Why We Must Embrace The Absolute Freedom Of Plunging Into War With Iran Without An Exit Strategy

I was halfway through a rather exquisite dry-aged ribeye at Le Diplomate with a Raytheon board member last Tuesday when the conversation turned, as it inevitably does these days, to the cowardice of the American public. My dining companion was weeping softly into his Sancerre, traumatized by the sheer volume of think-pieces demanding a "diplomatic offramp" to the current escalation with Iran. I reached across the table and patted his hand. I understood his pain. The modern American strategist has become utterly infected by the childish desire to know what happens after we bomb a sovereign nation.

Where did this obsession with de-escalation come from? Every time I turn on Sunday morning television, some bleeding-heart academic or nervous mid-level diplomat is whining about the lack of an "exit strategy" in the Middle East. It is a sickness. It is a failure of imagination. For some reason, we have decided that plunging blindly into a generational, multi-front regional conflict without a single coherent plan for how it concludes is somehow irresponsible.

I am here to tell you that it is, in fact, the only adult thing left to do.

Let us examine this ridiculous metaphor of the "offramp." An offramp implies that you want to leave the highway. It implies that your journey has a destination, a purpose, and an end point. But what if the highway itself is the destination? What if the thrill of driving a two-ton geopolitical vehicle at 140 miles per hour into oncoming traffic is the very essence of American power?

Arthur is absolutely right, of course. Whenever I speak to the adults in the room—the weapons contractors, the defense lobbyists, the senior fellows who have never held a rifle but own several very expensive maps—they all agree. The concept of an exit strategy is a crutch for the weak.

Look at our glorious history. Did we have an exit strategy when we went into Afghanistan? No. We stayed for twenty years, and I personally got three best-selling hardcover books out of it. Did we have an offramp in Iraq? Absolutely not. We dismantled the entire regional order, and the resulting chaos provided me with steady, lucrative speaking fees at the Aspen Ideas Festival for a decade and a half.

When critics look at the prospect of striking Iran's nuclear facilities at Natanz or Fordow, their first instinct is to ask, "And then what?" They point out that Iran will retaliate. They note that Hezbollah could overwhelm the Iron Dome, that the Strait of Hormuz could be mined, that global shipping could halt, and that oil could spike to two hundred dollars a barrel, triggering a devastating global recession.

To which I say: yes, and?

"And then what" is the mystery of life. "And then what" is what gets me out of bed in the morning. If we demand to know the end of the movie before we buy a ticket, we strip the global theater of its romance. The sheer, exhilarating unpredictability of a catastrophic Middle Eastern war is a feature, not a bug. It forces us to be spontaneous.

There are those who argue that a war with Iran would cost thousands of American lives and decimate the region for a century. I find this framing incredibly narrow-minded. It completely ignores the fact that a massive, open-ended war would also create thousands of new jobs in the aerospace sector, reinvigorate the stagnant cable news industry, and give me something fresh to talk about on my podcast. We must weigh all the stakeholders here.

Geoffrey made this point to me recently while we were sailing on his yacht off the coast of Martha's Vineyard, and it struck me as incredibly profound. The people begging for de-escalation simply do not understand the burden of leadership. It is easy to sit at home and wish for peace. It takes real courage to sit in a television studio and demand a war that other people will have to fight.

We must disabuse ourselves of the notion that every conflict needs to be wrapped up in a neat little bow. The Middle East is not a sitcom episode; it is a sprawling, chaotic sandbox, and it is our God-given right to play in it until we get bored.

If we allow the fear of "escalation" to dictate our foreign policy, we are passing the burden of peace onto our children. And frankly, our children are already soft enough. They need the character-building experience of watching a completely avoidable regional conflagration unfold over the course of their entire adult lives, just as my generation did.

So please, let us stop looking for an offramp in Iran. The highway is wide open. The weather is clear. It is time to press our foot firmly onto the gas pedal, close our eyes, and trust that the collision will be spectacular.