SLOP OF WAR

Historian and geopolitical analyst Walter Russell Mead is a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute, the Wall Street Journal’s Global View columnist, and the author of Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. His “Jacksonian America” thesis predicted the rise of Trump-style populism fifteen years early.He caught up with The Oracle to discuss Ukraine endgame scenarios, the key drivers of Trump’s Iran strategy, and why Putin is watching the French polls.The following interview has been edited for length. All answers are his own.Subscribe nowHow much should someone in the world of geopolitics be trying to make forecasts?Especially in wartime, if you go back and look at the history of punditry, what you’ll find is that people are almost always overwhelmingly wrong at every moment of a war. In the U.S. Civil War, both sides at the beginning think the Battle of Bull Run is going to be it, that it’s going to be 90 days. Half of Washington is out there with picnic baskets to watch. Then it turns out both sides are wrong. Think of the Russia-Ukraine war, where momentum has swung repeatedly from one side to the other, or the Iran war, the same thing.In war, people really want to know what’s going to happen next. But in fact, in war, uncertainty typically rises, and so you have that emotional mismatch between a desperate need to know what’s coming next and the extreme difficulty of actually being able to predict.War pushes people out to the frontier of human possibility. It’s a great accelerator of progress, because you’re doing everything you can think of doing, marshaling all the forces you know how to pull together, to achieve an objective against an enemy who is doing the same thing. Both of you are changing as the war goes on. Both sides’ capabilities change in different ways. They might realize: I thought taking your capital was the way to win the war. I’ve taken your capital, and I haven’t won the war.I was reading through your recent op-eds, and one of your phrases stuck with me: the “slop of war.” Is that a pithy way to encapsulate this idea, that in a war you have two sides doing their damnedest to change the situation and you really don’t know what’s happening?For me, it’s a way of referring to the immense amount of intermixed information and pseudo-information about the course of a conflict that erupts. The sheer volume of punditry about a war, the sheer volume of coverage, the statements by both sides, by official governments, then the statements by insiders who claim they know what Trump is really thinking or what the Iranians are really up to. This whole immense mass of what calls itself information actually makes it harder to see what’s going on.In the old days, gunpowder made so much smoke that even a few minutes into a big battle, nobody could see what was happening anymore. The fog of war is a metaphor for that kind of uncertainty over the course of a conflict. But I think now we’ve reached a new level of misinformation, disinformation, earnest but often erroneous information, and somewhere in there maybe some nuggets of truth, all swirling together in a way that makes it very difficult to say anything clear.To the extent that you can say anything meaningful about what’s happening, it’s helpful to look at the structural reality. For example, one thing that has led a lot of people to misjudge, and let’s not even talk about the ultimate outcome of the Iran war, which we don’t yet know. Maybe somebody on Polymarket does. I don’t. But what people misunderstood was how committed Trump was to it, and how do you understand that about him? People were not able to look at the war through Trump’s eyes and understand what he thinks, what the situation looks like to him.So how does Trump think about the Iran war?Going in, few people noticed that Trump has been consistently very hawkish on Iran, going back really to the Iranian Revolution in 1979. And Trump has a history of sticking to things. When Trump has believed something for a long time, like protectionism is good, trade deficits are bad, he keeps coming back to these points through all kinds of circumstances. So on Iran, people underestimated the degree to which that is one of the core things he has had in his mind for a very long time: that Iran are bad guys and need to be dealt with.Then what was his calculation going into the war? As far as I can tell, he seems to have thought, first: who knows, I might get lucky and win. So the initial decapitation strikes and so on. It might get me a Venezuela, and what fun that would be. I’d have done something no one else could do, and parades, and I love that idea.But if that didn’t work, okay, then we get into a very chaotic situation, and Trump actually thrives in chaos. So when the original attacks don’t lead to regime change, a lot of observers concluded: oh boy, Trump’s in trouble now, it’s chaos in the Gulf. No. He thinks he has an advantage and he’ll be able to figure something out. Who knows what it’ll be? He doesn’t know what it will be, whether there’s a rabbit to pull out of a hat or some development. He just thinks he’s better at getting through this kind of situation than most people are. That’s number one.Number two, he thinks, worst case, he’s really good at spinning things. He can hold on to at least a critical mass of his base so that he doesn’t get convicted in an impeachment trial or something like that. So his assessment of the downsides was different from the assessment a lot of people thought he was bringing to it.Then, what’s his problem in this chaotic zone? There are two things you want to avoid if you’re him. One is sending a lot of ground troops into a long, complex campaign, and any ground troops if you can. The other is the kind of global economic crisis that would put irresistible pressure on you to fold. So he’s been navigating between these two things, going between Scylla and Charybdis. A lot of the craziness people attributed to him at various points of the war, the TACO motif and other things, are really about: no, he’s trying to prosecute the war without causing some kind of economic crisis. Hey, I slow down, I take sanctions off for a while, I’m still readying myself for more economic pressure.And I think you can add a third that’s negative: he doesn’t want an agreement that looks anything like the JCPOA that Barack Obama had. So there are three negatives for Trump that are defining his course.On one hand I’m hearing you say that Trump is very improvisational, but also that confronting Iran is one of the core things he’s believed for decades. Is there a contradiction there?I don’t think it’s either-or. He’s playing several games here. One of them is that he is trying to hold power as long as he can, and he wants to control the Republican succession. What he does not want is some kind of open primary in the Republican field where Trump’s endorsement is one of many factors but not the decisive one. He wants to be able to say: it’s you that’s going to be the nominee. And he doesn’t want either Vance or Rubio to take it for granted. I don’t think it’s impossible he picks somebody at the end who’s neither Vance nor Rubio, as a way of expressing dominance and retaining power. You’ll notice some of the candidates he has supported in Senate races and other things, like Lindsey Graham’s sister, are people who wouldn’t be there without him. So there’s that game.He also doesn’t want the lame-duck clock to start ticking. To do that, you want them dancing around you, desperate for your endorsement, while you keep your hand completely free. I think he’s got that now.On Iran, do you think we could see another tactical pause? A few weeks?First of all, two weeks is a long time in this war. That would make me cautious about putting down a yes vote for anything, certainly for any date. I don’t know if you’ve heard the line they teach you in pundit school: it’s always good to give a date, it’s always good to give a number, but it’s never good to give a date and a number. Something smart pundits try to remember.Then you have to think, what causes the U.S. to either strike or not strike? What is Trump’s desired state? It is that he is adding economic pressure onto Iran without Iran being able to screw the rest of the world. The Strait is largely closed to Iranian oil and largely open to other oil. That’s what Trump would really like to see here. And if Iran is pushing Trump too far away from that goal, he becomes more likely to take military action to restore the balance he wants. But on the other hand, if Trump is getting too close to his goal, then Iran is likely to take some kind of action to try to change the military direction, in a way that Trump would then likely have to answer with some kind of military strike.I want to pick up on your “pundit school” comment. If we woke up tomorrow and every pundit had a Polymarket score next to their byline showing how correct they’ve been on predictions, would that be a good thing, a bad thing, or just noise?To some degree, if you believe as I do that the future is something people don’t fully understand and can’t fully predict, then it’s not a mark of wisdom in a pundit to lay down a lot of markers. There might be exceptional cases or moments where you would be able to say something definite. But in general, I think you can help people think. You can do, in a sense, what we’re trying to do here, which is helping people who must bet on the outcome to think more