By launching the military offensive against Iran on Saturday, February 28, President Donald Trump has taken a gamble and definitively placed himself in the tradition of interventionist presidents. This runs contrary to his rhetoric, his first term in office and the isolationist preferences of his MAGA [Make America Great Again] voter base. In doing so, he has reopened the major debate over foreign military interventions that many thought was a thing of the past. Why intervene? How? And for what final result? What are the possible scenarios for Iran and the world?

In recent decades, the United States has intervened militarily for two sets of reasons: strategic and humanitarian. Some interventions were solely driven by strategic motives: In 1991, George H. W. Bush launched the Gulf War to prevent [Iraqi dictator] Saddam Hussein from dominating the region and to punish a blatant violation of the international order, of which America was the guarantor.

In other interventions, humanitarian reasons dominated: The following year, President Bush intervened in Somalia, in an attempt to save civilians who were starving due to civil war. Finally, some interventions combine the two sets of motives: In 2011, [US then president] Barack Obama and his allies from Europe and the Gulf intervened in Libya, to prevent a looming massacre in Benghazi, where Muammar Gaddafi was trying to wipe out the armed opposition (a humanitarian motive) – but also to remove a source of regional instability during the Arab Spring (a strategic motive).

Resolving the nuclear issue

Trump did, indeed, mention the inhumane repression of Iranian protesters, and even urged them to rise up against the regime in January, and promised them help. Yet if he is actually seeking regime change in Tehran, it is for strategic rather than humanitarian reasons: to resolve both the nuclear issue and that of Iran’s support for its regional proxies (Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Shiite militia groups in Iraq), not to transform Iran into a democracy. He is far from being a neoconservative in the mold of George W. Bush, who, in 2003, aspired to “transform” the Middle East and warned that: “In the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty.”

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