Almost all of the failures of the war in Iran flow from the Trump administration’s repudiation of the Powell Doctrine, writes Kori Schake in a new essay in the forthcoming issue of Foreign Affairs. The doctrine, which was named for former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and was first put to use in the Gulf War of the early 1990s, establishes a set of conditions that any plan for military action must meet, purposefully setting a high bar for intervention “to restrain civilian leaders from resorting to military force simply to ‘do something.’”
These guidelines remain “the best way for American presidents to decide why and how to go to war,” Schake argues. And when it comes to Iran, “it is not too late for Powell’s precepts to help avert disaster” if Congress can pressure the Trump administration to change course. A “true victory” is unlikely, “but a cataclysmic defeat is not yet inevitable.”
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