What’s Next, an Invasion of Iran?

The pattern is all too clear by now. When Trump hits a stone wall, his strategy invariably is to backpedal tactically and change the subject to create new headlines and sometimes new crises.

Often, the new subject is merely a ludicrous diversion. Other times, he is playing with fire.

Are the ICE raids creating a “moral and political debacle” for the administration, as Trump’s usual allies on The Wall Street Journal editorial page delicately put it? Then let’s lower the temperature, bring in new leadership, begin prolonged negotiations to get the pictures off TV, and get tongues wagging about other stories.

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How about a two-year closing of the Kennedy Center that every self-respecting artist is boycotting, for “repairs” that were never needed before? Or a new Trumpian Arc de Triomphe, bigger than the one in Paris?

Most serious people get that this stuff is a silly distraction. And then there is Iran.

A quickie wag-the-dog extraction of Venezuela’s dictator Nicolás Maduro dominated the news for a few days, and the détente with his successor, socialist Delcy Rodríguez, seems to be working out. Trump even used the Venezuela exfiltration as a model of how ICE could work in Minnesota in a conversation with Gov. Tim Walz, civil liberties be damned. Maybe another foray of quick military action and regime change could work elsewhere?

But the situation in Iran is far more complex and trickier than the one in Venezuela.

Superficially, there are similarities. Both have regimes that have lost the support of their people. Both are economic disasters. Iran, despite its bluster, has lost much of its capacity to strike back.

As in the case of Venezuela, Trump is making a show of force by sending an “armada” to the region, led by the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier battle group, backed by sophisticated F-35 jets. Trump is talking openly about an attack, egged on by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But there the similarity with Venezuela ends.

In the Venezuelan case, other countries in Latin America were nonplayers. In the Mideast, leaders of several major nations that are often U.S. allies and financial cronies of Trump are working to head off any attack.

Both Saudi Arabia and Qatar have said that they would not allow their airspace to be used for a U.S. attack on Iran. Turkey, a NATO member, hosted talks in Istanbul on Friday to pursue a diplomatic solution.

In addition, though Iran has been weakened militarily, it still has enough drones and missiles to do serious damage to Israel. If the regime itself were threatened, Iran could not be counted on to exercise the kind of restraint it used last year when it resorted to only token retaliation against attacks on its nuclear facilities.

U.S. military sources have indicated that the U.S. is not yet ready to strike Iran because of the need to protect Israel and U.S. installations in the region, where there are 30,000 to 40,000 American troops vulnerable to retaliation.

Also, in the Venezuela case, the military goals were clear: depose and extract Maduro and find a compliant successor regime, without the need for a costly invasion and occupation.

The goals for any action against Iran are muddled and far more difficult to carry out, another indication that Trump is just engaging in headline-grabbing saber-rattling. The goals are very unclear here. Is Trump pursuing more constraints on Iran’s nuclear program? Or is he after regime change, and how does he propose to get it? Is he even aware of the complexities?

Trump’s interest in moving against Iran was heightened last month when major protests broke out against intolerable increases in consumer prices and the latest crackdowns against liberties by the conservative Islamist regime. Protests broke out over soaring prices in Iran on December 28, 2025, after the rial plunged to a record low.

Trump’s Venezuela Colony

The protests were taken up by shopkeepers in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar who shuttered their shops and began demonstrating. More than 1,000 people died in the demonstrations, which soon became a more generalized protest against the repression of liberties. All of that suggested a seriously weakened regime.

But that doesn’t mean that there is any kind of consensus about a successor government, much less that ordinary Iranians would welcome a U.S.-led invasion or coup as liberators. The Washington-based efforts by Reza Pahlavi, the son of the Shah who was deposed in 1979, to restore a presumably constitutional monarchy is a complete nonstarter, though the new Shah-in-waiting has some friends among Trumpers.

Late Monday, administration sources leaked plans for a rare direct meeting Friday between top U.S. and Iranian officials. Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Middle East envoy and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, will meet with Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister. Also expected to attend are senior officials from Turkey, Qatar, and Egypt.

Once again, the practical obstacles against a successful invasion, plus the resistance of regional powers that Trump has to care about, may spare us another gratuitous war. But as anyone who has read about the run-up to World War I knows, leaders a lot smarter than Trump occasionally blunder into catastrophic wars that nobody wanted.

It’s better for all concerned if Trump just distracts himself by renaming and then closing major cultural centers and building monuments to himself.

The Arc de Triomphe was commissioned in 1806 by Napoleon to commemorate his victory at the Battle of Austerlitz, where some 24,000 people were killed or wounded. By the time it was completed, Napoleon had been defeated and exiled. This time, maybe skip the battle and proceed directly to the arch.