When President Teddy Roosevelt brokered the peace deal between Russia and Japan that formally ended the Russo-Japanese War in September 1905, he didn’t publicly claim that neither side knew what the fuck they were doing, but he might well have thought that in private.
When President Teddy Roosevelt brokered the peace deal between Russia and Japan that formally ended the Russo-Japanese War in September 1905, he didn’t publicly claim that neither side knew what the fuck they were doing, but he might well have thought that in private.
By most objective measures, Japan had decimated their Russian foes over the course of a year and half of fighting on land and sea. After Japan attacked the Russian Pacific Fleet at Port Arthur when negotiations broke down over Manchuria and Korea, Japanese troops landed on the Korean peninsula, crossed the Yalu River into Manchuria and laid siege to the port itself, taking it along with the Liaodong Peninsula by January 1905. Two months later, they swept into the Manchurian capital at Mukden and took it as well after heavy fighting. Russia responded by sailing their Baltic Fleet some 20,000 miles to the region, only to see it suffer the same fate as the Pacific. When Roosevelt gathered representatives from both parties in Portsmouth, NH to negotiate a peace settlement, Russia had lost ten battleships, eight sunk, two captured, compared to only two on the Japanese side. Troop losses were closer in number, but somewhere around 70,000 Russians were dead and close to another 75,000 were captured, nor were the Russians able to recoup any lost territory including the island of Sakhalin taken late in the war, some say as a bargaining chip. This didn’t prevent Russia from entering peace talks as though they were the victor, however, refusing to pay any indemnities to Japan for the loss and balking at any territorial concessions. Incredibly, Russia emerged from twenty one days of negotiations between August 9 and August 30, 1905, taking place over twelve sessions in the General Stores Building (now Building 86) at the Portsmouth naval yard, where mahogany furniture patterned after the Cabinet Room of the White House had been shipped in from DC, not having to pay a dime, receiving half the island of Sakhalin back, both their ships, and the Chinese Eastern Railway in exchange for Port Arthur and Talien in southern Manchuria and the South Manchurian Railway. During the negotiations themselves, Russia deployed four new divisions in Manchuria and threatened to plunge the world into war if their demands weren’t met. Roosevelt wasn’t pleased with Russian intransigence, but he understood two things. First, Japan might well have won the war in terms of numbers at the time, but they couldn’t press their case any further without invading Russia proper, making a near impossible march through Siberia to Moscow and St. Petersburg. They were either stuck making a bad deal or continuing to fight on their own turf at considerable expense. Second, Roosevelt himself had put both his personal prestige and the power of the Presidency itself on the line when he offered to mediate. America wasn’t directly involved in the fighting, and had no real stake in the outcome. If he interceded and failed, it would’ve been perceived as a damaging blow to what was an emerging superpower at the time. Success was his, and his eyes’, the world’s only option.
President Donald Trump’s intercession in the 12 day war between Israel and Iran is similar in many ways. There were those, some in his own party, who said he should simply have stayed out of it rather than choosing to directly strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. There were those, some in his own party, who claimed he was weak, a tool of the Israelis as Roosevelt was said to have caved to Russia. While it’s too soon to tell in this case, there were also those who insisted peace couldn’t be lasting or durable, despite prevailing for thirty years and effectively ending Russia’s dream of a South Asian empire. Ultimately, however, Roosevelt saw what his detractors simply didn’t or couldn’t. Rather than an intractable situation that would spiral indefinitely, he found an opportunity to enhance world peace and expand American influence. Though neither Britain nor Germany directly engaged in the fighting, the British were allied with Japan, providing crucial intelligence and Germany, eager to upset the United Kingdom for almost any reason, supported the Russians, rendering what was a conflict confined to a relatively small region into a truly international affair with potentially severe repercussions for Europe and ultimately the United States if the two proxy parties should escalate into attacks on one another or send troops into the field. In this regard, it’s difficult to argue that President Trump saw what others including the experts and those in his own party simply didn’t, namely that the game in the Middle East had radically changed in the past decade and had done so in a way that greatly weakened Iran, offering a unique opportunity to resolve a decades long stand off. As I put it more bluntly on X shortly after Israel began pounding the Caliphate, “Is it just me or has Trump yet again realized what none of the so-called experts ever would’ve? These fools looked at Hamas on the run, Hezbollah in ruins, and two failed attacks on Israel, and concluded that preserving the status quo was all that counted. Trump looked at that with Israel’s help, and said now is the time to end it, one way or another.” Even over the first few days, when I described President Trump’s steadfast, at times even heavy handed support for Israel, as a gamble it had become apparent to me that Iran was almost completely impotent. As Israel ruled their skies, they were unable to down a single plane and were capable of penetrating Israel’s air defenses with only a handful of mostly ineffective missiles. Simultaneously, the silence from the rest of the Arab Street, which would have once upon a time immediately sprung into action to denounce Israel and the United States more than suggested the region as a whole was tacitly supporting the strikes, having grown tired of Iran’s provocation as the Abraham Accords and other economic interests have bound them closer to Israel. It seemed to me that President Trump’s recent visit to three leading nations, and his surprise meeting with the new leader of Syria, symbolized a radical shift in the region’s overall posture, one which seemed to have gone entirely unnoticed by the expert class because it was wrought primarily by a President they despise. China and Russia, two of Iran’s closest allies, were also notably silent, issuing statements, but taking no meaningful action, suggesting that Iran was truly alone, perhaps for the first time since the revolution in 1979.
As the debate over war raged throughout the week, I questioned whether President Trump would give up his strategic advantage, effectively fighting a war by proxy on X to directly engage, but even then I noted that a targeted strike might well be worth it, carrying what seems very limited risk with potentially high reward. Responding to conservative commentator Ed Morrisey after Israel continued to decimate Iran’s leadership, I noted “To me at least, this is a bizarre battle to be having before Trump commits us to anything and while Israel is showing Iran to be the classic paper tiger. I understand the concern that the establishment will push for war, but Trump, IMHO, is smarter than that. Indeed, he seems to be the only one who rightly recognized that Iran was almost completely powerless after Israel repelled two large scale attacks last year. We should let this play out for now…” At the same time, I am honest enough to admit that I was surprised by the audacity and scale of the US strikes themselves. Rather than a token show of force, President Trump chose a much bolder approach, demonstrating American military prowess in an undeniable fashion by hitting three targets at once, using ordinance that had never been deployed, and doing so entirely in secret. While many fretted about the aftermath – and I too acknowledged the potential risks – it seemed to me that beyond the fate of Iran’s nuclear program, which has self-evidently been set back indefinitely whatever the so-called experts claim, a statement was made about the nature of America’s technology superiority and what would happen if Iran pressed the issue further. From their perspective, the strike was the equivalent of the hand of God smacking down from the heavens. They didn’t know it was coming, but even if they did, they could’ve done nothing to prevent it. They couldn’t know the extent of our reach, but even if they did, there was the same nothing they could do about it either way. Talking tough as they did in the aftermath was easy and to be expected. Talk, as they say, is cheap, but flying a squadron of planes over thirty hours around the world capable of dropping bombs from so high in the atmosphere the Iranians couldn’t even detect them, and then landing those bombs on the equivalent of a refrigerator door thousands upon thousands of feet below is not. No military on Earth, now or ever, could’ve done it and the Iranians clearly knew it. I was reminded again of Roosevelt, this time of his Great White Fleet. Shortly before he left office, Roosevelt shocked the world with another display of force, ordering 16 Navy battleships, painted in bright white, decorated with gilded scrollwork, flying red white and blue banners, around the world, something no military at the time had ever accomplished. There were, of course, detractors to the effort. Those who claimed we didn’t have enough coal, couldn’t supply the ships throughout the more than year long journey. Congress, perhaps not surprisingly, balked at funding it in the first place, leaving Roosevelt to declare that he could simply send the ships as far as they could go and then would Congress leave them stranded on the other side of the world? “I am Commander-in-Chief, and my decision is absolute in the matter,” he stated, a statement President Trump is far too frequently forced to assert in my opinion. There were those who said any learnings from such an endeavor could easily be accomplished in waters closer to home. There were also those who believed the move was provocative, that it might increase tensions between the United States and Japan, which had deteriorated since the treaty of Portsmouth because of anti-Japanese sentiment, largely on the West Coast. Roosevelt, however, neutralized those concerns and turned the visit to Japanese waters into a diplomatic achievement on its own.
President Trump appears to have done the same here. Whatever anyone said in the aftermath of our airstrikes, Iran’s choice was either annihilation or capitulation. While I was likewise surprised by how quickly the peace deal came together, I wasn’t by the fact that it did come together, or by President Trump’s decision to use this as an opportunity to credit Iran and her people. Rather than kicking an adversary when they were down, he chose to lift them up. “On the assumption that everything works as it should, which it will, I would like to congratulate both Countries, Israel and Iran, on having the Stamina, Courage, and Intelligence to end, what should be called, ‘THE 12 DAY WAR,’” he wrote on Truth Social. “This is a War that could have gone on for years, and destroyed the entire Middle East, but it didn’t, and never will! God bless Israel, God bless Iran, God bless the Middle East, God bless the United States of America, and GOD BLESS THE WORLD!” Lastly, what happens next might be the most surprising of all. Success in diplomacy has a tendency to breed success, opening doors that had seemed to be entirely closed. Whatever happens in Iran, look for renewed momentum to quickly resolve the conflict in Palestine, and efforts to quickly expand the Abraham Accords, potentially even to countries like Syria which would have been inconceivable as recently as last year. The effects might not be confined to the Middle East either. Ukraine and Russia might well take note and decide it’s time to end it sooner rather than later. While we will have to wait and see how events unfold in the weeks and months ahead, one thing is certain: President Trump, like Roosevelt before him, saw what others didn’t, did what others wouldn’t, and at least so far, the world appears to be better off because of it. Even if you are a detractor, it should be alright to say so for once.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 