The Pottery Barn Rule of Foreign Policy

Colin Powell is said to have warned George W. Bush before the Iraq war with a shopkeeper’s logic: you break it, you own it. Powell later denied using those exact words, and Pottery Barn has no such policy. But the principle outlived the quibble, because it is true. A nation that shatters the existing order takes ownership of whatever it leaves on the floor.

The United States broke the order in the Persian Gulf. On February 28, American and Israeli forces struck Iran and killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Whatever one thinks of that decision — and I supported it — it ended one status quo and obligated us to build a better one. Roughly one hundred days later, we have not built it. We have built something worse.

Consider what the President of the United States now presides over.

Iran has laid naval mines in the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint through which a fifth of the world’s oil moves; our own Central Command sank sixteen Iranian minelayers trying to stop it. Iranian drones have struck merchant ships in the Gulf. Iranian missiles and drones have rained on American-allied Gulf states, killing a port worker in Bahrain. And in the last twenty-four hours, Iran fired barrage after barrage at Israel — the first such bombardment since the April ceasefire — which the Revolutionary Guard cheerfully called “a warning.” Before February 28, ships moved through Hormuz and Israel was not under missile fire from Tehran.

That was the status quo we destroyed. What replaced it is a shooting gallery. By any honest accounting, we are worse off than the day we started.

Against that backdrop, the public position of the President is that the ceasefire holds and Israel will do as it is told. He has pressed Benjamin Netanyahu, reportedly in heated terms, to pull back. Set aside the wisdom of that posture for a moment and notice what it exposes. For a while now, we have been told that the tail wags the dog — that Israel dictates American foreign policy and Washington merely salutes. A great many social media influencers maintain that position. Yet, here is an American president openly ordering the Israeli prime minister to stand down while Iranian warheads fall on Israeli cities. You cannot have it both ways. If Israel controlled the United States, Israel would not be the one being told to absorb the blows. The relationship runs in the other direction, and this episode proves it beyond argument.

That clarity does not excuse the policy. It indicts it.

It is unacceptable to tie Israel’s hands behind its back while Iran and Hezbollah strike. A Hezbollah anti-tank missile killed a twenty-one-year-old Israeli officer, Captain Eitan Lemberg, on the very first day of the latest truce. A ceasefire that one side honors and the other treats as a free-fire window is not a ceasefire; it is a unilateral disarmament we are imposing on a friend. No serious nation demands that an ally take fire and forbids it from firing back. We are demanding exactly that, and we are calling it peace.

So we are left to interpret the President’s words, and here I will be generous, because the stakes demand generosity. His public positioning had better be at odds with his private formulations. A statesman may say “the ceasefire holds” in public while quietly preparing the response that makes holding it possible. There is evidence this is so.

On June 4 the President conceded that Iran killing American troops would be “a good reason to restart the war.” Two days later, American forces did restart it in miniature — shooting down four Iranian drones and striking coastal radar sites along the strait. The machinery of response is built and operating. We must presume it will be used. If we presume otherwise, we are telling Tehran that the cost of attacking our allies is a stern American statement, and we will have set those allies up to be hit again and again. It is akin to Obama giving a dirty look, then looking the other way.

This is the Pottery Barn rule of foreign policy. We broke the status quo ante. We own the wreckage. And ownership is not a feeling; it is an obligation. The only way to fix what we broke is to resume pressure on Iran — relentlessly, until the missiles stop, the mines are destroyed, and the strait reopens — rather than freezing our friends in place and hoping the regime in Tehran develops a conscience. Surely the President understands this. The man who ordered the strike that killed Khamenei is not a man who flinches, or should not be.

If Mr. Trump does understand it, then his public calm is cover for private resolve, and that is fine. But if he does not, if the calm is the whole of it, then he will achieve something no American president has managed in a very long time. He will have started a war, won it, and then lost it; and worse, lost allies in the bargain, through nothing nobler than dereliction of duty. I refuse to believe that of him. Which is why I must presume an American response to Iran is coming. The alternative is unthinkable and un-American.