Nations don’t have the right to be independent.
Amazingly, and to the consternation of many of his supporters, Trump has become an internationalist, though as an impulse rather than a change in principle. Moreover Trump is particularly aggressive and has changed the canons of how statesmen of both parties engage in their prudent internationalism whereby the claim about going to war was reluctant and inevitable because all attempts at diplomacy had been exhausted. Appeasement had preceded an English ultimatum on Poland being invaded by the Nazis. Yalta was offered as a last ditch attempt to avoid a Cold War. But Trump was quickly fed up with negotiations with Iran, demanding they agree never to have nuclear weapons and going to war when they didn’t say that, while previous diplomatists took as their motto “Trust but verify”, which meant not to rely on verbal assurances but painstakingly spell out the details of surveillance and stockpiles Iran would agree to, as was the case in Obama’s agreement with the Iranians which Trump dumped in his first term. Let us see what Trump’s new foreign policy bodes, well or not.
Now that the American and Israeli millitary have been so successful in degrading Iran’ military assets and its leadership, and there have been no sleeper cells in the United States to create havoc in our homeland, the focus of anti-Trump people is to say that there is no end game of the terms under which the war will; be over. In wars of necessity, the endgame is to survive, but in wars of choice like Iran, what deal is there to be struck? A quiescent Iran still intact? A regime change> A disorganized nation? But even powerful nations can be sure how their enemies will unravel. A revolution against the Kaiser was not the plan for the Allies in World War I. The United States did not know the Soviet Union would collapse after the United States had negotiated for the end of the Cold War. Moreover, under the new dispensation by Trump, Trump still remains in charge in that he can just shift the topic away from Iran, just let it languish, while observing from above and within, should Iran become belligerent, while turning to other matters, like conquering Antarctica or finding hidden deviants. There is no end of enemies to get obsessed about when the old scapegoats tire in the imaginations of the populace.
An objection by the Left to the war against Iran is that nations have a right to maintain their existence, even if the nations are immoral. But that is not the case even if the Nuremberg Trials and the United Nations say otherwise. Peace between nations is prudential rather than moral, nations having an armed truce so they don’t risk their sovereignty or prosperity. The British put down the Biafran Revolution in Nigeria in the Sixties because the precedent of Biafran independence might lead any number of African countries whose borders were established by Great Britain would try to rearrange configurations through local wars. Put the point more abstractly. A right is not a property of a nation, as in X has a right to exist as a nation. Rights are attributes of individuals and what nations can do is more or less recognize or enforce rights that are inherent in human nature though over time nations can recognize a right that expands the guarantee of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. So I would say universal health care and universal education have become rights because those are now recognized as required for people to grasp the possibilities of their own ambitions, which is what “the pursuit of happiness” means. So nations do not have to put up with nations so obnoxious or dangerous tyo nations that they will not put up with it. Bill Clinton bombed Belgrade because concentration camps were active in Sarajevo. And so too the United States does not have to put up with the regime which kills its own civilian protesters in great number and has engaged in war with its regional neighbors so long as the initiating nation is prudent enough not to pick on a nation, however distasteful, that is quite dangerous to the moral party. The U. S. should not attack North Korea or Russia or China. Remain more or less within the truce and engage in only proxy wars like Ukraine.
So what nation can trust other nations? The answer is cultural affinities. The English speaking nations have such an affinity and, in fact, closely collaborate militarily. That is why it is a joke to say the United States can absorb Canada. Moreover, affinities can evolve. The European Union is developing a continental sized culture based on Christianity, the Enlightenment and democracy. Germany and France will have ended the four wars between them that lasted from the early nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Iran is so different from the United States in religion and political structure that it is an adversary.