It is not yet clear how the ongoing US attack on Iran will unfold, how long it will last, or who will “win.” The fact that this attack is even occurring, though, is very much in keeping with previous American foreign policy in one sense: it is another example of Washington focusing its attention on a smaller adversary and not its larger ones.
The US has had larger adversaries as well as smaller adversaries in the past, has larger and smaller adversaries at present, and will continue to have both in the future. Larger adversaries pose more serious threats to American interests than smaller ones. Yet just as it is doing now with Iran, America has time and again focused its attention on thwarting smaller adversaries instead of larger ones. Further, this is a tendency that America’s larger adversaries have often benefited from.
During the 1960s and 1970s, America sought unsuccessfully to thwart communist forces from taking over South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. North Vietnam, it is true, was receiving military assistance from larger communist powers, the Soviet Union and China. It was understandable, then, that policymakers in Washington thought that by fighting against North Vietnam and other Marxist forces in Southeast Asia, they were thwarting communism generally. The US not only failed at this, but the Soviet Union took advantage of America’s expensive and time-consuming distraction with Indochina to catch up to and even surpass the US in numbers of strategic nuclear weapons. Moscow then took advantage of America’s disillusionment with its intervention in Indochina and allergy to military intervention to support the spread of Marxist revolution to several Third World (as we used to call them) countries in the 1970s.
After the Al Qaeda attacks against the US on Sept. 11, 2001 (9/11), the US invaded Afghanistan which had hosted Al Qaeda and refused to hand over its leaders to the US. America then invaded Iraq in 2003, which the George W. Bush administration erroneously believed to have weapons of mass destruction and to have supported Al Qaeda and its 9/11 attacks. Both US-led interventions served Iranian interests in particular. Not only did the US and its allies topple two regimes which had been at odds with Iran, but opened both Iraq and Afghanistan to Iranian influence. Ironically, Tehran appeared to exercise more influence in Afghanistan while its “pro-Western” government was in place than when the Taliban returned to power in 2021. In Iraq, Iran gained – and has maintained – influence in Baghdad ever since the downfall of Saddam Hussein.
If the Islamic Republic survives the current US intervention against it, Moscow and Beijing will both benefit.
The US withdrew its forces from Iraq in 2010. In 2014, though, Al Qaeda rival Islamic State (also known as ISIS and ISIL) grew powerful in eastern Syria where it threatened the Iranian-backed Assad regime, and in western Iraq where it threatened the Iranian-influenced Iraqi government in Baghdad as well as the pro-Western Kurdish Regional Government in northern Iraq. The US sent forces back into Iraq as well as into Syria to prevent the further rise of ISIS, and the US played a crucial role in beating it back. One of the beneficiaries of American efforts, though, was Iran both in Syria (where ISIS had threatened the Assad regime) and Iraq (where ISIS threatened the pro-Tehran Baghdad government).
In none of these cases did Washington intend for its intervention against a smaller adversary to redound to the benefit of a larger one. But in each of these cases, this is what ended up happening. America’s current focus on Iran is similarly distracting its attention away from what Russia and China are doing.
One reason why this phenomenon occurs is the American tendency to intervene against a small adversary with unrealistic expectations about defeating it quickly, thus leading to a longer intervention which the American public tires of and which the US sooner or later withdraws from.
It would be best, then, if the US avoided intervening against smaller adversaries when it has larger ones that it should be more concerned about. If and when the US contemplates intervening against a smaller adversary anyway, attention needs to be paid both to 1) who will benefit if the intervention fails; and 2) who will benefit if the intervention succeeds in toppling the regime it is aimed at but creates a destabilized situation which others can take advantage of – as occurred in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya.
If the Islamic Republic survives the current US intervention against it, Moscow and Beijing will both benefit from the US having to focus on dealing with an enraged Iranian leadership hell bent on striking back at the US and its regional allies. By contrast, if US intervention against Iran does lead to the downfall of the Islamic Republic, it is highly unlikely that a pro-Western one will seamlessly succeed it. Far more likely is a weak or even failed state in which numerous forces contend for power, as occurred in Iraq and Libya after Western interventions overthrew their dictators. What happened in Libya should be especially sobering: while the US succeeded in helping bring about the downfall of Muammar al-Qaddafi, Russia ended up becoming highly influential in the eastern part of this war-wracked country. Something similar could happen in Iran.
Whether it does or not, the time and attention America will need to devote to contain refugee flows and other negative impacts of ongoing civil war in Iran from affecting the countries near Iran will greatly distract Washington from what Russia and China are doing elsewhere.
What Washington really needs is a foreign policy leadership that understands that the US becoming distracted with punishing smaller adversaries all too often provides opportunities for America’s larger adversaries to take advantage of.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.