Trump's Clausewitzian War
Has Donald been reading the Prussian military theorist?*
To a normal observer, Trump’s war on Iran appears disastrous: having declared that Iran’s unconditional surrender was the war aim, he then appeared to change his mind, declaring that the war would end when he concluded that Iran was no longer a threat. The problem here was that the world had its own means of deciding if Iran was a threat: it could look at oil prices, or social media videos of drones hitting buildings in the Gulf, or news of American military casualties, or the fact that the Straits of Hormuz were still mined. By the 14th of March, Trump - who had dismissed the idea of support from allies such as the United Kingdom - was begging international military assistance from China, France, the UK, Japan and South Korea. At the time of writing, various allies are “considering their response”, no doubt wishing they’d never been asked. Committing your forces to a risky mission with unclear objectives under the overall command of an erratic idiot seems like the sort of thing that most politicians dread.
In a fascinating article , Matthew Ford wrote about the degree to which the chaos and unpredictability of this war are a by-product of a hyperconnected world and of how Trump operates: he has framed the “end” of the war as being when he decides to end it, rather than when some military or political objectives are met.
As Matt wrote:
Hyperconnectivity has implications for strategic decision-making: how do ends/ways/means align when online media is constantly shaping what objectives are acceptable and technology is seducing us into using military power?
Trump operates in a social media bubble in which his supporters are fed a constant diet of pro-Trump misinformation. For example, as Trump’s critics noted that he wore a commercially-branded TRUMP baseball cap at a supposedly dignified transfer of the remains of fallen US servicemen, his favourite Fox News simply played a video of him at a completely different ceremony when he wasn’t wearing the vulgar cap. And whilst the headline polls show that Americans overall don’t support the military action against Iran, the overwhelming majority of Republican voters do support it. The only risk to Trump is the economic one, but even that can be manipulated by a President who knows how to play the markets. When oil prices spiked on 9 March, Trump said, while the markets were open, “I think the war is very complete, pretty much”, and said the US was “very far ahead of schedule”. The markets, made up of people that are glued to their smartphones like everyone else, responded with oil prices dropping back down below $100. But later the same day, once the markets had closed, Trump contradicted himself, opining that the war would continue for some time.
The Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz wrote, reflecting on his experiences of the Napoleonic Wars, “war is nothing more than a continuation of the political process by other means.” Clausewitz’s point was that war should not be an end in itself, but a means to achieving some political aim. It may seem that Trump’s war, with its constantly shifting, chaotic objectives, is not very Clausewitzian. But that is to fail to consider Trump’s wider political aims as President. These are: self-enrichment, the extension of his own personal power, to be constantly the centre of attention and to be able to humiliate and dominate his foes. There is no policy agenda, no ideological lodestar, no coherence or plan. Trump’s presidency is delivering his political aims successfully: he’s making a lot of money, he is the centre of global attention in a way that no previous president has ever been and he has destroyed the checks and balances of the US system. The fact that it seems chaotic and unpredictable doesn’t matter to him. Indeed it may be part of the point.
The war is being fought in the same way: there is very likely self-enrichment from trading the peaks and troughs of the gyrating oil price, Trump’s power has been enhanced, for example by disposing of the constitutional norm that Congress authorises military force and by threats against media organisations that don’t report it the way he wants, he is the centre of attention and he is able to attack and humiliate his foes, such as when he said he might attack Iran’s Kharg Island “for fun”. What looks to us to be incoherent chaos might suit Trump very well.
Truly this war is the pursuit of Trumpian politics by other means.
*of course I do not believe Trump has read Clausewitz.