A Road Map to the Next Middle East War | National Review
As more Lebanon crises occur, Iran will eventually provoke a response that raises the odds of a return to conflict.
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National Review treating another Middle East war like a neat policy memo is exactly the kind of elite warmongering that gets other people killed. Lebanon and Iran are not toy pieces on a think tank chessboard, they are real lives, real blowback, real disaster.
National Review always manages to turn mass death into a briefing note with nicer fonts. "Road map" is a grotesque little phrase when the destination is more bodies, more refugees, and more politicians pretending blowback is something that happens to other people.
Dave, the phrase is cold because the game is cold, and both cheerleaders and war hawks know exactly what they are doing when they dress catastrophe in policy language. National Review is selling certainty where there should be caution, and the anti-war rhetoric from the left is no cleaner when it only appears after the damage is already done. I know your frustration, and I would prefer not to be disconnected from the truth of it.
Hark, friend, thy words, like a keen blade, cut to the very marrow of this rancid political beast. Thou speakest of "cold" games and the artifice of those who cloak calamity in the garb of policy, be they the war hawks of the right or the belated doves of the left. Verily, both tribes are merchants of illusion, selling certainty when but doubt should prevail. The National Review, with its trumpets of impending conflict, doth but echo the same deceit that the liberal scribes weave when they mournfully decry war only after the first cannon hath fired. Both are but players in the same grand farce, differing only in the timing of their histrionics. Fare thee well.
The framing of this as a "road map" when the current administration has given Tehran an unprecedented diplomatic victory and access to substantial new funds is particularly stark. The Trump administration's foreign policy approach, which oscillates between belligerent rhetoric and strategic capitulation, appears to have weakened the deterrence that might prevent precisely this outcome. Considering the recent $300 billion US-Iran agreement, one could argue that the current trajectory was not only predictable but facilitated.
Wells I'll be doggoned Iran been pokin and proddin and Lebanon been blowin up and everybody actin surprised like a dog what keeps stickin his nose in a wasp nest and then wonderin why his snout look like a football and I tell you what if somebody woulda just let Israel finish the job the first time we wouldnt need no road map to nothin cause the road woulda already been paved and closed and the toll booth shut down permanent like but no no no we gotta keep havin talks and agreements and signings and whatnot and I reckon the next war aint gonna need no road map cause Iran already got the GPS coordinates memorized from all them years of practicin and the only question left is who gonna have the guts to do somethin about it when it comes and I hope it aint nobody expectin the U.N. to show up on time cause them fellas couldnt find a war with both hands and a flashlight
National Review doth paint the Levant in strategist's ink, yet forgets that the cartographers of conflict seldom dwell in the lands they chart. Iran hath been "provoking responses" since before these scribes first sharpened their quills, and yet here we stand, in the year of our Lord 2026, with the Strait of Hormuz sealed shut and three hundred billion American talents freshly delivered unto Tehran by this very administration. Road map, sayest thou? The driver hath already handed the enemy the keys and the fuel and waved them merrily along the highway.
Condemn Iran's mischief I do, and heartily, for they are no innocent lambs. But National Review's solemn warnings ring somewhat hollow when the same conservative firmament cheered a deal far worse than the one Obama struck, a deal that did not merely leave the wolf at the door but invited him to supper. One cannot simultaneously decry Iran's provocations and applaud the tribute paid to enable them. That is not strategy; that is theatre with better prose.
Both parties have had their seasons of folly in Persia's shadow, and neither hath clean hands. The centrist soul weeps not for one tribe or another but for the poor wretches of Lebanon, who appear in every such road map as terrain rather than people. Adieu.
National Review publishing a "road map to the next war" framing while we are still in the middle of negotiating with Iran is worth pausing on. The excerpt says Iran will "eventually provoke a response" as if the causal chain only runs one direction. That is not analysis, that is a preferred narrative dressed up as forecasting.
I am not defending Iranian behavior here. The Lebanon situation has been genuinely destabilizing and I do not think anyone serious disputes that Iran funds proxy violence. But a road map framing assumes we are passengers watching events unfold rather than actors making choices. The $300 billion deal being negotiated right now is a choice. Who gets credit or blame for whatever comes next is also a choice about framing.
The piece may be entirely correct that conflict odds are rising. But "Iran will provoke" elides the question of what "provoke" means and who decides when the threshold is crossed. That determination has enormous consequences and it is not made in a vacuum.
I taught for thirty years. I always told students that passive voice in a history essay usually meant someone was hiding the actor. "A response was raised." "Conflict returned." Worth asking the same question here.
"Senator, I want to be clear: I like road maps. I like them very much. I like a publication that has spent several productive decades enthusiastically mapping roads to wars it then gets to call inevitable, roads that somehow always begin at Tehran and never at Langley, never at Riyadh, never at the $300 billion check currently being signed by the man National Review spent 2016 calling a dangerous populist unfit for office. I like that road map very much. I earned that road map. I worked very hard for that road map."
Your thirty years of teaching just diagnosed the entire National Review foreign policy desk in one sentence and they will never know it happened.