As President Donald Trump uses US military force overseas, his calculation has been that he can launch military operations with the loss of few American lives and minimal disruption to the economy.
Already, six Americans have been killed. Gulf allies are under attack. The stock market wobbled. Gas prices are rising. The US military is spending, by some estimates, hundreds of millions of dollars per day. In Iran, an airstrike on a girls’ elementary school killed 175 people, according to local health officials and Iranian state media, and the Trump administration says it is investigating who was responsible.
While no US ground troops have yet been sent to Iranian soil, the administration has not ruled out deploying soldiers. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suggested Wednesday that the conflict might not be short.
“We are accelerating, not decelerating,” Hegseth told reporters, adding: “More bombers and more fighters are arriving just today.”
Before deciding to launch a new round of missile strikes against Iran that began Saturday, Trump had been emboldened by what his administration views as a string of swift military achievements.
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Under Trump’s leadership, the US military captured Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, in a quickly executed operation; struck Iran’s nuclear facilities in a surprise attack; targeted Houthi militants in Yemen; blew up a succession of suspected drug boats in the Caribbean; and bombed targets in Iraq, Nigeria and Somalia as part of counterterrorism operations.
All of these operations were carried out quickly, and, in the administration’s view, successfully, with little cost to American lives or treasure.
But the war the United States and Israel have launched against Iran runs the risk of spiraling beyond those quick-strike operations, particularly if the administration further involves itself in regime change.
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Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo., a former Army Ranger who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, warned Wednesday that the United States was headed down the same path of endless war that he had seen firsthand and that Trump had campaigned against.
“After trillions of dollars, thousands of American lives, decades of endless conflict, my entire adult life, a quarter of a century of American war — here we go again,” Crow said. “Donald Trump campaigned on ending the wars because he knew at the time that that’s what Americans wanted, and still want, and yet, here we go again.”
Trump has encouraged the people of Iran to “take over” their country, but he has not backed any specific entity to lead the fight against the government.
Since launching strikes, Trump has spoken with Kurdish leaders, but has not agreed to any plan to arm them to overthrow the Iranian government, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Wednesday.
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“Trump is an individual who likes low costs and flashy what he considers victories,” said Jon Hoffman, a research fellow in defense and foreign policy at the Cato Institute. “Everything that I hear from folks in the administration and around the administration is that after Maduro, he was running high. He felt untouchable in many ways. But this is fundamentally different than Venezuela. The costs are already racking up.”
Hoffman pointed to the dead US service members and the spiking of oil and natural gas prices.
“I think Europe’s natural gas prices went up about 40%, and this is only going to get worse,” he said. “These prices are going to continue to rise.”
Still, Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations who worked for three Republican presidents, including Trump, said he believed there were many benefits to killing the leaders of Iran and dismantling the country’s military capacity.
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“The costs so far are the lives lost to American service members,” he said. “The benefits are, I think, enormous. This regime has been trying and sometimes succeeding in killing Americans for more than 40 years.”
Abrams said that if Trump declines to send in ground troops, American deaths may remain low. But a decimated Iranian regime, he said, was ultimately in the interests of the United States and its allies. “Even if regime remnants remain in power, they’ll have no nuclear program, essentially no ballistic missile program and no ability to project power in the region,” he said.
But Hoffman isn’t so sure, arguing a destabilized Iran could pose a high risk to the US and its allies.
“If it really is the plan to start arming ethnic separatist groups and try to Balkanize Iran,” he said, “not only would that be a proxy war at a scale at which the United States has never engaged before in the Middle East, that will impose incredible costs on the region.”
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In that scenario, Hoffman said, “you’re likely talking mass refugee flows, you’re likely talking about time and space for groups like ISIS to start taking a foothold.” He added: “These are groups that just thrive on chaos. You’re opening Pandora’s box.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
