On Iran, Konstantin Kisin Won’t Choose a Trade-Off
Konstantin Kisin, the Soviet-born British commentator and Triggernometry co-host, recently took aim at America’s ongoing military campaign against Iran, focusing heavily on the “cheerleaders” who suggested early on that it would deliver a clean victory on a convenient timeline.
Kisin is usually one of the clearest voices on what it actually takes to defend the liberal order. That is what makes his take on Operation Epic Fury—in which he argues against the weakest version of the case for war—so disappointing.
The serious case for launching Epic Fury is not that it would be easy, but that it was necessary. After 2025’s Twelve Day War thwarted Iran’s sprint to acquire nuclear weapons, Tehran instead set itself to assembling the architecture that would make its nuclear program untouchable. A nuclear program is not only a stockpile of enriched uranium or a facility buried underground. It is also the ability to impose unbearable costs on anyone who tries to intervene.
Once Iran could no longer sprint toward the bomb itself, it began sprinting toward a retaliatory arsenal of missiles, drones, and other capabilities behind which it could make future action against its nuclear program impossible, or at least prohibitively costly. It was racing toward a point of no return, after which the West would no longer be able to stop it from crossing the nuclear threshold. That was the danger Epic Fury was meant to preempt.
There is also a broader strategic layer. Beijing spent years turning Tehran into a pillar of its Middle Eastern architecture: a sanctions-evasion hub, a source of pressure on American allies, and a drain on American attention and resources. A Middle East permanently destabilized by Iran is useful to China. Every crisis Tehran creates is another demand on American bandwidth. Every carrier group sent to the region is one not positioned for the Western Pacific.
That matters because the strategic horizon is Taiwan. At some point, Washington would have faced the choice Beijing wanted it to face: accept an Iran too costly to confront, or drain the resources needed to defend Taiwan elsewhere. Operation Epic Fury is an attempt to prevent that choice from arriving.
Kisin rejects the idea of allowing Iran to obtain nuclear weapons. Fine. So how does one prevent it from doing so? If not Epic Fury, then what? He is disguising the avoidance of choice as realism. But in reality, one must choose, and here, there were four choices on the menu—none of them painless.
The first option is to accept that a revolutionary regime actively seeking the destruction of America will be able to cross the nuclear threshold on its own timetable. The other three options all involve stopping it by force, and differ according to the costs one is willing to bear: high oil prices and serious economic disruption; thousands of American soldiers dying in a ground war; or bombing Iran in ways that the postwar liberal imagination finds disturbing.
To stop Iran without invasion or norm-shattering escalation, the United States has so far chosen economic hardship. Iran can drag the conflict out. It can make energy more expensive. It can threaten shipping. It can impose pain on the global economy. That is the cost of the path Washington chose. Unlike Washington, Kisin is not choosing at all. He is lamenting the cost of the choice while declining to name his preferred alternative.
Kisin is failing to apply something he otherwise understands. He understands the world is not a safe space. He understands that the liberal order depends on strength. He understands that civilization is not maintained by moral aspiration alone. But the moment that principle becomes concrete—the moment defending order means oil shocks, uncertainty, escalation, ugly tradeoffs, and no clean ending—he retreats into complaint.
A necessary war can be poorly explained. A necessary war can take longer than promised. A necessary war can produce real economic damage. A necessary war can be cheered on for foolish reasons. None of that makes it unnecessary.
The question is not whether a given action is costly, but which costs one prefers to endure. Kisin often invokes one of Thomas Sowell’s famous lines: “There are no solutions, only trade-offs.” That is right. But trade-offs require a choice, and Kisin is not making one. If he believes Epic Fury was the wrong choice, or that it is being fought the wrong way, he should say which trade-off he prefers.
