Richard Haass: ‘America chose this war — and must now choose how to end it’

Richard Haass is speaking from the core of the American foreign policy establishment. His essay is less about Iran than about defending the worldview of the professional diplomatic class.
Now think about David Pinsof’s argument that most public reasoning is not truth optimization. It is alliance management. People produce arguments that strengthen their coalition position. Accuracy matters only insofar as it helps maintain allies and reputation.
Let’s apply Pinsof’s insights to the FT piece. Richard Haass opens with a conceptual framework he built his career on: wars of necessity versus wars of choice. He wrote the book on it. So when he calls the current war against Iran “a textbook war of choice,” he is not simply analyzing events. He is applying his own brand to them, which is a very different thing. The framework signals membership in a serious-policy-discourse community. It does not settle the underlying question, which is whether Iran posed a threat serious enough to justify military action. That remains genuinely contested. Calling something “textbook” implies professional authority rather than expressing it.
The framing of the headline does immediate work. “America chose this war” assigns agency entirely to the United States and brackets Iranian behavior: the nuclear program, the proxy networks, the decades of deterrence testing. If the war was a choice, then diplomacy was the responsible path that reckless men abandoned. That conclusion is built into the premise. Haass never has to argue it directly.
His treatment of Iran itself is telling. The regime never appears as reckless or ideological. It appears as a rational actor responding to incentives, the kind of adversary that can always be managed through the right mix of sanctions relief and security concessions. That is the core diplomatic worldview, and it is a worldview, not a finding. Conflicts become bargaining problems. Wars happen because bargaining failed or was prematurely abandoned. The possibility that some adversaries do not primarily respond to incentive structures the way the diplomatic class assumes gets no space in the article.
The Ukraine comparison is the weakest passage. Haass argues that Washington showed “near-unlimited willingness to compromise” with Russia while showing “unrealistic demands and lack of patience” with Iran. But Russia invaded a sovereign European country and has killed tens of thousands of civilians. Iran has pursued nuclear weapons, armed proxies across the Middle East, and attacked American forces and allies repeatedly. That these two situations reveal a “double standard” rather than a difference in kind requires more argument than Haass provides. He states the contrast as if it speaks for itself.
Then there is the line about “dead service members” among the mounting costs. At the time of publication, there had been no American combat deaths for roughly a week. Haass writes inside an anticipated-cost frame rather than a current-facts frame. The Iraq and Afghanistan template sits behind every sentence. He assumes early military action leads to casualties, escalation, and political fatigue, because it usually does. The prediction is safe. If the war later turns costly, he looks prescient. If it stays limited, the prediction quietly disappears. This is not dishonesty. It is how the establishment’s analytic templates work: the historical script runs whether or not the current operational reality matches it.
What Haass produces here is something his professional world does very well. It criticizes the war without directly condemning the president. It frames the objection as strategic rather than moral: the war distracts from China, destabilizes markets, imposes opportunity costs. That language positions Trump as deviating from the priorities the professional policy community believes should govern American power. The deeper argument is about authority, about who should guide foreign policy and through what process.
Haass is not wrong that wars eventually require negotiated settlements, or that the questions preceding this war will resurface at its conclusion. That part of the article is probably right. But being right about the endgame does not validate the analytic framework that precedes it, and it does not mean that the war itself was the wrong choice. Those are separate questions, and Haass conflates them throughout.