Generals, officers, and policy staffers knocking their heads together in the office and drawing up war plans are nothing new in the Pentagon. The U.S. military has a plan for every contingency you can possibly think of, from an out-of-the-blue Russian incursion in the Baltics to an internal collapse of the Venezuelan government. So, we should all take the latest report in the New York Times about a hypothetical American military attack on Iran with this context in mind.

Mobilization plans are one thing. But acting on those plans and mobilizing for war is quite another. There are no two ways about it: A U.S. military operation in Iran absent a credible and direct national security threat to the United States, its personnel, or citizens in the region is the very definition of recklessness.

It’s not that the U.S. wouldn’t prevail in a conflict with Iran. Conventionally speaking, the regular Iranian military and the more elite Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps are no match for the U.S. Armed Forces. The concern, rather, is that the costs associated with military action heavily outweigh whatever benefits Washington would receive. The problems Iran poses to the region can’t be resolved through bombing raids or sinking the IRGC’s fleet underneath the Persian Gulf.

Militarily, Tehran has options. It can retaliate through proxies or tactical partners in multiple countries with a certain amount of plausible deniability. Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Palestinian militants in Gaza, Shia militias in Iraq and Syria, the Taliban in Afghanistan — Tehran would be able to utilize all or at least some of these groups as a form of pressure in the event of a John Bolton-like bombing campaign. In such a scenario, the tens of thousands of U.S. troops stationed in the Middle East actually limit Washington’s flexibility and increase the risk; the more troops the U.S. deploys to the region, the more targets Iran has.

Of course, none of this is new. The Iran-proxy relationship has been studied for decades by regional scholars and intelligence analysts. Tehran may be a weak power compared to the United States, but this doesn’t mean it won’t go down fighting.

What is relatively new, however, is the man who sits in the Oval Office. Unlike previous U.S. presidents, Donald Trump appears reflexively opposed to getting the U.S. deeper into the Middle East. He recoils at the thought of wasting a few more trillion dollars and sacrificing a few thousand additional American lives for the cesspool this region has become — a place with a lot of intractable problems (ethnic conflict, predatory government, jihadists, unaccountable militias, and zero-sum competition between states) and few easy solutions. This is exactly what Trump campaigned against, and it was an issue that resonated with a lot of Americans who were tired of spending so many resources in a theater that seems immune to every dose of medicine.

A preventive attack on Iran would of course be a breaking of this campaign promise from a president who likes to remind Americans that unlike other politicians, he actually does what he says. Strategically, an attack on Iran would be a disaster, dividing the U.S. from its allies and partners and opening a Pandora’s Box that would unfurl a brand new set of crises. But such an action wouldn’t be politically advantageous either; indeed, it would reinforce a belief in the minds of many in the commentariat that Trump doesn’t give orders, but rather follows them from his more hawkish national security advisers.

The best way to prevent this would be to stop whistling past the graveyard. Before the tension with Iran gets any more solidified, President Trump should seriously rethink his course of action. Provoking Iran into a conflict or launching one unilaterally serves the interest of nobody. This is especially true for the United States, a country that should be working to rebalance its force posture after nearly two decades of expensive and counterproductive military commitments in the region.

Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., may rue the day he sided with Donald Trump Jr. against a valid subpoena by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Graham’s advice that Trump Jr. refuse to testify was way out of line in principle, and could prove harmful to his own committee’s work in practice.

Graham at first said that Trump Jr. should refuse even to appear before the Intelligence Committee. At least he later amended his advice. Now he says he meant the presidential son should comply technically with the subpoena by showing up at an Intelligence Committee hearing, but then refuse to answer any question by pleading the Fifth Amendment.

The original statement was worse, indeed awful, but even the modified advice is wrongheaded.

A subpoena from Congress, like one from a court, is a binding legal summons. The only valid reason for refusing to comply is if the subpoena demands information or material that is unlawful for the subpoenaed person to supply. Mere disagreements over politics or mere inconveniences (“I’ve already answered some of their questions!”) do not qualify as valid excuses. Graham himself made that very point back in 1998 when arguing in favor of impeaching then-president Bill Clinton.

Congressional oversight — over the executive branch, over law enforcement, and over U.S. intelligence gathering — is an essential part of constitutional government. Courts repeatedly have recognized the oversight power as necessary and vast. Indeed, oversight by the elected representatives of the people is an essential safeguard of liberty.

Graham knows this. Moreover, in very practical terms, he should appreciate the oversight and subpoena authority even more than most. The Judiciary Committee that Graham leads is, historically, one of the committees that needs and uses subpoena power the most. By openly saying a citizen should ignore or undermine a subpoena, he weakens his own standing, at least morally and perhaps at the margins legally, if he as chairman wants to issue subpoenas in the future.

Graham also undermines Senate traditions and comity by so disrespecting a co-equal committee chairman as he now has done to Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr, R-N.C. The insult is especially pronounced when inflicted upon a chairman of one’s own party, and in this case from a neighboring state as well.

The damage was mitigated, but only slightly, when Graham clarified that he thinks Trump Jr. should comply but “take the Fifth.” While paying belated homage to the importance that Congress’ legal powers of subpoena be preserved, Graham still is advising a key witness to withhold information another committee and its chairman think vital to the national interest. As the committee in question here is Intelligence, with the national-security implications involved and often with the added element of secrecy, Graham in theory could be undermining a particularly important inquiry whose importance he does not fully understand.

Graham’s only stated reason for doing so is that he thinks it’s important for the investigation into Russian perfidy to be “over.” Well, who is he to say so? The criminal investigation may largely have run its course, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t loose ends to tie up regarding the crucial, underlying reason for the intelligence investigation in the first place: learning how the Russians went about trying to subvert U.S. elections.

To advise someone to “take the Fifth” implies both that that person remains subject to criminal liability (which probably is not the case here) and that the person’s knowledge is immaterial to Congress’ due interests in protecting American security. Both assumptions likely are wrong.

Graham’s advice is thus ill-considered, and potentially dangerous.

There was a school of thought that said former Vice President Joe Biden would begin to sink in the polls the moment he announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination. Biden’s first day in the race, the thinking went, would be his best day.

In fact, the opposite has happened. Since formally becoming a candidate on April 25, Biden has shot up in the polls. On announcement day, Biden held a 6.3-point lead over second-place Sen. Bernie Sanders in the RealClearPolitics average of polls. Today, that lead is 23.5 points. That is a big change.

Polls do not tell us who will win an election months from now. But they do tell us what is happening at this moment. And at this moment, Democratic voters, who are sometimes said to be moving left and itching to transform the United States with a “Green New Deal,” “Medicare for All,” and through-the-roof taxes on the rich, are in fact responding to a decidedly more centrist appeal.

That appeal, from Biden, is a promise not to fundamentally remake American society but to restore things to the way they used to be. And “the way they used to be” means before President Trump.

Obviously, Democratic voters want to replace a Republican president with a Democratic president. But they are especially dismayed by Trump — and some, driven by increasingly strident news coverage, seem to have gone nearly ’round the bend about him.

But for some center-left Democrats, the solution to the Trump Problem — that is, the fact that Trump is president — might not be the “Green New Deal” or “Medicare for All.” It is to restore the pre-2017 order in American politics. And Biden, Barack Obama’s vice president from 2009 to 2017, is the physical embodiment of that old order.

That is what Biden promises. Nearly every day, he repeats some version of his core campaign pledge: “I want to restore the soul of this country.”

Biden’s unexpected choice of Charlottesville, Va., as the theme of his announcement was a way of saying that something has gone terribly wrong in the U.S. and that he wants to return to the pre-Trump past. Addressing a real or imagined moral crisis is one way for an opposition candidate to run against an incumbent president whose term has brought solid economic growth, low unemployment, and higher wages.

How long will Biden’s lead last? Who knows? There is simply no telling how the Democratic race will play out. In the last two Republican nomination contests, we saw one race, in 2012, in which several candidates alternated holding the lead before Mitt Romney finally won. In the other, in 2016, we saw Trump lead a big field virtually the entire time. Now, with an even bigger Democratic field, the race dynamics are not yet clear.

Plus, for Biden specifically, there will always be the issue of age. Biden will be 78 years old on inauguration day 2021. That is the same age Trump would be upon leaving office, should he serve eight years. But Biden would be just beginning his presidency nearing the age of 80. That is totally uncharted territory in U.S. history. (By the way, one other candidate, Sanders, is even older.)

Even if Democrats want to restore the old order, they might decide a younger candidate should do the job.

They might also want a candidate without Biden’s record of fizzling out in presidential campaigns. In his first run for president, in 1988, Biden withdrew amid a plagiarism scandal before any votes were cast. In his second run, in 2008, he quit after finishing fifth in the Iowa caucuses. So, he has run twice and never even made it to the New Hampshire primary.

Now, though, Biden stands ahead of the field. Democrats know how old he is, they know he has lost in the past, and they still like him.

There’s a truism that elections are always about the future, not the past. That’s often the case. But what if it isn’t this time? A lot of political truisms did not hold up in the 2016 election, which was won by a man with another promise of restoration, to “Make America Great Again.”

Now, many Democrats seem happy to support a candidate who pledges to take them back a few years. Again, that could change, but for the moment, it shows how many Democrats yearn to return to a time before Trump.