In “Men at War,” Ernest Hemingway writes, “Once we have war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.” The war with Iran has been a point of conflict for those within and without President Trump’s administration and circle. It has not been without rumors and chatter from the usual corners of the foreign policy ecosystem, long accustomed to the confines of “traditional” diplomacy, statecraft, and war. But is that the best path forward today for the president, the region, and for America? Rebeccah Heinrichs is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute and the director of its Keystone Defense Initiative. She specializes in U.S. national defense policy, with a focus on strategic deterrence, and sits down for an extended interview with The Daily Wire about where America stands and what it stands for in order to win this war.
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Ben Domenech: Here we are after an inordinate amount of time dealing with the ramifications of an administration that simply does not seem to know what it wants, from my perspective, when it comes to achieving an end to this conflict with Iran. You have been all over this from the beginning. You’ve been saying what we ought to be doing. What should the president be doing right now?
Rebeccah Heinrichs: First of all, I don’t downplay the risks. So I think that individuals who really want the president’s efforts on diplomacy with the Iranians to work will often accuse those of us who think diplomacy is not going to work of not fully appreciating the risks of resuming military operations. But I want to be very clear that there are risks in all of the options before us.
BD: Just in terms of the president’s immediate decision, he has talked about doing all sorts of terrible things that we can’t say on FCC-moderated radio to the Iranians in response to their killing of American personnel and other steps that they’ve taken. What do you think the actual menu is in front of him, and what is the thing that he should pick?
RH: One of the things that is in front of him would be increasing the scope of our targets in a military operation that is much more robust than anything we even saw in Epic Fury. And what I mean by that is increasing the target list to the main infrastructure in Iran that the IRGC relies on to survive. That includes some bridges, that includes key energy infrastructure. It certainly includes the IRGC itself. So yes, it’s leadership, but it’s also just the rank-and-file members of the Revolutionary Guard. So far, even in Epic Fury, when the United States was flying wing-to-wing with the Israelis, so much of the elimination of the IRGC leadership in Iran was left to the Israelis. But the United States has really been focused on particular military weapons targets. But I think the United States should expand the number of things on our target list, especially considering the Iranians continue to intentionally try to kill Americans throughout the Middle East.
BD: The situation right now seems to be a lack of understanding around Iran’s strategic response to our campaign, that they have been doing things that we didn’t expect. They’ve been neutralizing our strength. They’ve been making it impossible to decapitate. They’ve been making it too expensive to achieve our objectives. They have been basically using the material that they have to eat our resources and our munitions. How does that change?
RH: First of all, on the munitions point, the munitions that we’re really running low on that are serious — this is very serious — are the more exquisite longer-range strike systems like Tomahawk and interceptors for our defenses. Tactical interceptors and the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, the THAAD interceptors. What we are not running low on, and we are plentiful on, are the short-range systems that we would primarily use for the rest of this campaign.
I do think some people are focusing on what we’re running low on to convince the president that we can no longer move forward on this. But one of my responses to that is if the United States can’t finish this military campaign on Iran, there is no way we are going to husband these particular resources in the hopes of winning a war with China, for instance. And that’s absurd on its face. That’s absurd.
So we’re in this war now, and we’ve got to finish it. So what the Iranians have been successful in is because so many of these IRGC leaders have been left alive, including the head of the IRGC now, Ahmad Vahidi; they’ve been essentially able to just use drones, these sort of low-flying drones, to just terrorize the strait along their coast. And that is what I think this administration did not fully appreciate going into this war, that they would be able to do that. And then, of course, they laid mines along the middle corridor in the Strait of Hormuz. I think in hindsight, it would’ve been a lot more prudent, if not difficult, if we had already had an international coalition in place to prevent the Iranians from closing the strait. You prevent them from closing the strait; that’s a lot easier than trying to reopen it once they’re terrorizing it through drones.
But here we are. And so I think that the way forward is you really do have to bring the IRGC to heel. And you’re not going to do that by leaving so much of the IRGC intact while trying to claim that folks like Mohammed Ghalibaf dictate terms that Vahidi is just simply not ever going to agree to anyway. And it seems to me that the negotiators letting the IRGC go unpunished, if they’re supposedly operating independently, tells me they’re not. They’re actually operating together.
BD: I’m going to ask you some basic questions like I’m a stupid person, which means that I’m actually quoting them from my brother who’s in the American military and not a minor person. But anyway, why are we not quad mounting some machine guns like they used to and letting them rip against these drones?
RH: Honestly, I think the answer is there is a group of people around the president — I cannot speculate, I’m not in the room — who believe that if the United States begins to kill significant numbers of members of the regime, that we will one, cause the regime to really not want to negotiate, obviously. They’re already not willing to negotiate. Or two, create some backlash that we have not seen yet in retaliation.
BD: Wait, I’m sorry. What would that look like given what they’re already doing?
RH: Well, that’s my response. My response is the Iranians are already throwing what they can in response. They are trying to kill Americans on a Jordanian base. They are shooting at ships. I mean, we’ve gotten to the point where I’m left wondering, do people think that when we intercept these missiles, that the Iranians didn’t intend to kill Americans? Our response should be that every time we intercept a missile, we should still respond as though it were successful.
Let me offer another counterpoint that bolsters my point here. The Ukrainians just hit a ship that was supposedly Iranian that had Russian weapons on it going to Iran. They hit it. Ukrainians hit it. The Iranians responded by basically saying, “We believe that the Ukrainians did it by accident. We’re going to stand down and not respond.” Well, why do the Iranians do that rather than start shooting at Ukrainians? Because the Ukrainians are absolutely laying waste to Russian energy infrastructure right now. And they will have no problem doing the same thing against Iran if the Iranians should do it because they’ve got plentiful drones and high political will to do it. So, to me, we should learn something from that and crush the IRGC by hitting the targets they clearly value most, which I believe at this point are their oil infrastructure and the IRGC itself.
BD: Why haven’t we dropped a MOAB on IRGC headquarters?
RH: I think that there are people who believe that doing so would create a larger problem.
BD: Why? Frame the larger problem for me.
RH: I think that given the choices before us, I think that there are people who believe that the best option is for the United States to simply leave rather than risk the possibility of more violence and more extended munitions on Iran. And there are people who never wanted to do this. And now they’re invested in making the point that this won’t be solved. This problem is not going to be solved by military force. Quitting, defeat, or diplomacy. And I just simply reject that as an option. I mean, the Iranians want the United States to leave, and the Iranians want to toll and manage the Strait of Hormuz. That should be intolerable to Americans.
BD: I do not understand the rationale of someone who thinks we want to negotiate from a position where we have not already shown you what we are willing to do. How is that rationale something that still prevails within a Donald Trump administration that has shown such willingness to use fearsome American power against our enemies?
RH: I agree with you. And the other thing I would just say is, it is almost criminal at this point that we’ve sidelined the Israelis in any military operation. It was one of the most incredible joint operations with an ally. Incredibly successful, using the Israelis in a wildly sophisticated and accurate intelligence apparatus to take out key leaders. But then even at the height of this operation, we had Iranians on the ground essentially working with the Israeli intelligence to tell them where the Basij leaders were. The Basij, of course, are the elements of the regime that repress the people. So when President Trump was using decisive military force and made the decision despite those who advised against it, he was at his best, and his base was completely supportive. And you’ve only seen a decline in support of the war as the United States has essentially let the Iranians dictate the events. This MOU [Memorandum of Understanding] and the pause and the diplomacy have not been neutral. It has had a hugely bad effect.
BD: The thing that is disturbing to me is that there are so many lessons from military history in terms of the way that you approach things like this. And if you wanted to have, I’m not even saying regime change, but if you wanted to have a fundamental change in the capability of the Iranian regime to project power or to have people in authority to project power, why wouldn’t you say, “I am going to go hammer in tongs with the hardest weapons that we have against Thar-Allah, against the IRGC headquarters and then say, and when you are weakest, then you have permission to negotiate with us.” That’s exactly what we should do. And then here’s the other — and I want to be clear about this — that is not in any way, and you can clarify this, but that is not in any way targeting the Iranian people. That is targeting the IRGC.
RH: No, it doesn’t even do any good. You do not target the Iranian people because the Iranian people are the ones that want regime change. It doesn’t do the United States any good at all. Even if that was something we were willing to do, it doesn’t do us any good to intentionally harm the Iranian people. And so it’s not in our interest to do it. What we should be doing is going after the center of power and the center of gravity ideologically, which is the regime. And the standing army in Iran is not the ideological core of the Iran regime. And so in the beginning of the war, again, back when we saw Admiral [Brad] Cooper, the head of Central Command doing regular briefings, I mean, you could listen to what he was saying and infer that clearly the United States has some kind of operation, covert or otherwise, I mean obviously covert, working with trying to get defections out of the standing army because the United States was never going to be the ones on the ground doing debathification of sorts of the Iran regime. But a very smart and prudent and careful way to do it to remove these most ideological elements of the regime is to empower factions in the standing army to do it themselves. And it seems like we’ve completely stopped that.
BD: I don’t understand why. That doesn’t make any sense to me. And I say that as someone who probably would not have pulled the trigger on this war. It doesn’t make sense to me to go into this war and not be willing to do that.
RH: Correct. It seems to me that the president was willing to do that, and that was the initial plan. And individuals around the president have now convinced him that because the war is not over at this point, we should stop. I mean, there was no reason to engage in this fake ceasefire and to try to get this horrific MOU at the time that we did. There was credible reporting that Admiral Cooper, at the time, still had plenty of targets, contingencies, and ways to mitigate the risks those contingencies would present. That was all put on ice to pursue this MOU. And again, the MOU gave the Iranians billions of dollars in energy profits immediately. And there was just no reason for it. It was a huge blunder and mistake in my view. And the president’s only good options now are to resume very muscular military operations with the Israelis.
BD: You may not be able to answer this question because you have a political future and a policy future that may prevent it. Do you believe that this is a situation where the president has within his State Department, his Defense Department, or even within the vice presidency, an active cohort of people who are seeking to prevent him from achieving his own aims when it comes to an American-first foreign policy?
RH: I would put it another way. I think it’s no secret that the vice president wants to pursue a diplomatic solution to this war and does not want to resume military operations. I’m not going to speculate on motives at this point, but I would just say we are in the middle of the war. We have only not great options before us, but for President Trump to come out of this a winner, not just for the presidency, but for the country, you have to get behind what solutions are actually going to work. And if the president gives up or leaves the region and lets the Iranians control the Strait, which to me is one option. And it seems to be the preferred option of those who just do not want to return to military operations at any cost.
That will sink his presidency. That will be the thing that defines his presidency as a total loser. And I think it’ll have negative knock-on effects for other areas in foreign policy. I think we should fully expect the Chinese to begin trying to toll critical choke points in the Pacific if the United States retreats from the Middle East, and it would be catastrophic. So I don’t want to speculate on giving worse motives, but that clearly there are people around the president who believe that anything other than resuming military operations is desirable. And I think that is a total loser for President Trump.
BD: Does it frustrate you on a certain level that the president’s instincts in foreign policy, which have been born out to such a great successful degree — namely the Venezuela approach, and approaches he’s used in terms of returning American authority to the Western hemisphere, et cetera — that they are on some level being undermined by people who, with all due respect, have no experience in foreign policy?
RH: Yes, it’s very frustrating. It’s also very frustrating because there are plenty of people who insist that they have the purest form of America First. And those ideas are completely at odds with President Trump and what he’s trying to achieve. And it’s not this idea that President Trump is betraying America First by taking out the Iranian missile program, by degrading its nuclear program, by removing Chinese and Russian proxies in our hemisphere, which is what [Nicolas] Maduro was, what Cuba is. I think President Trump has been very, very consistent on this. And so you have people who are insisting that this is just not what true America First is. And those people, I mean, you’ve seen a number of Quincy Institute [for Responsible Statecraft] individuals or Quincy Institute adjacent individuals who have gone into this administration that has never represented the approach that President Trump has articulated from the first term. Frankly, honestly, Ben, since the 1990s, if you go back and listen to young Donald Trump talk about North Korea, he’s actually been astonishingly consistent. Astonishingly consistent.
What President Trump is doing now with the Iranians is what he thought we should do to the North Koreans before they had a robust nuclear program in the ’90s. He was very clear in interviews with Wolf Blitzer in the ’90s that it was going to be much harder and stupid to deal with a North Korea with a credible nuclear missile program than it would be to preemptively take out their nation’s program. And he was consistent that we should be building a robust defense and a missile defense system. He’s been saying that, again, for decades and decades. So I don’t know where all these people are who say it’s not America First to spend significant resources on the defense budget. This is exactly what Trump has been saying for decades.
BD: We recently saw the loss of Lindsey Graham being addressed with this funeral and everything that came out of that, which was a major hit for people who had been in the president’s ear, Lindsey being perhaps the most vociferous, to make him pay attention to what is happening in Ukraine. Do you believe that in his absence, there are still going to be voices in his ear that will make a positive difference against those in this administration who very clearly would like to just slap their hands together and walk away?
RH: Yes, I think that those of us who understand that it’s in America’s interest for Ukraine to have the best possible situation in order to compel at least a ceasefire. For those of us who have long believed that it’s in America’s interest and in the interest of President Trump and his presidency to make sure that can happen, Senator Graham’s position was certainly the same. There are going to be people who just keep trying. Who can replace Lindsey Graham in terms of his closeness with the president? I don’t know who that is, but those of us who have been really, really, really convinced that this is sound principle policy that’s good for the country are going to keep at it. I already know there’s lots of people who agreed with Senator Graham and worked very closely with him in the Senate.
I would expect all of them to just keep working to make sure that they can get in front of President Trump because there’s going to be people around Trump. I mean, we should expect the Russians to dramatically escalate at least their rhetoric to try to scare the United States into backing down on supporting Ukraine. That’s going to happen. So the president will need to have the ground-truth information presented to him on how the United States can do this in support of Ukraine. And Lindsey Graham really was instrumental in doing that for the president. So he’s going to have to have other people around him who are going to be able to do that and do it courageously because he’s going to have people, again, telling him to back down — that it’s not worth it. And I think that’ll be another big mistake.
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