David French writes:

The only thing worse than President Trump starting an unconstitutional war is President Trump losing control of that war.

On Wednesday, NBC News reported that Trump “erupted” at members of his national security team over the Iran War. According to the report, his advisers can’t agree on a path forward. But how could they? Every path to victory risks dangerous escalation, while continuing the present course risks strategic defeat.

This was always the most likely outcome. The president chose to take on a much more powerful country than, say, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003, while using far less force than we employed to topple the Iraqi government.

What did he expect would happen?

Oh right, we know. He thought he could topple a vicious, deeply embedded authoritarian regime with a few targeted airstrikes and a fantasied popular uprising. As he has said many times, he expected a version of his Venezuela outcome, and when the Venezuela strategy failed, if strategy is the word, there was no real Plan B — other than to bomb Iran more and hope for capitulation.

In fact, we’re planning to do that yet again. Or maybe we’re not.

On Friday, Trump said he was ordering a new round of airstrikes. And what was his reasoning? “You know at some point,” Trump said, “they’re going to say, ‘We just can’t take it anymore.’”

On Saturday, he’d changed his mind. “We have just been asked by Iran, and other Middle Eastern Countries, to hold off any attack,” Trump said in a Truth Social post.

“I have agreed,” he added, “for the future benefit of the WORLD and, likewise, the survival of a successful and prosperous Iran, to cancel the attack, subject to being able to rapidly make a DEAL.”

But the problem we face right now is something well beyond deals. America has been so powerful for so long that we are accustomed to being in control of events. We start wars when we want and — crucially — we believe that we can end them when we want.

When I was in Iraq, as terrible as that war was, we knew it was contained. We were fighting an enemy that had minimal ability to harm Americans outside of Iraq. The same was true in Afghanistan once we and our allies destroyed Al Qaeda’s strongholds.

In both conflicts, the fighting was brutal, and we can and should debate the wisdom of both wars. But our great-power rivals were largely absent.

There is no such thing as a safe war — any war can spin out of control — but the combination of American power, enemy weakness and Russian and Chinese restraint meant that Americans could sleep secure in the knowledge that the chances of a catastrophic escalation were extremely remote.

That is no longer the case. The world is walking a path toward a world war, and no one — including the president of the United States — seems to be in command of events. [Continue reading…]