Soleimani’s killing was, without question, the most consequential act of Trump’s presidency. It didn’t just punish Iran for the action of its proxies. After decades of the U.S. letting the Islamic Republic get away with murder, the Trump administration made it clear that America would no longer allow the regime to hide behind its militias.
And it isn't just punishing Iran.
Consider all the undeserved hype about Russia's so-called "hybrid warfare" demonstrated first in the Crimea in 2014 and a little later that year in the Donbas region of Ukraine.
I dismiss the whole "hybrid warfare" craze and boiled it down to this:
Good Lord people, Russian "hybrid warfare" is just Russian aggression that we pretend isn't happening. Sadly, there's nothing new or novel about that.
The Russians invade (which includes local allies and not just Russian troops), the Russians deny they are invading, and the West publicly accepts that fiction that Russia is not invading.
Mind you, the actual invasion-denial-acceptance issue is separate from what is also lumped into hybrid warfare--information operations:
Moscow and Beijing have weaponized previously benign activities like diplomacy, investment flows, infrastructure development, foreign asset purchases, and media. University campuses have become battlegrounds of covert influence and interference. These activities complement more aggressive forms of political warfare operations, such as espionage, cyber-attacks, and intellectual property theft. For its part, the West at large gave up on political warfare operations after the end of the Cold War, complacently believing that the ideology that birthed them—communist authoritarianism—had been consigned to the “dustbin of history.”
Deterring, combating, and defeating political warfare campaigns whether or not they support combat is critically important for the West. I heartily endorse engaging in that sphere of battle (although "democracy defense" legislation could simply be censorship despite the happy title; and there certainly was FISA abuse that should be corrected).
But that Western effort against Russian (or Chinese) information warfare must be made apart from whether their information warfare supports "subliminal" combat. The West has called the combination of information warfare and subliminal warfare "hybrid warfare."
Regarding the combat portion of the combination, by killing Soleimani, America stopped the key pretending anchor about the source of the violence and mayhem that Iran foments but denies. Russia counts on a similar disconnect between seeing the bloody obvious invasion and the Western reaction to the bloody obvious.
Did America kill that model at the same time Soleimani was killed?
