The 7th Crusade—US Folly in Iran
Chief Petty Officer James Mullen photo
The United States has once again plunged into a war convinced that righteous purpose, overwhelming force and moral certainty will deliver victory. But history — ancient and modern — keeps teaching the same lesson: macho crusades fail. They fail because they are built on arrogance, miscalculation and the belief that military might can substitute for strategy. The current U.S. war in Iran is not an exception. It is the latest chapter in a thousand-year pattern of powerful nations mistaking zeal for wisdom.
The medieval Crusades are often remembered as grand, heroic campaigns. In reality, most were disasters. The First Crusade succeeded largely because of Muslim political fragmentation, not Western brilliance. The Second was a catastrophe. The Third ended in stalemate. The Fourth never reached the Holy Land. And the Seventh — Louis IX’s doomed invasion of Egypt — collapsed in disease, ransom and humiliation. The Crusaders believed their moral purity guaranteed victory. Reality proved otherwise.
That same delusion now shapes Washington D.C.’s approach to Iran. What makes this moment even more alarming is that the United States is no longer disguising the religious framing of its war. At a Pentagon news conference recently, the Secretary of Defense quoted the Bible and described the campaign as a struggle ordained by faith. When a superpower with unmatched military capacity casts an aggressive war in explicitly religious terms, it is not strategy — it is crusading. And crusades, history shows, end badly.
Force without foresight
The United States keeps returning to the same failed playbook: launch a war quickly, assume overwhelming force will produce political transformation, and ignore the complexities that follow. The results are familiar.
• In Iraq, the U.S. toppled a dictator in weeks but unleashed 20 years of instability.
• In Afghanistan, it defeated the Taliban in months but lost the war in slow motion.
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• In Libya, it removed a tyrant but left chaos that still reverberates across Africa.
These were not failures of bravery. They were failures of imagination — wars launched without a plan for the day after, without understanding local dynamics, and without appreciating the limits of American power.
Iran is following the same script. Washington, D.C. expected a swift, punishing campaign that would cripple the regime. Instead, it has triggered a sprawling regional conflict, empowered Iranian proxies and forced the U.S. into an open-ended commitment with no clear objective. America may win battles, but Iran is winning the war of endurance.
The danger of moral absolutism
Crusades depend on the belief that one side holds moral purity. The medieval Crusaders believed they were liberating holy lands. Today, American leaders claim they are defending freedom or restoring order. But when a war is launched without congressional authorization, without international support and without a clear threat to national security, the moral high ground collapses instantly.
The Secretary of Defense’s biblical rhetoric only deepens the problem. When the world hears the United States describe a war as a sacred mission, it does not see resolve — it sees extremism. Allies recoil. Adversaries mobilize. And the conflict becomes harder, not easier, to end.
Macho foreign policy is not strength
At the heart of America’s repeated misadventures is a cultural reflex: the belief that restraint is weakness, that diplomacy is unmanly and that toughness requires action. This macho approach to foreign policy has produced a century of unnecessary wars, each justified by the same language of resolve and each ending in disappointment.
Iran exposes the hollowness of that worldview. The United States cannot bomb its way to legitimacy. It cannot intimidate a nation that has survived sanctions, isolation and conflict for decades. And it cannot force a region as complex as the Middle East to conform to its strategic fantasies.
Learning the lesson history keeps teaching
The Crusades failed because they were built on arrogance, misunderstanding and the belief that righteousness guaranteed victory. America’s war in Iran is failing for the same reasons. The United States does not need another crusade. It needs humility, strategy and the courage to choose diplomacy over dominance.
If Washington continues down this path — framing war as a sacred mission, dismissing diplomacy as weakness and assuming force can substitute for strategy — it will discover what Louis IX learned the hard way: crusades do not end in triumph. They end in exhaustion.
(David M. Crane is a global leader in international criminal justice and the founding Chief Prosecutor of the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone. He has spent decades shaping accountability mechanisms around the world, including serving as a driving architect behind the Special Tribunal against Ukraine. Crane is a distinguished scholar of international law, a former senior U.S. national security official, and a leading voice on the rule of law, state responsibility, and the legal limits on the use of force.)
