The Iran war is the latest example of repressed warfighting undermining victory

Had President Donald Trump overruled his isolationist wing and fought a real war, it would have ended long ago, at lower cost, with a clear win—a fundamental regime change.

By Ira Straus, Middle East Forum

The war against the Iranian regime keeps getting stopped in mid-battle.

Leaders and diplomats repeatedly pause and displace it into substitutes for war. Instead of fighting to achieve regime change, diplomatic effort diverts into other goals.

That is why the war goes on.

The late Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud explained a block against doing something right leads to doing other things that do not achieve the goal but still feel like action.

As the person keeps trying those substitutes, the costs of unresolved goals pile up.

A real war uses all military services when needed; it does not use just the air force. A repressed war just keeps bombing and hopes everyone will be awed into giving in.

Regime change occurs on the ground. It requires a ground game: boots on the ground—probably some Americans as the organizing core, allies, and an armed Iranian opposition to do most of the legwork.

It uses air and naval forces to supplement the ground game; it does not rely on substituting them for it.

What is a “displaced war”? A military operation diverted from optimal methods to suboptimal ones—fighting by all means except the ones that would lead to success.

Why does it happen? For the same reason Freud gave for all psychological displacements: a mental block against tackling the real thing.

After 1945, many Westerners erected a block against the West, doing what was necessary to win wars.

They did this out of fear of nuclear war and an unjustified distaste for decisively defeating enemies.

The mental block spread throughout the media, academic, and professional classes, producing a taboo against even talking about winning wars.

Today there is a preference against winning across much of the political spectrum.

In a lecture at the University of Virginia, Lewis Feuer, a disciple of Freud, identified this trend as “repressed war.”

An individual sees the necessity to fight, but he represses thoughts of taking measures needed to win.

So he projects the need in an oblique direction, fighting in ways not designed to win—and keeps failing.

American philosopher James Burnham had analyzed this as an outcome of liberal guilt over the West’s power.

Feuer further analyzed it as an outcome of the passion in radical movements, especially youthful ones, for aggression against the West.

Leftist aggression couples with liberal guilt: Leftist rhetorical assaults on the West induce liberal guilt; liberal guilt empowers the left to actually weaken the West.

The taboo against winning by war has the tagline, “No boots on the ground.” It was used already in the Kosovo war, which the West nearly lost by sticking to the air.

It has been repeated many times since, undermining wars and producing new defeats.

Defeat is met not by dropping the ruinous taboo, but by tacking new taboos onto it, like “no forever wars,” leading to more defeats.

Pundits and analysts apply the “forever war” label to ever shorter wars; by now it means “no wars lasting more than a few weeks.”

Lost in discourse is the irony that constant ceasefires produce wars that can go on forever.

Pseudo-war raises costs and throws the kit down the drain.

It is why the Pentagon runs short on munitions and why prolonged on-again, off-again conflict endangers allies everywhere, in Ukraine and Poland, in Taiwan and Korea, and even in the Middle East itself.

Had President Donald Trump overruled his isolationist wing and fought a real war, it would have ended long ago, at lower cost, with a clear win—a fundamental regime change.

The global economy would be better off. Instead, he equivocated, caving to Vice President JD Vance whenever he seemed close to winning. The result: He mostly has been losing.

Trump could still decide to win the war, though it would mean defying an alliance of opponents from both ends of the spectrum.

It has set Trump up for a lose-lose choice: Fight forever from the air alone and lose anyway or declare peace and go home in defeat.

By playing by their rules, Trump has been losing for a year, repeatedly halting America’s momentum toward victory in the name of deal-making while snatching defeat from the jaws of victory by giving the Iranian regime time to regroup and rearm.

Winning will be costlier today than it would have been earlier, but it will be far less costly than any result that falls short of victory.

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