Important Decision: Will Donald Trump Send Troops to Iran?

For the past few days, the world has been holding its breath: will Donald Trump send troops to Iran or not? If the President of the United States hesitates, there must be a good reason. For Americans, invading foreign territories is seen as a sign of greatness… but also of bitter failures. Are the United States fundamentally incapable of becoming a terrestrial power, as Carl Schmitt once pondered?

Their motto? “All the way!” On their shoulder, a logo reading “AA”. This has nothing to do with Alcoholics Anonymous: these are the paratroopers of the 82nd airborne division who were dropped in the Middle East yesterday. These soldiers, known as “All American” – recruited from all over the country – form a special unit known for their ability to swiftly intervene in hostile areas. Founded in 1917, the division has played a major role in all U.S.-led conflicts, from the Normandy landings to the war in Afghanistan. Their arrival today is symbolic. In a matter of moments, the United States could launch what seemed unimaginable until now: a ground attack on Iran.

Taking the Land

Yet, Donald Trump seems to hesitate. “Will he attack the Kharg regime, through which 90% of Iranian oil reserves pass?” “I will go and take it,” declared the future president back in 1988 in an interview with the Guardian. Yesterday, he threatened to “annihilate” – while assuring that negotiations with Iran were going “very well.” Securing the Strait of Hormuz? Why not, but Trump also hinted that he could end the war without resolving the issue – “Europeans can go find their own oil,” he shouted this morning. From the Iranian perspective, the situation is clear: “The enemy publicly sends messages of negotiations and dialogue while secretly planning a ground offensive,” declared Sunday Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Parliament President, before threatening the United States and their allies to “punish” them in case of a ground attack.

“Every fundamental order is a spatial order,” wrote Carl Schmitt in Land and Sea, published in 1942. “Speaking of the constitution of a country or a continent means speaking of its fundamental order, of its nomos. The fundamental order, the true, authentic one, is based at its core on certain spatial limits and limitations, on certain measures and on a certain division of the land. The inaugural act of any great era is therefore a large-scale land seizure.” According to the jurist of the Third Reich, traditional war involves land conquest. It is only recently, with the rise of maritime powers – such as the English and the Americans – that conflicts have been deterritorialized. But there remains a fundamental difference between land war and maritime war.

Partisans Everywhere?

“War at sea is largely a commercial war,” wrote Schmitt in his Theorie of the Partisan (1962). It is conceived on the model of flows, exchanges, and ignores the fundamentally political – or one could say existential – nature of defending a territory. Hence the failure of colonial powers against the partisans, fighters attached to their land – “tellurics,” as Schmitt describes them. Far from the abstract objectives of naval battle strategists, who simply count ships hit as if they were moving pieces on a board game, land fighters aim to “defend their home, their hearth, and their native soil against an invader.” These irregular partisans, not assimilated to regular troops, pose challenges to conventional armies. Schmitt cites the example of Vietnamese fighters during the Indochina War – individuals who plunged the United States into a deep political crisis as the conflict dragged on.

Is it this defensive instinct that Donald Trump fears? Perhaps. Meanwhile, the Iranian regime has developed another strategy: to strike Americans and their allies… on their own soil. Across Europe, attacks are increasing, targeting Jewish institutions (a school in Amsterdam, a synagogue in Liège and Rotterdam) or those linked to the United States (such as an agency of the Bank of New York Mellon in Amsterdam or the U.S. embassy in Oslo). Some have been claimed by the “Hayi” or “Islamic Movement of the Companions of Virtue,” a pro-Iranian group suspected of being a regime proxy. On Friday, police arrested two individuals who were about to set off explosives outside the Paris headquarters of the Bank of America. Each time, the process is similar: young individuals, often minors and with no specific ties to Iran, are recruited online and paid a few hundred euros to attack designated targets. Is this a new form of “partisan,” uprooted this time, apolitical and atomized… yet equally dangerous?

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