If it ever did, former President Joe Biden broke it in Afghanistan. The conflict with Iran requires new thinking.

The first problem with the “Pottery Barn Doctrine” is that it was never really a doctrine at all. 

It was a metaphor, a media-friendly line attached to Colin Powell’s warning before Iraq: if you break a country, you own the aftermath. Even the store itself objected; Pottery Barn said it had no such policy. The phrase survived anyway because it captured something Americans dimly understood after Iraq — that smashing a regime is easy compared with governing the ruins.

But if Washington ever truly believed in that rule, it stopped believing in it long before Iran. Joe Biden broke it forever in Afghanistan.

What else do you call it when the United States spends twenty years building a client state, training its army, funding its institutions, shaping its politics, and tying thousands of local allies to American promises — only to leave in a collapse so rapid and chaotic that the whole project disintegrates in days? 

The Biden White House’s own 2023 summary leaned heavily on the Trump administration’s Doha deal and troop drawdowns, while Trump-supporters point out — correctly — that the Taliban never adhered to the requirements of the agreement for troop drawdown in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the State Department’s later review found that both administrations suffered from insufficient planning for worst-case scenarios during the withdrawal. That is not “you break it, you own it.” That is closer to: you build it, you mismanage it, then ignore the warnings of the Afghanistan Papers, and others, and then you blame the previous tenant on the way out.

And the human consequences were not theoretical. 

Now retired Generals Mark Milley and Frank McKenzie later testified that they had recommended keeping a residual force of roughly 2,500 troops and that the delayed evacuation was a central failure of the withdrawal. 

Reuters also reported the White House publicly defended rejecting that option, arguing a continued troop presence would have meant renewed war with the Taliban. In other words, the administration did not “own” the aftermath. It explicitly chose not to. Then the Taliban paraded through Bagram with military hardware once supplied to Afghan forces by the United States and its allies, a grotesque little coda to the fantasy that America had responsibly closed the book.

Now, suddenly progressives are rediscovering the Pottery Barn line whenever Iran comes up. Responsibility in foreign statecraft matters, of course, but the old slogan is no longer describing American behavior, if it ever did. The Afghanistan withdrawal proved that Washington is entirely capable of participating in the destruction of a political order and then declining, in practice, to own the consequences. So let’s at least retire the pretense.

Iran demands a different framework anyway. This is not Iraq in 2003, and it is not Afghanistan in 2021.

And neither country is an overpriced furniture and textiles retailer.

Iran is already in the middle of a profound internal crisis layered on top of a widening war. Reuters reports that after the killing of Ali Khamenei, the regime is navigating an emergency succession fight, with hardline clerics pushing for the swift naming of a new supreme leader while visible divisions open between President Masoud Pezeshkian and harder-line factions aligned with the Revolutionary Guards. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, has warned Tehran not to strike its territory again and signaled possible retaliation if it does. This is not a neat American “ownership” scenario. It is a regional power struggle unfolding inside an already brittle system.

And here is the part the old doctrine obscures most of all: America may have immense military power, but it does not have total authorship over what comes next. 

A Washington Post report on a classified National Intelligence Council assessment says even a large-scale U.S. assault is unlikely, by itself, to oust Iran’s entrenched clerical and military establishment. That matters. Because it means the relevant question is no longer, “If we break it, do we own it?” The more relevant question is: what are the actual limits of what outside force can accomplish inside a country whose internal succession, coercive institutions, and regional entanglements are already driving events?

The Iran conflict requires new thinking precisely because the old slogans are too comforting. They flatter Americans into imagining a level of control we do not have. The Pottery Barn Doctrine does not exist — if it ever did. Washington no longer follows it. Afghanistan proved that. Iran is proving something else: sometimes the aftermath is not ours to own, only ours to influence — for better or worse. And confusing influence with control is how empires talk themselves into disasters.

And forever wars.

(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)