think later. “Hit Iran now,” Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina exclaimed on the app formerly known as Twitter. “Hit them hard.” Nevertheless, unless Nikki Haley clinches first the GOP nomination and then the presidency—an increasingly long-shot prospect—Graham and other Holden Bloodfeast types won’t get the apocalyptic conflagration they salivate for.
The more likely pattern is the United States getting itself embroiled in a growing number of proxy wars and indecisive interventions along a wide geographic range, stretching from Europe’s burning eastern and southern peripheries to the Middle East to East Asia. Indeed, that’s what the Biden administration and the bipartisan establishment seem to have been up to ever since they wrapped up the fruitless post-9/11 wars: carefully calibrating escalation and support to US proxies to punish rising powers for challenging Washington in its sphere of influence—the whole planet, more or less—but without triggering all-out wars.
It is a risky strategy, since it involves frequently tangoing with two nuclear-armed states (Russia and China) and a third that might be a nuclear-threshold state (Iran). Political leaders aren’t perfectly rational actors, and the nations they rule are even more vulnerable to the power of sentiment and passion. What looks to Washington elites as a careful turn of the escalation dial might come across as a humiliating insult to, say, Xi Jinping personally or the Putin regime’s hard-core nationalist base—and then what?
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/how-many-proxy-wars-is-enough/
