The Only Iran Hawk Is Trump

By carrying out air strikes on three Iranian nuclear sites last night, Donald Trump showed the fundamental error of American political ornithology: There have never been Iran hawks and Iran doves. There have been only doves. Every prior U.S. president, including Trump himself, has refrained from attacking Iranian territory, even in response to killings and attempted killings of Americans, not only abroad but also on American soil. Whether this dovish approach was wise is debatable; that it was anomalous among American policies toward hostile countries is not. Imagine if Venezuela relentlessly plotted to kill Americans in locations around the world—and tried to acquire a weapon that would safeguard its campaign of violence for generations to come. Other countries have not been so bold as Iran, and if they had been, the response might have looked like what Iran saw last night in Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. At a press conference, Trump said the nuclear sites were “completely and totally obliterated.”

Also beyond debate are the results of that dovish policy, up to yesterday. Some of those results were positive. The United States and Iran were not at war, and American forces in the Middle East were not all at high alert for reprisals. But Iran had gone metastatic. It had, with impunity, set up armed proxies in Lebanon, Yemen, Gaza, and Iraq, and less overt forces around the world. What other country does this? What other country does this without rebuke?

The best argument against attacking Iran’s nuclear program has always been that the attack would not work—that it would at best set the program back, rather than end it, and that Tehran would respond by building back better, in a deeper bunker and with greater stealth. An enrichment facility capable of producing a nuclear weapon need not be large; it would perhaps have the size and power needs of a Costco or two. The Barack Obama–era nuclear deal secured unprecedented access for monitoring Iran’s known nuclear sites. The demolition of those sites means that any future ones will be unmonitored, remaining a secret from outsiders for years, as China’s was. Think of the cavernous chemistry lab built below the laundry-processing plant on Breaking Bad, but churning out uranium-235, not blue meth.

If any other country is thinking about going nuclear, it will learn the lesson of last night and start with the Breaking Bad approach, or better yet scrap its plans completely. From the perspective of nonproliferation, Trump’s strikes could be good news, in the obvious sense that countries that desire nuclear weapons now have more reason to think their centrifuges will be destroyed before they produce enough material for a bomb. Up until now, most countries that have persevered have eventually succeeded in going nuclear. The most notable counterexamples are Iraq, whose so-called “nuclear mujahedin” (as Saddam Hussein later called them) had their Osirak reactor bombed by Israel in 1981, and Syria, which built a secret plutonium-producing nuclear reactor only to have it destroyed, again by Israel, in 2007. If the strikes last night worked (and it is far too early for anyone, including Trump, to say), Iran will join the small club of nations whose nuclear ambitions have been thwarted by force.

“There will be either peace,” Trump said at his press conference last night, “or there will be tragedy for Iran.” What might peace and its alternatives look like? Trump did not say, as the Iran dove George W. Bush might have, that peace is conditional on the overthrow of Iran’s theocracy. Trump has always seemed open to Iran’s continued rule by any authoritarian or scumbag or religious nut who is willing to keep to himself and maybe allow the Trump family to open a hotel someday. So peace could conceivably still take many forms, some of which will disappoint Iranian democrats and secularists.

The alternative to peace, which Trump promises will draw such a tragic reply, can take both immediate and longer-term forms. The immediate form is continued Iranian strikes against Israel and the expansion of those attacks to include U.S. bases in the region. (The logic of international law, for what little it is worth, would seem to permit retaliation against military targets—but not hospitals, apartment buildings, or other civilian infrastructure—of both Israel and the United States.) It would at this point be foolhardy for Iran to increase such attacks, rather than ending them or tapering them off.

But no one familiar with Iran’s history would expect it to limit its reply to conventional strikes, or to prefer them to the irregular forms of attack that it has practiced avidly for more than 40 years. A barrage of ballistic missiles, the regime understands, may invite a tragedy for Iran. But what about the mysterious disappearance of an American from the streets of Dubai, Bahrain, or Prague? Or the blowing up of a hostel full of Israelis in Bangkok? Or cutting the brakes of some American or Israeli diplomat’s car in Baku? Small acts of harassment, such as these, force Iran's enemies to make hard choices about how to retaliate. The difficulty of those choices are part of the reason for past presidents’ consistent reluctance to attack Iran. Do you attack Iran after the death of one U.S. Marine? How about two? How much proof of Iranian involvement in a diplomat’s car crash will it take to trigger a renewed state of war? Iran’s history suggests that under normal circumstances, it knows the level of provocation that will keep an American president from responding with direct force. Its estimations seem to have failed it for Trump (and Benjamin Netanyahu), but in the past and in the future, one can expect that it will, like a niggling spouse from hell, know the precise limits of its adversaries’ patience. The point of the prolonged pressure, staying a smidge under the threshold of renewed hostility, is to drive Iran’s adversaries mad, to tire them out, and to convince them to leave the region out of sheer stress and weariness. Ironically Trump’s foreign policy is, or was until yesterday, proof that this strategy is effective. Trump came to power as an isolationist in trade and a bring ’em home skeptic of U.S. military action abroad. In his first term he fired John Bolton, a tireless advocate of regime change. In his second he appointed Tulsi Gabbard, high priestess of weary isolationism, as a top adviser.

Trump said that he would escalate American attacks “if peace does not come quickly.” It is possible that peace will come quickly, and Iran’s government will survive in humiliated form. It is also possible, under those circumstances, that the peace that comes quickly will again be illusory, and Iran will revert to tactics short of war, so it can wait out Trump’s term, and let another dove take his place. In that case, the Middle East and beyond will be a scarier place to be an American than it was a few days ago.