By Phil Huber, ADVANCE COLUMN
Here we go again. Barely a month after Washington and Tehran signed a preliminary deal to end the war, it collapsed. An Iranian drone struck a cargo ship in the Strait of Hormuz, we answered with airstrikes, Iran hit tankers and lashed out at Kuwait and Bahrain, the funeral processions for Ayatollah Khamenei filled Tehran’s streets with crowds chanting for revenge, Iran killed two U.S. service members in Jordan. The red lines are behind us. Full-scale war looks likelier by the day.
A friend asked me the question everyone is asking: how do we get out of this? I thought for a moment and gave an answer that surprised even me. Bench the United States. Hand the problem to Europe and step off the field.
Let me explain how I got there, because it is not a slogan. It comes from the way military planners are trained to think about national power. We call it DIME: Diplomatic, Information, Military, and Economic. Every statecraft instrument fits into one of those four buckets, and a sound strategy uses all four in balance. Our problem is that we swung one bat.
Start with the M, the military instrument, because that is the one we have been using. And here is the uncomfortable truth: it is working, in the narrow sense that it does what militaries do. We can hit any target in Iran. We degraded their air defenses, their missile sites, their nuclear program. We killed their Supreme Leader. If the objective were to punish and destroy, we have proven we can. But military force answers only one question well: can we break things? It cannot answer the question that matters, which is how this ends.
Because the logical extension of the military instrument is the one we already examined and rejected. If bombing does not produce a settlement, the next rung is invasion and occupation. I have written before about what that would take: an occupation force of roughly 1.8 million troops, larger than our entire active-duty military; a return to the draft; a decade or more of commitment; five to fifty thousand American dead; and three to five trillion dollars. We have the power to break Iran but not to hold it. That door is closed. No serious planner would walk through it, and no honest one would pretend otherwise.
So, if the M has reached its limit and invasion is off the table, what is left? Run down the rest of the menu.
Option one: Give up and leave. Simply walk away, declare the mission complete, and pull back to the horizon. It is tempting, and it is cheap in the short run. But it hands Iran a propaganda victory, abandons the Gulf states that host our troops and trusted our word, and leaves the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil flows, in the hands of a regime that has just learned threats work. Walking away is not the same as getting out. It is losing while pretending we chose to.
Option two: Escalate to win. Double down, expand the target list, break every bridge and power plant as the President has threatened. But escalation without a political objective is just violence with a bigger budget. We would be back at the invasion question within months, having killed thousands more and moved no closer to a settlement.
Option three, and the one I keep returning to: Change who is holding the bat. This is where the other three letters of DIME come in, and where I would bench ourselves.
The Diplomatic instrument has been crippled by the fact that we are the ones dropping the bombs. You cannot be both the arsonist and the fire marshal. Iran will never accept a settlement brokered by the country that killed its Supreme Leader; every American proposal is poisoned at the source. But a European-led effort is a different matter. France, Germany, and Britain negotiated the original nuclear deal. They have standing in Tehran that we have spent. Let them convene it, guarantee it, and put European monitors and, if needed, European peacekeepers on the ground. The Diplomatic instrument works far better in hands that are not also the Military instrument.
The Information instrument follows the same logic. Right now, our message is drowned out by the pictures of funeral crowds and burning tankers, because we are the villain in Iran’s story and a reluctant warrior in our own. Step back, and the narrative changes. The story becomes Iran versus the world’s patience, not Iran versus America. We stop being the recruiting poster.
The Economic instrument is the one we can still wield from the bench, and it may be the most powerful of all. Sanctions, sanctions relief, frozen assets, access to global banking. These are levers that do not require a single additional airstrike, and they bite hardest when applied multilaterally, with Europe and the Gulf and even China and India aligned rather than working around us. Economic pressure with a diplomatic off-ramp is how you change a regime’s calculus. Bombs harden it; money moves it.
So benching the United States does not mean surrender, and it does not mean isolation. It means recognizing that we are the wrong pitcher for this inning. Our military instrument has done what it can and cannot do more without ruin. Our diplomatic and informational instruments are compromised precisely because we are the shooter. The one tool we can still use, the economic one, works best in concert with others. Hand the diplomacy to Europe, keep our economic weight on the scale, hold our fire, and let a settlement be built by hands that Tehran can actually shake.
I spent a career in uniform, and I believe in American power. But power is knowing which instrument to use, and when to sit one out. Sometimes the smartest move the strongest team can make is to bench its starter and win the game a different way.
The alternative is to keep swinging the only bat we have, until we are standing in the rubble of a country we cannot hold, wondering how we got there. We wrote that memo already. We should not have to sign it.
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Phil Huber is a retired Army Reserve colonel, a federal civil servant, and a retired consultant who writes on civic education. He lives in Fredericksburg.
Bingo! Great article! There appears to be no easy way out. There are 100,000 targets and we couldn’t hit them in 100 years.