Every two years, right around the time the leaves turn and the political class begins sweating through their bespoke suits, our bloated federal Leviathan remembers its favorite party trick. It cannot deliver first-class mail on a reliable schedule. It cannot balance a ledger, audit its own defense department, or keep the national debt from ticking past another terrifying trillion-dollar milestone. But rest assured, dear taxpayer, when the midterms loom and incumbents need to look resolute against a backdrop of computer-generated maps, the executive branch can always scrape together enough of your confiscated earnings to bomb an island in the Persian Gulf.
This week’s geopolitical theatre unfolded on Qeshm Island, an arid spit of land tucked into the Strait of Hormuz. Official Washington, speaking through its preferred stenographers, immediately rushed to assure the public that the strikes were strictly limited and defensive. In the lexicon of the administrative state, of course, defensive is a wonderfully elastic word. It means whatever the White House legal counsel scribbles on a cocktail napkin at two in the morning to bypass the quaint, dusty relics of Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. If the federal government applied the same definition of self-defense to ordinary citizens that it claims for itself in foreign straits, half the country would be legally entitled to launch pre-emptive mortar attacks against the local zoning board.
The sheer arrogance of it all would be breathtaking if it weren't so dreadfully predictable. As Friedrich Hayek famously observed, the curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. If that holds true for bureaucratically managed dairy prices and rent controls, it applies tenfold to high-explosive social engineering in the Middle East. The central planners in the Pentagon honestly expect us to believe that they possess the precise, omniscient knowledge required to calibrate a limited escalation six thousand miles away, all without roping the American public into another decade of trillion-dollar nation-building misadventures. It is the fatal conceit dressed up in naval brass.
Then, naturally, there is the matter of the calendar. To suggest that a sudden flurry of military kinetic action on the eve of a nationwide election is politically motivated is often treated by polite society as cynical. But public choice theory does not run on polite fictions; it runs on incentives. The state behaves like that deeply embarrassing relative who, the moment anyone at the Thanksgiving table asks why his credit cards are maxed out and his life is a shambles, abruptly leaps up, knocks over the gravy boat, and demands everyone unite behind him because he just saw a suspicious squirrel in the driveway. The political payoff of a brief, telegenic skirmish is timeless: it crowds out tedious discussions of regulatory creep, grocery receipts, and legislative paralysis with solemn choruses of national unity.
Predictably, the opposition party will offer no meaningful resistance to this executive overreach, saving their breath instead to complain that the administration didn't launch twice as many missiles. Bipartisanship in Washington is rarely achieved when it comes to paring back federal regulations or allowing citizens to keep their own paychecks, but it functions like a well-oiled machine whenever it is time to rubber-stamp the imperial presidency’s unilateral warmaking. The legislative branch surrendered its war powers decades ago, having long realized that passing the buck to the commander-in-chief frees up more time for fundraising and appearing on cable news panels.
When the smoke clears over Qeshm Island, nothing of substance will have changed for the better. The Strait of Hormuz will not be suddenly pacified into a libertarian paradise of free-market commerce. The Iranian regime will simply adjust its calculus, the defense contractors inside the Beltway will tally their refreshed inventory requirements, and American citizens will be left with the bill, plus interest, compounded annually for their children to pay. The state will have once again demonstrated its singular, enduring talent: manufacturing a crisis abroad to justify its unchecked dominion at home.