Yes, Vladimir Putin owes Donald Trump a thank-you note.
When the United States and Israel attacked Iran, Washington apparently treated it as just another small country war, disconnected from Russia's invasion of Ukraine. It isn't. Six months later, the two wars are melding into one strategic mess, draining American weapons, straining our industrial capacity and costing us a hell of a lot of money. And the big winner is Russia.
Don't believe me? Start with ammunition and oil.
Russia fires a $2 million ballistic missile at Kyiv and Ukraine fires two (2) $4 million Patriot interceptors to make sure we stop it. Iran fires a ballistic missile at an American base or one of our Gulf allies and we need two more Patriots. There aren't separate warehouses marked UKRAINE and IRAN. They come out of the same American arsenal and are replaced by the same production lines already struggling to keep up. To make matters worse, Russia can build 4 or 5 ballistic missiles for every one Patriot coming off our assembly lines.
The numbers are frightening. The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates that our Patriot interceptor inventory has fallen below 1,000 and THAAD high-altitude interceptors to about 250. Ukraine desperately needs the same weapons as Russia intensifies its missile attacks. Replacing the missiles expended against Iran will take years.
And this is happening when we should be building up our missile inventories, not frantically trying to refill the shelves.
Every Iranian missile that makes us fire Patriots helps Russia. Two adversaries thousands of miles apart are emptying the same American ammunition magazine from opposite directions.
Then there is oil.
Russia finances its war largely through energy exports. The Iran war disrupted Middle Eastern supplies and sent oil prices soaring. The Council on Foreign Relations calculated that Russian oil revenues doubled during the first three weeks of the conflict. Russia may have sold less oil but got a premium on every barrel. Even with oil now apparently trickling through the Strait of Hormuz, Persian Gulf crude remains around $100 a barrel.
Think about that. We went to war to weaken Iran and simultaneously helped finance Russia's war against Ukraine.
Think about it again when you fill your gas tank at more than five dollars a gallon. Part of that is ending up in Putin's pocket.
The connection goes deeper. Iran gave Russia the Shahed drone. Russia took that relatively simple Iranian weapon, industrialized it, modified it and improved it through four years of combat over Ukraine. The Russians now deploy faster, nastier descendants of the original Shahed. We should expect Iran to get the benefit of those improvements when the fighting starts again.
War is a brutal laboratory. Iran gave Russia the weapon. Russia made it better.
Which brings me to Benjamin Netanyahu.
Whatever one thinks of the Israeli prime minister, Netanyahu is no fool. Unlike President Trump, he devours intelligence and briefing papers. Israel spent four years being remarkably unwilling to criticize Russia's invasion of Ukraine. It condemned the invasion but has done nothing to help Ukraine fight Russia. Russia has too much leverage in Jerusalem.
Netanyahu knew how badly Trump wanted to be the decisive leader who finally solved the Iranian problem that had bedeviled his predecessors. He played skillfully on Trump's instincts, his impatience and, yes, his ego. Trump allowed himself to be drawn into a war Iran had not started and which, six months later, Iran still has not lost.
So here is the question I cannot answer.
Did Netanyahu not understand what this war would do for Vladimir Putin?
Surely Israeli intelligence could figure out what a Middle Eastern war would do to oil prices. Surely, it knew that American Patriot, THAAD and other missile inventories were finite. Surely, it knew Ukraine depended on those same inventories. And surely a government that had spent years carefully managing its relationship with Moscow understood that diverting American attention, money and weapons from Ukraine would help Russia.
None of this required a crystal ball. It required arithmetic.
Perhaps Netanyahu decided that weakening Iran was worth the consequences. From Israel's perspective, that is at least understandable.
But did he calculate what harm it would do to the United States?
We are now fighting a debilitating war in the Persian Gulf while simultaneously trying to keep Russia from defeating Ukraine. We are firing weapons in one theater desperately needed in another and replacing them at a fraction of the rate modern wars consume them. CSIS warns that the damage goes beyond Ukraine. We are creating vulnerabilities in the Western Pacific, precisely where the Pentagon needs enough weapons in reserve to deter China.
Meanwhile, the bill arrives at home. The Iran and Ukraine wars have helped drive global diesel prices to record levels. American diesel has exceeded $6 a gallon. Higher transportation costs don't stay at the gas station. They work their way into the price of almost everything Americans buy.
This is what happens when a great power goes to war without strategy.
Before entering a war, presidents need to ask some pretty basic questions. What are we trying to accomplish? How does this end? What will it cost? What other commitments will it jeopardize?
And the most basic question of all: Who benefits?
Had we bothered to ask that before attacking Iran, the answer should have stopped us cold: Vladimir Putin.
Great powers normally try to force their adversaries to fight two wars at once. The Trump Administration pulled off something more remarkable. We arranged to fight two wars at once ourselves, burned through the weapons needed for both, raised Americans' energy bills and made one adversary richer while fighting the other. Pericles figured this out 2,500 years ago: don't go looking for another war while you are already fighting one. Athens forgot the lesson; Sicily and disaster followed.
How dumb could we be?
Putin really should send that thank-you note.