Washington Wednesday: The no-forever-war test

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LINDSAY MAST, HOST: It’s Wednesday the 4th of March.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

First up on The World and Everything in It.

Well, today the WORLD editorial team has gathered for a staff retreat, and so as we build today’s program, we’re doing it a good bit differently. Typically our team members work remotely. We’re a close team relationally, but we do work in different places around the country. But we are today in our retreat center.

We’ve got several friends—I can’t count exactly how many—but we have many, many people in the room. So welcome to you folks, and thanks for coming on out.

And so also in the room with us is Hunter Baker. He is a political scientist, he is a contributor to WORLD Opinions, and he’s our regular Washington Wednesday analyst. Good morning to you, Hunter.

BAKER: Good morning.

EICHER: Well clearly, Hunter, the story of this week—and I think as we expect it to be likely subsequent weeks—is the war with Iran. So let’s get right to the intersection of American politics and global foreign policy.

I would frame up the first part here of the conversation like this: Hunter, as you see it, what kind of risk is President Trump taking here politically with this war with Iran?

BAKER: He’s taking an immense risk.

You may remember—I certainly do—I remember being in college at the time of the first Gulf War, and George H. W. Bush came on broadcast to the entire nation. Those of us here may remember what Bush said: “This will not be another Vietnam.” That was reminding everybody.

And of course that was a relatively short engagement that we completed and walked on from. But then we had the second Gulf War, which was an entirely different situation altogether.

We spent multiple trillions of dollars on that affair, several years, and many American lives lost. So as Donald Trump approaches this engagement with Iran, people are going to be having similar questions.

They’re going to be wondering: Is this going to be something that happens quickly, as he seems to have promised, or is it going to drag on and consume a great deal of American blood and treasure?

EICHER: Do you have a good definition for what “drag on” actually means? We heard him say just a couple of days ago that it could go four to five weeks, maybe a little bit longer than that. What do you think, just as a political scientist, the American people’s tolerance for a dragged-on war would be?

BAKER: I think not a lot more than that.

The thing that people are really going to be watching is this question of whether we commit American troops. Nobody—and I mean nobody—I think wants to see large numbers of American troops in the Middle East again.

So the fear is that he’ll be unable to achieve the kind of political result that he wants in Iran and will have to move into a kind of occupation mode.

MAST: Well Hunter, it’s a midterm election year. Let’s assume that the war goes well, however that’s defined.

Do you see the president’s party—and we have to emphasize that of course the president’s not on the ballot—but do Republicans generally benefit from a Trump success on the battlefield?

And then look at the same question, if you would, assuming that the war goes badly.

BAKER: There’s an expression that many of us will remember. People who are younger won’t, but this expression was: “Partisanship ends at the water’s edge.”

I don’t know if people remember that.

EICHER: I think a lot of people have forgotten it.

BAKER: That used to be a common statement of American foreign policy. We are in a totally different era now, which is really, really bad for the country. Our political culture has suffered somewhat since that time.

The ideal situation would be that Republican and Democratic legislators would be sitting in some sort of Socratic stance, evaluating the arguments for and against. I’m afraid that is just not the situation.

EICHER: Let me ask you this. Do you think that Iran is different from, let’s say, an Afghanistan or an Iraq?

We’ve got some history there. The Iranians in 1979 overran our embassy and took American hostages for 444 days. I’m old enough to remember this stuff.

Does that change the calculus at all with a known bad guy who’s been a bad guy for that long?

BAKER: What I would say about Iran is that Iran is in many ways a more frightening adversary.

The reason I would say that is that we saw their determination with the revolution in 1979 and taking American prisoners. But if you look at our own War on Terror, Iran cooperated with us in a few places.

Generally speaking, what they did during the War on Terror was try to make America miserable. They tried to cost us a lot of lives and cost us a lot of money—not because they loved Iraq, for instance—but because they wanted to make sure the Americans did not establish a long-term presence in the Middle East.

They did all that they could to hurt America during that time, and they were pretty effective in doing so.

To tie back to the political question, they understand that American involvement in foreign countries is subject to the political debate within our country. So if you can increase the cost in lives, money, and sheer human suffering, then you can reduce American commitment.

EICHER: When we talk about Iran outlasting or making calculations, a lot of them are dead. Who are we talking about? Who’s doing this calculation?

BAKER: Great question. ​​We have engaged in what is called a decapitation attack, in which we have removed a significant portion of the leadership of the Iranian regime.

But what needs to be understood is this is a highly ideological state, and they have supposedly tried to duplicate that leadership four levels down and at the same kind of level of determination.

MAST: Okay Hunter, I want to know: How does a conflict like this, a war like this, fit or conflict with the “no forever wars” brand that helped define the president’s movement?

BAKER: I think there’s no question that the only way that you get to a Donald Trump presidency is with the failure in the Middle East with the War on Terror—kind of that loss of American prestige and confidence.

Certainly it’s on the Republican Party, and certainly its impact on the Republican Party led to the kind of sea change that you saw in the Republican Party in 2016.

So Donald Trump has a lot riding on that reputation as somebody who can be successful and somebody who won’t get caught up in what J.D. Vance calls a stupid war.

Really what Trump has to do is avoid falling into that same kind of trap that engulfed the last Bush administration.

MAST: Hunter, the war has raised concerns over possible terror attacks here at home, especially during a government shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security.

So far we have heard of at least one suspected attack that took place in Austin, Texas.

In a Senate Homeland Security oversight hearing, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham also connected the dots.

GRAHAM: I wonder how many people like that are waiting to pounce and D.H.S. doesn’t have appropriated funds. This is insane!

How do you see this affecting the DHS funding debate? Does it change the calculus on holding up funding if you’re a Democrat?

BAKER: This gets back to what I was talking about with the ideal of the Socratic legislator.

If you were just dealing from a stance of pure reason, you would say: We’ve engaged in hostilities with Iran. Iran is a major sponsor of terror. Now is exactly the wrong time to have a shutdown affecting the Department of Homeland Security.

So maybe you pull back on your strategy.

I can absolutely understand why Democrats were using this point of leverage and trying to get the changes that they wanted in ICE. But the calculus has changed, and now we need the Department of Homeland Security operating at its very best. It’s the wrong kind of strategy to be pursuing now.

Nevertheless, I think that currently they’re still going that direction.

EICHER: I expect the mainstream media will be all over that, right?

BAKER: They should be. They should be.

Honestly this is where good journalists should be saying we cannot be engaged in effectively a war with the number one sponsor of terror in the world and not have our Department of Homeland Security operating.

EICHER: Hunter Baker is provost at North Greenville University.

Thanks for coming all this way to be with us. Let’s thank Hunter Baker for Washington Wednesday.

BAKER: Thank you.

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