President Trump is said to have been surprised by the resilience of the Iranian regime. Going into the war, he probably expected that a decapitation strike against the top leadership would convince the remaining members of the regime that they didn’t stand a chance against America’s military might. That, he must have thought, would cause the regime to fall quickly.
The reality has been completely different. Key figures of the government, including the supreme leader, were indeed killed in the opening days of the war. But they were quickly replaced by others, ensuring survival of the regime. Furthermore, the new leaders are said to be even more hardline than those who were killed.
I have heard people say that President Trump admires strongmen. If true, that would be unfortunate. But even worse than that, he appears to have badly misjudged the nature of Iranian society. That is a mistake too many American political leaders have made in the past. This fundamental misunderstanding of the rigid hierarchical structures in foreign cultures will keep getting the U.S. into quagmires, such as the one that seems to be brewing in Iran today.
The truth is that the vast majority of the world’s autocrats don’t overly concern themselves with ensuring the welfare of the people they rule over. The primary focus of these tyrants is survival of their regimes, and continuity of the privileges they enjoy. They will take entire countries and their populations down into the abyss if that is what they have to do to maintain their grip on power.
President Trump has said several times in recent weeks that the U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz is suffocating Iran’s economy. That is true, and theoretically, it should force the regime to negotiate an end to the war. But as the president is finding out, the hardliners have dug in. They have cut off internet access in the country and used other repressive measures to silence the population. Today, the Iranian people have no avenues through which they can let either their leaders or the outside world know of their suffering.
Regimes like the one in Tehran can maintain such an iron grip on their societies for long periods of time. President Trump doesn’t have that luxury. He governs in a free society where he is held accountable for his actions on a continuous basis. That structural difference means that in a contest of wills between him and any autocrats, his opponents will win pretty much every time.
When the U.S. Supreme Court declared the president’s tariffs unlawful in February, he was deprived of the most important cudgel he wielded in his battle with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Unfortunately for him, his Chinese counterpart has no such institutional checks on his power. Mr. Xi can afford to outwait him and use that advantage to extract concessions from the U.S. in the ongoing bilateral trade negotiations.
President Trump may covet the seemingly unlimited powers that leaders like Xi Jinping and Vladmir Putin have. But by showing deference to such autocratic rulers at the expense of leaders of Western countries, as he has done repeatedly in the past year, he is shooting himself in the foot. He would be much better off teaming up with those like-minded traditional allies. As it is, he has left himself, and America, badly isolated and exposed against an emboldened China that has its autocratic friends solidly behind it.
One has to hope that the experience in Iran will prompt the president to revise his thinking about strongmen and change how he relates to them.