It’s easier to start a war than to comply with a law enacted by Congress

By James J. Devine

The bar for releasing the Epstein files — those elusive records detailing how a convicted sex trafficker moved freely among the powerful for years — is apparently so high that the trump administration has not managed to clear it.

The bar for launching military strikes, destabilizing entire regions, and spending hundreds of billions of dollars on war without clear objectives or an exit strategy?

That turns out to be considerably lower. In fact, it appears to be underground.

This is the central absurdity of American foreign policy as it has been practiced for more than two decades.

A president cannot be expected to release documents that might embarrass the wealthy and well-connected. But that same president can order bombers to hit targets halfway around the world with barely a memo justifying the action.

The Epstein files wait. The missiles do not.

Consider the recent war with Iran. Not the first one — the one that just ended, or perhaps has not ended, depending on whom you ask. Both the United States and Iran appear to believe they won, which is a bit like two boxers each claiming victory while both lie flat on their backs in the ring.

The official price tag stands at $25 billion, though the administration originally asked Congress for $200 billion, which suggests either remarkable inefficiency or a creative approach to budget padding.

Either way, the actual costs — in lives, in regional stability, and in the shattered economies of Gulf states that thought they were buying American protection — are far higher and largely uncounted.

There were always two ways to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.

One was the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the painstakingly constructed agreement that limited Iranian enrichment to 3.67%, shipped its stockpile out of the country, destroyed its plutonium reactor, and installed an inspection regime that covered everything from uranium mines to centrifuge storage facilities.

The other was bombing Iran.

The Obama administration war-gamed both options. Officials received the same briefing from the Israeli prime minister that the Trump administration would later receive — a presentation so consistent that the president’s attention would wander during lengthy phone calls, having heard it all before.

And every time, the conclusion was the same: You cannot bomb a nuclear program out of existence. The knowledge is in the scientists’ heads. The facilities are scattered. The fuel cycle is understood.

Maybe if you occupied the country, you could. But nobody was suggesting that.

So they chose the deal. It was not perfect. It did not make Iran a democracy or turn the Revolutionary Guard into a civic organization.

What it did was work. The International Atomic Energy Agency verified compliance. The United Nations Security Council — Russia, China, France, Britain, Germany, and the European Union — all signed on.

Iran shipped its nuclear material abroad. Inspectors got in everywhere. The breakout time stretched to a year.

Then the Trump administration tore it up.

For reasons that had nothing to do with the deal’s effectiveness and everything to do with the previous president’s signature on the document, the United States withdrew, reimposed sanctions, and began a slow march toward the military option that every previous administration had concluded was futile.

The results were entirely predictable to anyone who had ever looked at a map.

Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s fossil fuel energy flows. It treated the strait like a toll road — charging passage, generating revenue, and demonstrating that its ability to choke global commerce was a form of deterrent power all its own.

The price of oil spiked, enriching not just Iran but also Russia. American allies in the Gulf, which had spent billions on advanced military equipment, declined to join the fight. Why would they? Iran is a country of 94 million people sitting right across a narrow body of water.

The drones and missiles that got through American defenses — and more got through than the Pentagon has admitted — rained down on Dubai and Abu Dhabi, cities whose entire economic model depends on the illusion of safety.

The influencers who once posted beach photos from the Emirates now face arrest if they post anything at all.

And what is the best outcome the Trump administration can now hope for? Something that looks very much like the deal it destroyed.

The same restrictions. The same inspections. The same limitations.

But with one crucial difference: The Iranians have now been bombed. Their leaders have been killed.

The Revolutionary Guard — the most hard-line, militarized faction of the regime — is now firmly in control because its members are the ones who stood up to the Americans, closed the strait, and kept the drones flying.

The people the United States might have negotiated with, the political operators who understood the value of a deal, are dead.

So the best possible deal today is worse than the deal Trump tore up, and even that deal he will not take because his ego will not allow him to accept anything that could be seen as validating his predecessor.

The United States is caught between a president who cannot admit he was wrong and an Iranian leadership that has learned a devastating lesson: The only thing that reliably deters an American attack is the capacity to inflict unacceptable pain.

This is the pattern that has repeated itself across three decades of American foreign policy: Libya. Syria. Afghanistan. Iraq. And now Iran.

The machinery of intervention has become self-sustaining, a sprawling edifice of bases, drones, and special forces that constantly generates new threats to justify its own existence.

The United States has spent $6 trillion on the war on terror.

Six trillion dollars. Imagine what a fraction of that could have built: schools, hospitals, high-speed rail, and a public health system that did not collapse during a pandemic.

Instead, the country has built the capacity to kill people anywhere on Earth at any time, and it uses that capacity because it has it.

The bar for intervention keeps getting lower. The bar for anything else — diplomacy, patience, and the modest recognition that the United States cannot control every event on the planet — keeps getting higher.

The Epstein files remain sealed. The bombs keep falling. And somewhere in the Pentagon, no doubt, someone is already war-gaming the next war because that is what the machine does.

It grinds. It consumes. And it produces, reliably and without fail, more chaos.

The hurdle for exposing embarrassing information about the powerful is impossibly high.

The threshold for bombing a country is little more than a suggestion, at best. That is not a foreign policy. That is an addiction.

And like all addictions, it will not end until the country decides it has had enough.