People around the world no doubt breathed a tad easier Wednesday after Donald Trump chose not to hit back militarily in response to Tehran’s missile attack on bases in Iraq where American troops are stationed. There was no obliteration of any of the 52 Iranian targets, including cultural icons, that Trump alleged had been selected for retaliation if Iran struck at Americans.
Whether this stand-down came about because Trump’s own team walked him back from ordering a war crime or he just acted on a whim is hard to know. Whatever adults were once in the room long ago fled the room. If Americans had been killed in the attack, missiles and bombs would probably be flying in both directions right now. Whatever the case, ancient structures such as, say, the 1,200-year-old Imām Ridhā Mosque in Mashhad all remain standing. For the moment. A step back from the precipice, at least temporarily.
Ideas on where matters go from here are, of necessity, deeply speculative, with the reckless, impulsive, and pitifully ignorant U.S. commander in chief in charge on one side and the aggressive Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps growing stronger than ever among the competing forces maneuvering for power inside the Islamic republic since Trump withdrew from the nuclear agreement in 2018.
That counterproductive move of Trump’s produced today’s peril. We didn’t have to be here. The “maximum pressure” applied by the Trump regime to force the mullahs to knuckle under and sign a new nuclear deal has failed to make anybody safer. It has, however, succeeded in greatly harming an Iranian economy that hadn’t yet recovered from years of sanctions, and that, plus the assassination of Maj. Gen. Soleimani, brought cheer to the hard-liners in America and boosted the clout of the hard-liners in Iran, neither of which wanted the nuclear agreement in the first place. The Iranian moderates in the leadership were “already on life support” before the assassination, said Vali R. Nasr, a Middle East scholar and former dean of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.
In that light, since speculation is roaring in high gear, it’s worth looking at what one of the hardest of U.S. hard-liners had to say earlier this week that got trampled amid everything else that was happening. Former national security adviser John Bolton tweeted Sunday:
Contrary to Bolton, the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors responsible for verifying that everybody was complying with the nuclear agreement said in 11 quarterly reports that Iran was doing so fully. That, in fact, is what initially kept Trump from making the move he was determined to make so that he could flip off Barack Obama and show off his own negotiating genius. He kept asking his staff for justification for withdrawal. Ultimately, he just shrugged off Iranian compliance and withdrew from the agreement anyway, reimposing old sanctions and adding new ones.
Since that happened, Iran has been gradually exceeding various limits in the agreement, saying with each move that it is perfectly willing to comply again if the United States removes the sanctions and returns to what diplomats like to call the status quo ante. Iran has over the past eight months announced that it no longer feels bound by any of the production limits on any level of enriched uranium, on research into advanced centrifuges, on the use of centrifuges in the once-secret underground facility at Fordow, or on the prohibition of activities at the Arak heavy water reactor, which can produce plutonium.
A key purpose of the agreement in the view of the U.S. negotiators was that all the verified restrictions would put Iran about one year from having enough enriched uranium to make a single nuclear bomb. Building nukes is something that Iranian leaders say they have no intention of doing, but that critics in and outside the United States do not believe, especially given instances of Iran’s proven duplicity in such matters in the past.
With the production limits axed, the anti-nuclear proliferation Institute for Science and International Security, led by David Albright, estimates that Iran could have enough material to have a single nuclear warhead in four to five months. Thus, what Bolton is saying with his “effectively preventing” Iran from getting a nuclear capability is that action must be taken soon or Iran will present the same retaliation risks of millions dead as attacking North Korea now would.
What action? Well, it’s certainly not the diplomatic path. Bolton’s made himself clear on this dozens of times in the past two-plus decades. Here’s one example from nearly five years ago that he published in The New York Times: “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.” He must have been terribly disappointed when his desires weren’t finally fulfilled by Trump on Tuesday.
As close observers have noted for decades, an attack on Iran short of a series that would “collaterally”—if not intentionally—kill thousands of Iranian civilians would not permanently wipe out Iran’s ability to eventually build a nuke if it chose to do so. Hitting Iran’s widespread nuclear development facilities would not be as “clean” as Israel’s much-reviled Operation Babylon attack on Iraq’s reactor at Osirak in 1983. While Iran’s air force is mostly ready for the scrapyard, Iran has boosted its air defenses and has invested heavily in drones and accurate missile technology over the past decade.
Nobody doubts that the United States could, if its leaders wished, turn Iran into a smoldering ruin. The potential for devastating blowback from an American attack on Iran’s turf has been written about in articles, reports, and white papers for years. None predicts a pretty outcome. Despite the fantasies of Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, who thinks one or two strikes and the war would be over, Iran would be no pushover. And while there’s no love outside Iran’s sphere of influence for the semi-autocratic theocrats who run the country, Washington will have no coalition behind it should it follow Bolton’s advice.
Most diplomats and observers and media have judged the nuclear agreement dead. Albright says, “If there’s no limitation on production [of enriched uranium], then there is no deal.” Even Ankit Panda, senior editor at The Diplomat—who writes that the agreement is still alive, though hanging by a thread—writes in The New Republic that he doesn’t think there is much possibility that Iran will return to full compliance with the old agreement.
It nevertheless matters that the Iranians haven’t completely abandoned it. If that were the case, they wouldn’t be saying the IAEA inspectors are still welcome, and they might be giving their six-month notice that they will pull out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Israel, Pakistan, and India all built their nuclear arsenals, not having signed the NPT. North Korea withdrew from the NPT before it built its nukes. Iran has made clear that, even now, after all that’s happened since Trump arrived in the Oval Office, if the U.S. reversed what he has done, Tehran would again comply with the agreement that puts limits on its nuclear development for another 10 years. A wise American president would take Tehran up on that, and push for negotiations to make the agreement more restrictive, and on other issues, such as the development of certain kinds of missiles.
It is, however, difficult to imagine how to move out of the foreign policy limbo Trump has delivered us into until he himself is moved out of the White House.