The Arithmetic of Versailles

There is a particular American habit, older than any of us and more durable than our memory, of beginning a thing we do not intend to finish and calling the beginning a victory. We did it again this winter. On the twenty-eighth of February, under the name Operation Epic Fury, the United States and Israel opened the largest air campaign the region had seen since the buildings of Baghdad came down in 2003, and a country that had spent the cold months watching the Iranian regime gun down its own people in the streets was told that the fury would be epic, and brief, and ours.

It was epic. Whether it was brief depends on who is counting, and on what. Fifteen American servicemen are dead. More than three thousand Iranians are dead, the regime's soldiers and the regime's victims lowered into the same ground, the difference between them lost to the altitude from which we chose to look. Two thousand more lie in Lebanon, where the war we started found the war we had forgotten. Moody's Analytics, which has no stake in the poetry of the thing, puts the cost to American consumers and taxpayers at one hundred thirty-two billion dollars, and counting. That phrase, and counting, is the whole of what I mean to say.

For now there is a paper. On the seventeenth of June, in the Palace of Versailles of all the rooms on earth, President Donald Trump signed a memorandum of understanding, and President Masoud Pezeshkian signed his copy in Tehran, and the men who write the headlines called it peace. Read it. It is a sixty-day ceasefire and a promise to keep talking. The question the bombs were dropped to answer, whether Iran enriches uranium and how much and who shall decide, is precisely the question the paper leaves unanswered. It is deferred. It is, in the language of diplomats, an outstanding issue. The strait reopens, the President wrote on Truth Social, upon the signing of the Deal on Friday, for purposes of mine removal. We laid the mines. We will remove the mines. We will call the removal a triumph.

I am no pacifist, and I will not pretend the men in Tehran are anything other than what they are. A regime that machine-guns its own children in January has forfeited my sympathy entirely. But a conservative is meant to be the one who reads the bill before he signs it, who knows the state is never so dangerous as when it is certain and cheap and quick, who remembers that the dead do not rise again when the markets calm and the oil flows and the cable hosts move on. Versailles is a fitting room for this. The last men to sign a glorious peace beneath that ceiling bought the next war with it, and handed the receipt to their children.

Count the cost. Count it honestly. Then tell me what we bought.