In a recent essay for The New York Times, Robert Malley, the special envoy for Iran from 2021 to 2023, and Stephen Wertheim, a historian of U.S. foreign policy, assessed the latest U.S. military misadventure in the Middle East, this time against Iran in a joint air and naval campaign co-authored with America’s regional ally Israel.

Like the costly and chaotic efforts by the United States to redefine reality in Iraq and Afghanistan not too many years ago, the U.S. offensive against Iran has come to strategic grief, this time only faster, they say. “The question now is whether the cycle of ineffectual American intervention has been broken, or simply taken another turn.”

The two foreign policy experts conclude that this “unnecessary, unjustified and unlawful war that…convulsed the region, battered the global economy and exasperated the American public” may in the end “bequeath an accidental gift: a lasting aversion to military conflict with Iran and a chance to replace decades of failed policy with serious diplomacy.”

May it be so, but President Trump is already showing signs of buyer’s remorse on the deal he just signed at Versailles (a site that hardly foretells diplomatic success). Already, a chorus of self-described realists and assorted war-happy members of the American and Israeli commentariat are in an uproar over the Trump retreat.

Many furiously argue that the Iran gambit failed not because the effort to permanently shut down Iran’s nuclear program by force was wrongheaded in the first place, but because not enough of the overpowering U.S. force was used. According to this analysis, Mr. Trump lost his nerve, but “success” could still be within reach if he rejoined the war and ruthlessly finished the job, presumably by putting U.S. boots on the ground in a military campaign that could drag on for years.

The indifference to what a resort to total war might mean in terms of Iranian suffering and the death and grief it would produce for U.S. service members and their families is breathtaking. But Iran hawks like John Bolton or Trump-influencer Mark Levin show no sign that they have lost their appetite for war despite the consistent failure of military interventions to achieve America’s purported strategic aims. It’s still completely possible that the unpredictable Mr. Trump could be goaded into returning to the fray, allowing this latest Mideast catastrophe to metastasize further.

U.S. leaders often favor manly displays of pure power over what too many of them perceive as soft approaches like negotiation and confabbing at the United Nations. Self-described Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has elevated this tendency to comic-book status, and the Trump administration’s various cost-cutting measures at the State Department have seriously degraded the administration’s soft-power capacity, leaving little in the geopolitical toolbox to promote U.S. interests but hard-power options.

Now, after the Iran debacle, are U.S. diplomats indeed ready to embrace a true realism, to accept that the path to the geopolitical good, if not to the perfect, lies through diplomacy and compromise, not threats and missile strikes? If so, they can turn to experts on patient dialogue at the Vatican for guidance. The Holy See has for decades implored the United States to reconsider its preferential option for the “adventure with no return,” as St. John Paul II so memorably described the merciless and unpredictable resort to armed conflict. Can it be finally acknowledged that what the Trump administration seeks to secure by massive force had already been achieved by the Obama administration through negotiation?

Like his predecessors, Pope Francis had been a frequent supporter of multilateralism and international forums and regulatory bodies as the most promising forces for promoting and protecting the global common good. But he understood the need for reform and new empowerment among such institutions, warning that they risk devolving into the kind of hollow forums for argument and dispute irresolution that undermined the League of Nations.

In a speech in May 2023, he urged a restoration of authority to such institutions. “It is not enough that they call for peace if they are not given the autonomous capacity to promote and realize concrete actions, since they risk not being at the service of the common good but partisan tools,” he said.

And in what proved a memorable address to the Holy See Diplomatic Corps in January, Pope Leo XIV renewed the church’s endorsement of multilateralism, citing its contemporary weakness as “a particular cause for concern at the international level.”

“A diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force,” the pope told the assembled diplomats, adding: “War is back in vogue, and a zeal for war is spreading.”

“Peace is no longer sought as a gift and a desirable good in itself, or in the pursuit of ‘the establishment of the ordered universe willed by God, with a more perfect form of justice among men and women.’”

“Instead, peace is sought through weapons as a condition for asserting one’s own dominion,” Leo said. “This gravely threatens the rule of law, which is the foundation of all peaceful civil coexistence.”

The Vatican has frequently reminded world leaders of the rich arenas for multilateral cooperation and innovation, including and beyond peacemaking, to secure a global common good—addressing persisting human misery in all its forms, climate change, equitable use of natural resources and trade relations, and the continuing drama of human migration.

What might restore the authority of international forums and multilateral peacemaking could be the example of a world power that willingly adheres to the rule of humanitarian law, even if it means losing face or a strategic advantage from time to time. But during Mr. Trump’s first term, in a trend that has gravely accelerated during his return to the White House, U.S. strategists showed indifference, if not open hostility, to dialogue and the multilateralism encouraged over and over by Rome.

Now, members of the current Trump administration withdraw from international forums, frequently ridicule them and enthusiastically promote an Orwellian “peace through strength” policy. The “war department” under Mr. Hegseth next year seeks an unprecedented $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget. In a morally and fiscally sane world, that should be a hard sell in Congress as the clear limits of warmaking become starker and Ukraine and other asymmetric forces demonstrate the ineffectiveness of bulky, big-budget military packages in an era of high-tech, low-cost battlefield innovation.

Beyond the moral and spiritual costs of an overreliance on might and a derision of dialogue, there are plain fiscal realities that the current resort to military force must finally contend with as the nation’s debt reaches crisis level. The Cost of War project at Brown University calculates that from late 2001 through fiscal year 2022, the United States spent or committed more than $8 trillion to the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and the various skirmishes during the global war on terror—an estimated $5.8 trillion in appropriations and a minimum of $2.2 trillion more for obligations to care for the veterans of these wars over decades.

In an era when U.S. politicians struggle to find fiscal villains among recipients of food, housing and health assistance, these numbers should be a scandal. Instead, too many lawmakers change the subject when the deplorable waste of U.S. military spending is pointed out.

On June 22, the Pentagon requested an additional $80 billion this year to cover the cost of the U.S. war against Iran. Independent analysts now project the true overall cost of the war to U.S. taxpayers could land anywhere between $200 billion and $1 trillion.

Those figures do not include the human cost in terms of suffering the war has created in Iran and elsewhere, the disruption it has caused to the global economy, the spikes in commodity, food and agricultural-input costs that the war created and the hunger and loss of life it will create in the most vulnerable communities around the world. Its continuing impact on the global economy will pile on billions of dollars more in collateral losses and opportunity costs.

For anyone still interested in making America great again, a simple step, with an eye on that $40 trillion debt pile we’re leaving behind for our great-grandchildren to contend with, might be to reassess how the United States approaches geopolitical challenges. Beyond the clear benefits in terms of the reduction of human suffering and the unpredictable economic and geopolitical collateral outcomes of conflict, negotiating peaceful resolutions will always be a better deal than elective warmaking.

According to the Cost of War folks, military spending produces, on average, five jobs for every $1 million spent, but the same taxpayer investment creates nearly 13 jobs in education, nine in health care and seven to eight in infrastructure and clean energy.

And that job growth will reflect investments in all kinds of things that are socially and economically good for Americans and the rest of the world. Word on the street has it that war is good for absolutely nothing.

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Kevin Clarke is America’s chief correspondent and the author of Oscar Romero: Love Must Win Out (Liturgical Press).