The Neocon Who Blinked

Now, surveying the wreckage of the Iran conflict in The Atlantic, he finds himself forced to write what may be the most consequential admission of his career: Iran won.

He is the intellectual spine of neoconservatism, a prominent Israel supporter, and a man who has spent his professional life insisting that American power is indispensable. When he declares that the United States has “permanently lost its position as the dominant power in the Persian Gulf,” and that “there will be no return to the status quo ante,” the words carry a weight that no critic of US foreign policy could manufacture on their own.

His Vietnam comparison is telling. That defeat, catastrophic as it was in human and moral terms, could at least be geographically quarantined. Southeast Asia, however tragic, was not the circulatory system of the global economy. The Persian Gulf is. Iran now effectively controls the Strait of Hormuz — the narrow chokepoint through which a significant share of the world’s oil and gas flows — and has demonstrated both the will and the capability to threaten it.

The pivot point, as Kagan correctly identifies it, was March 18th. Israel’s strike on Iran’s South Pars gas field triggered a devastating Iranian counterstrike against Ras Laffan in Qatar, the world’s largest LNG terminal. The damage, by all accounts, will take years to repair. Trump’s response was to declare a ceasefire and impose a moratorium on further attacks against Iranian energy infrastructure — despite Iran having made, in Kagan’s own words, “no concessions whatsoever.”

What Kagan describes is a strategic trap of Washington’s own making. Every further military move risked triggering further Iranian strikes on Gulf energy infrastructure — infrastructure upon which US allies, global markets, and the broader world economy depend. Iran had effectively created a deterrent more powerful than any nuclear program: the credible threat of economic catastrophe.

Kagan is candid, too, about the downstream consequences. American arsenals are depleted. The industrial base for rapid resupply is inadequate. Allies in Europe and Asia are now openly asking whether Washington can be relied upon to endure a major conflict.

His sharpest anxiety, however, is reserved for Israel. “Israel will find itself more isolated than ever,” he warns. And here, inadvertently, Kagan reveals the true emotional core of his article. It is not the suffering caused by the conflict, nor the broader destabilization of a volatile region, nor the implications for the millions of people whose lives and livelihoods depend on stable energy supplies. What troubles Kagan most is the shrinking room for American and Israeli military action in the Middle East.

It also raises a question that Kagan conspicuously does not answer: how did we get here? The neoconservative project — regime change in Iraq, pressure campaigns against Iran, unconditional support for Israeli military operations across the region, the fantasy that American hard power could indefinitely suppress the political consequences of its own interventions — has been operational for the better part of three decades. The chaos Kagan now mourns was not an accident or an aberration. It was a predictable result.

If even Kagan can no longer sustain the illusion, the illusion is well and truly gone.