In his remarks announcing the bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities, Trump made three points worth noting. First, of course, was a series of phrases about how bad Iran, or “the Iranian regime” (a phrase used only once) is: “they built this horribly destructive enterprise”; “the world’s number one state sponsor of terror”; “the bully of the Middle East”; “they have been killing our people, blowing off their arms, blowing off their legs with roadside bombs”; “hundreds of thousands throughout the Middle East and around the world have died as a direct result of their hate”; “so many were killed by their general”; “this horrible threat to Israel.”
Second, Trump threatened what presumably are further bombings: if Iran doesn’t “now make peace … future attacks will be far greater and a lot easier”; “there will be tragedy for Iran far greater than we have witnessed over the last eight days”; “there are many targets left … if peace does not come quickly, we will go after those other targets with precision, speed and skill.”
Third, although Trump duly indicated as an “objective … the destruction of Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity … a stop to the nuclear threat,” he in fact tied the cessation of future attacks only to the aforementioned “peace”: “make peace,” “peace … [to] come quickly.” (To be sure, the next day, he raised the issue of “regime change,” though in a typically vague fashion; I’ll return to this below.)
What’s striking about these three points is the decrease in frequency and concreteness in the move from point 1 to points 2 and 3. Trump was prolix about how “horrible” Iran has been or could be; much less wordy about what else he might attack; and almost silent about what he expects from Iran in order to avoid those steps. I want to argue that this asymmetry is to be expected; that it’s going to lead either to another U.S. retreat and/or to an even broader conflagration; and that the time has come to start reevaluating some of the assumptions that underlie thinking about post-1979 Iran.
To start. As I’ve pointed out multiple times, U.S. foreign policy is structured around finding actions that are appropriate responses to perceived problems, not about choosing actions that are likely to lead to accomplishing desired goals. Had the latter been the way that U.S. policy is made, there would have been explicit consideration by Trump and his advisers about the probability that bombing the nuclear facilities would bring about particular goals, such as a non-nuclear Iran, or a non-Islamic Republic Iran. But almost surely, no such consideration occurred because if it had, bombing would most likely have been ruled out as having a low probability of success for accomplishing either goal. (For what it’s worth, I doubt that there was even a crude strategic analysis about what Iran was likely to do in response and how to change the likelihood of those responses. At most, there was perhaps a brief discussion of hardening U.S. military facilities in the region and, perhaps, drawing up a list of targets to strike if those facilities were hit. I think it extremely unlikely that there was any serious discussion of how to respond to what was in fact a highly predictable possible move, namely the closing of the Straits of Hormuz: see, for example, the contentless bluster by Rubio yesterday on that issue.)
It is also worth noting, not coincidentally, that almost none of the elements on Trump’s bill of particulars concerns the possible development or deployment of nuclear weapons by Iran. Although some reports have suggested that this omission was due to Trump simply acting on “vibes” rather than intelligence estimates, the parade of horribles he advanced was for the most part backward looking: about the words and supposed deeds emanating from Iran for decades. In this regard, to refer to the bombing as part of a “preventive war” is 180 degrees off the mark: Trump’s rationale, like that of most of his actions in the White House, is resolutely focused on the past, on taking revenge for real or imagined injuries. Although this obsession with the past is typical of presidential calls to arms, from Wilson in 1917 to Obama in 2011, those calls are usually leavened with considerable discussion of ongoing developments, something which Trump avoids almost completely.
This focus on appropriateness, not consequences, is why Trump’s speech spends so much time on how bad Iran is and so little time on what he wants from it. And it’s why the reference, in point 2, to future bombing brings to mind Groundhog Day, or Yogi Berra on déja vu: if our actions are unsuccessful in accomplishing our (undefined) goal, we’ll keep doing them over and over again. This is the same reason why, during the Vietnam War, almost any U.S. setback was followed by increased bombing of North Vietnam; why, for almost 15 years, the U.S. continued a ludicrously unsuccessful policy of Tibetan exiles into China; and why, for over six decades, the U.S. keeps imposing sanctions on Cuba. As these examples show, this urge to continue a failed policy is hard-wired into U.S. foreign policy. To be sure, and apropos of the above point on grievances, there are some particularly Trumpian touches in the speech, from the use of the term “bully” to the presumption that Iran was behind IEDs in Iraq to thanking God by name; and it is thus certainly possible that other U.S. presidents would have decided not to bomb; but in the end, the combination of having the policy tool – in this case, the bunker-buster bomb – the opportunity – in this case, Iran supposedly being on the back foot – and a long list of grievances makes me dubious that if we were to have re-run history, a similar action would not have been taken by, at least, Biden and Bush Jr.
Second, if, as is highly likely, Iran neither agrees to dismantle its nuclear program nor democratizes its regime, what will the U.S. do immediately, then down the road? Per the hints in Trump’s speech and per my above comment on intermediate-term continuity in other cases, the most likely scenario is that the U.S. will continue bombing, not least because that policy instrument is ready at hand. It is, of course, possible that if Iran does nothing, Trump will declare complete victory and announce an end to operations. But if the Iranians respond militarily, we should expect continued U.S. bombing. Perhaps, a month or two down the road, if bombing continues to fail to make headway, and if the Iranians are able to degrade U.S. naval capabilities, there might be a face-saving solution à la the U.S. and Yemen: announce an agreement, declare partial victory, and skedaddle.
However, a denouement along these lines would be resisted not only by hardliners at home but by their allies abroad, notably the Israelis. This could lead to pressure on the U.S. to escalate further, for example, by establishing a no-fly zone in support of a regional armed opposition, or by carrying out intensive bombing operations against Republican Guards and other regime power bases. Faced with the existential threat posed by this type of escalation, one could well imagine the regime responding in a way that could trigger spirals of violence and counter-violence throughout the region.
In short, while it is possible for Saturday’s bombing to be the final step in the current conflict (and putting aside the fact that Israel and Iran continue to strike each other), if Iran’s response to the bombing is military, then the U.S. attack will most likely have opened the door either to an eventual U.S. retreat or, alternatively, to much broader and more intense waves of regional violence. In effect, Trump has lit a match next to a gasoline tank and is leaving it to Iran and Israel to grab a fire extinguisher.
It might be argued, of course, that Trump had no real choice, given the clear and present danger that would be posed by Iran’s possession of a nuclear weapon. To be sure, one might continue, Trump did not have to authorize bombing at this moment; but in the end, the threat of such a weapon was so great, and the likelihood of its being developed was so high, that the issue regarding military force was no longer if, but when. However, this entire line of argument is premised on the idea that, given the nature of the Iranian regime, possession of nuclear arms would be catastrophic. And although, unlike some prominent scholars, I believe that the possession by any state of nuclear weapons is extraordinarily dangerous, whether that danger would be greater still if such weapons were in the arsenal of the current regime is a very different question.
Since 1979, Iran has seen Israel as an illegitimate state which should never have come into existence and which should be replaced by a nondenominational polity; the fate of “immigrant Jews” would be left to a referendum. In the meantime, Iran has supported armed movements in various countries that have, with some regularity, been involved with military action against Israel; Iran and Israel have engaged in tit-for-tat assassinations, air strikes, and other military attacks; and, beyond its conflict with Israel, Iran has also had tense and at times overtly violent relations (directly and via proxies) with other states in the general area. To understate the matter enormously, one can well understand why regimes in various countries regard the Islamic Republic with fear and loathing.
That said, how would the situation change if Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons? Is the claim that Iran would in fact use those weapons in attacking Israel or other states with which it was in conflict? Or is the claim rather that the possession of nuclear weapons would embolden Iran to become more aggressive, even with nuclear weapons not being used? The first of these possibilities is dubious in the extreme: not only has no nuclear-armed state used those weapons since the United States did so in 1945, the use of such weapons against Israel would certainly be met in kind. As to the prospect of Iran using nuclear weapons against other states, such as Saudi Arabia, it is almost impossible to imagine a scenario in which this would occur, above all in a way that would spare Iran a devastating reprisal. And these same arguments apply to the second possibility, that of a now-emboldened Iran.
The one factor left out from this analysis is accidents. Every time a state nuclearizes, the chances of an accidentally-triggered catastrophe go up; the same happens every time states add to, or improve the quality of, their nuclear arsenal. And this, by the way, is true regardless of the nature of the regime in question: the world was in grave danger from the arms race between the United States, a democracy, and the Soviet Union, a one-party dictatorship. My point simply is that neither the nature of the regime in Tehran nor its clear antipathy to many other states make it more dangerous to the latter if it develops nuclear weapons. The world would be more dangerous, not because Iran would be more likely to attack Israel or a non-nuclear U.S. ally, but because a crisis could well escalate into a nuclear exchange between Iran and Israel, or Iran and the U.S.
So, when one reads that a nuclear-armed Iran is dangerous (as one senator put it, “nuclear weapons in the hands of the Ayatollah is a nightmare for the world”), what does that actually mean? My guess is that the real concern about a nuclear-armed Iran is not that it would pose a greater threat to its current enemies, but that those enemies would pose less of a threat to it. In effect, as the case of North Korea shows, it would be much more dangerous for Israel and the United States to bomb a nuclear-armed Iran precisely because they could not know what action might trigger a nuclear response. To put matters classically, nuclear weapons can serve as a deterrent, and if Iran were to obtain such weapons, it would have a deterrent against the kind of bombardment it has undergone for the last week or so. If anything, the attacks against Iran’s nuclear facilities increase the chance of Iran redoubling its efforts to get the bomb: the fact that Iran may have been slowed down is more than counterbalanced by the increased resources it will now throw into the effort.
If, because of Trump’s and Netanyahu’s own goal, the chances of Iran choosing to forgo nuclear weapons have sharply diminished, how then can the situation be stabilized? (Hint: it won’t happen through the population rising up and overthrowing the regime.) The most straightforward way is by attending to the ostensible gravamen of Iran’s objections to Israel, namely that its existence is a per se violation of Palestinian rights. Recall that it was the fate of the Palestinians that, from 1947 onward, fueled rejection of Israel from Arab states; although various piecemeal efforts since then have led to diplomatic recognition, it has been a cold and highly partial peace that has not even come close to resolving the core issue at stake. If, however, there were to be a genuine bipartite settlement, joined in by the Palestinians and the Israelis, that would, almost by definition, remove Iran’s stated reason for an enormous part of its foreign policy.
Obviously, any kind of settlement – whether one- or two-state – is not even faintly within imagination now and for the foreseeable future. My point, however, is that in the absence of such a settlement, fantasies about Iran will continue to haunt our leaders’ dreams, leading to wave after wave of bombs and deaths.