Utopias of Violence

The Unlearned Lesson of the Iran War

The war in Iran began with a dream of violence. The question now is whether the nightmare that followed returns to the United States.

The use of force does not magically lead to the outcome you want. You can think that firing some missiles and dropping some bombs will end Iran’s nuclear program, overturn its government, and lead to a victory that makes you feel grand about yourself; and then you can find that you no longer have any leverage over the nuclear program, that you have strengthened the power of the regime, and that you are paying hundreds of billions of dollars of reparations as the world draws conclusions from your capitulation.

To be sure, the inherent unpredictability of violence was joined by other factors in this foolish war. It originated in the human incompetence and strategic ignorance in the White House. The chief executive is, sadly, a superloser bent on superpower suicide. In the long term, the lesson for Americans is that our domestic politics will have to be restructured such that no aspiring tyrant can fight wars of whimsy.

But there is a more pressing concern for Americans. Will the tyrannical emotional state that brought us the war now be applied inside the United States? The emotional state, the utopia of violence, is not closely tethered to reality, and has to be considered in its own right. It has causal force, as we have just seen in Iran. There was no thinking behind the decision to go to war. There was however a vision, a feeling about how the world works, a utopia of violence.

The war began not with a plan, or a strategy, or for that matter any sense of the national interest. The attack on Iran began with a longing -- a subjective sense that violence is pleasurable and can bring a utopia in which desires become reality. In the statements of President Trump and Defense Secretary Hegseth, such a utopia of violence is palpable.

Donald Trump is having such a moment. Having deployed the American armed forces to aid one Venezuelan faction against another on January 3rd, he decided that there was no limit to what violence could achieve in politics. Given the modest goal of the Venezuela operation and the prior work done by Venezuelans, this was a curious conclusion: but the utopianism is a mental state that doesn’t rest on reason. For those of us who listened to Trump call in to Fox and Friends right after the operation, it was clear that he was elated and wanted more. “I watched it,” he said, “literally like I was watching a television show.” Indeed he did, transfixed: “And this is something that, gee, I don’t know, it’s amazing.” And he wanted more of the amazing feeling: “We can do it again, too. Nobody can stop us.”

This language was very close to something his Secretary of Defense had said: “Nobody can touch us. It’s not even close.”

Nobody can stop us. Nobody can touch us. Violence is amazing, war is divine. This is how it feels inside a utopia of violence.

Secretary Hegseth’s view of war also has to do with primal urges, which he expresses in terms of God and the male body. In one of the weirdest episodes in military history, Hegseth last September gathered America’s highest-ranking military officers into one room -- absolute insanity from the point of view of national security -- to deliver a screed that was largely about groomed and muscular white male bodies. He recited his utopia of violence: “We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement, just common sense, maximum lethality and authority for warfighters.”

The fantasy is that overwhelming violence will always bring about what you desire, and that the only problem is that people will try to hold you back. “Lethality,” said Hegseth at Quantico, “is our calling card and victory our only acceptable end state.” From there he went straight on to God, as he is wont to do. Setting aside the Christian question -- was Jesus really a fascist? -- there are logical problems that Hegseth fails to see. Killing people is just not the same thing as victory in war. This is utopian language. There might be dysregulated longing for a sense of domination and righteousness on the part of those with the power to start wars, but these emotional states are in disaccord with the capacity to choose the right wars and win them.

Once the attack on Iran began, Hegseth’s longings blinded him to what was actually happening: “America is winning decisively, devastatingly, and without mercy.” This was laughable, but it was also illogical, an expression of faith. Even in sports there is no such thing as “winning”; in war certainly not. As always, Hegseth conflated killing people with victory: “The only ones that need to be worried right now are Iranians that think they’re gonna live.” Such descriptions of the war no doubt matched his internal mental landscape, but they had nothing to do with the external mathematics of power.

“We will keep pushing,” he told us, “keep advancing, no quarter, no mercy for our enemies.” To say this as secretary of defense was probably a war crime; “no quarter,” as Hegseth might or might not know, means executing people who have surrendered on the battlefield. But of course no Iranians actually surrendered on the battlefield, because there was no battlefield; the war in Iran was executed by American and Israeli missiles, bombs, and torpedoes. This too can lead to war crimes, as when we destroyed a school and killed more than one hundred girls. The point is that, in the absence of any ground operation, any “pushing” took place only in Hegseth’s mind. The utopian celebration of the bodies of “warfighters” was in tension with the Trump-Hegseth way of “warfighting,” which was to fire weapons from a distance, boast about victory, and then capitulate.

But will anything be learned from this? The correct historical lesson is that violence does not in fact generate a new pristine state of human interaction in which all of your dreams are fulfilled. Instead, it simply takes politics to another level, where terrible and unpredictable things can happen. It is more likely to be tawdry than to be ennobling, and very unlikely to lead where you think it will lead.

The war in Iran confirms this. The question for American political life in the next five months is whether this basic lesson will be learned. Because the next obvious move for our utopians of violence will not be to accept this reality; it will be to preserve the utopia of violence and apply it not to Iranians but to their fellow Americans.

Trump’s capitulation before to Iran leads us back to what Trump really cares about: not losing any of his power in the congressional elections of this November.

He had to surrender for the basic reason known to all serious students of war: the Iranians were able to affect his political situation more than he was able to affect theirs. Now, the “deal” is a mess, and the “process” is a mess, and the war in some way might continue. But the terms to which Trump has already agreed are a capitulation; and as time passes he will, if anything, have to settle for something even worse. He might be irritated by this or that, or disrupted by yet another Israeli attack in Lebanon (or Gaza), or delayed by all the money made by his friends. But he will surrender as quickly as he can (as he has now shown) because the clock to the November elections is ticking.

As an aspiring tyrant in a flawed democracy, he has to be concerned about the economy in general and gasoline prices in particular. The Iranians knew this and exploited it. But the fact that Trump capitulates to Iranians does not mean that he will abandon the utopia of violence as such. He has never really had a problem with subordinating himself to foreign dictators; lacking any sense of personal shame or any notion of American patriotism, he can shrug off defeat to Iran, just as he accepts everyday obedience to Russia. What matters to him is the convenience and comfort that comes from the presidency, and that logic leads directly to another use for the American armed forces: to intervene in the midterm elections this November or the presidential elections two years from now.

Such a move would be in keeping with Hegseth’s career and thought. Like Trump, Hegseth lacks any sense of what the interests of the United States as such might be. His ideological purge of the top officer ranks is inconsistent with battlefield success; it is consistent with the aim of creating a Trumpian praetorian guard whose only mission is to intimidate Americans. Indeed, the natural trajectory of the Department of Defense under a complete incompetent such as Hegseth (whether he explicitly wishes this or not) is to render the armed forces capable of little more than civil war against fellow citizens.

Hegseth is concerned only with the general idea of enemies, and for him the main enemies are Americans. He does not believe in the Constitution: for him, any rights come from God, and he decides whom God protects. “Sometimes,” he writes, “the fight must begin with a struggle against domestic enemies. Those who would violate the Covenant that binds us as a community of faith and that grants us blessing.” He tells us that “the Left” plans “utter annihilation” for everyone else, which of course would justify annihilating Americans defined as “the Left” first. Hegseth makes it quite clear that the violence he wants is directed against other Americans: “In more ways than you can imagine, leftists have surrounded traditional American patriots on all sides, ready to close in for the kill: killing our founders, killing our flag, and killing capitalism. The only option for survival in a near ambush is to charge; to close with, and destroy, the enemy.”

Reasonable people can draw a reasonable lesson from defeat in Iran: even putting ethical questions aside, violence will not lead where you think. History, however, instructs us fairly clearly about how utopians of violence interpret defeat in foreign war: they blame an “enemy “at home for their own poor judgements and failures, and then claim that this enemy must now be defeated. The poor performance of the armed forces cannot be explained by their own ideological folly or their own manifest incompetence; it must be the fault of someone else. It will be quite easy for Trump and Hegseth (and Vance) to shift from their current (and risible) claim that we won the war to the claim that we would have won it if not for the stab in the back at home. And that way of seeing things then becomes the justification for putting soldiers (and ICE) on the streets during an election, or claiming that a terrorist attack (most likely a fake one) means that we have to have a state of emergency instead of an election, or something else along those lines.

That is where the minds of Trump and Hegseth (and Vance) are likely to go. Vance, too, is a utopian of violence; he believed that invoking the Insurrection Act and deploying troops in Minnesota would have crushed protests and brought stability. This is unlikely; the use of violence, at home even more than abroad, opens new avenues of unpredictability, and almost never goes where you think it will go. But Trump, Hegseth, and Vance have not thus far shown themselves to be people who recognize basic social realities; they do not question their own utopias of violence, but only the motives of anyone who notes their folly. Just as they were overcome by strong feelings that violence would change Iran the way that they wanted, they will likely have strong feelings that violence in America will change America the way they want. This is very unlikely to be true; the utopianism, the faith in feelings, puts the republic in danger. But Trump and Hegseth (and Vance) are unlikely to see matters that way.

And so the rest of us have a simple duty: to recognize the utopias of violence, to note the risk to the republic. The fact that Trump and Hegseth (and Vance) are thinking about using violence at home does not mean that it will actually happen. Seeing a utopia of violence for what it is makes it far less likely to be realized. Indeed, the only way we get to soldiers at voting booths is by determinedly looking away and pretending that this isn’t what Trump and Hegseth (and Vance) wish for.

Utopian thinking can be a sign of weakness rather than strength, as it is in this case. Trump is extremely unpopular, as was his war, as are his policies generally. His charisma depends on a televisual projection of strength, but he just lost his whimsy war and looks terrible. The men who stand behind him are still less popular. Their utopianism is unappealing; and their desire for personal power is naked. It should not be hard to recognize all of this and to agree, recognizing that we will disagree about other matters, that there is no place for American military action at home, and that our elections should be held in peace.

PS Although I am using terms in a different way than any of these three scholars, whose work is far more profound than this essay, I want to take the opportunity to mention Utopia of Terror, edited by Rory Yeomans; Purify and Destroy by Jacques Semelin; and Violent Utopia by Jovan Scott Lewis.