This Is Donald Trump’s War, and It’s Only the Beginning
President Donald Trump has just committed the most basic of strategic blunders: the fallacy of the last move. This is the mistaken belief that a powerful or bold action will decisively settle a dispute in your favor.
The enemy, however, always gets a vote. Just ask Vladimir Putin. Or Adolf Hitler. Or see any of the wars the United States launched in this century. Or, for that matter, most of the wars started in the last century. Only the 1991 Iraq War ended in a quick, clear American victory (after Saddam Hussein succumbed to this same fallacy with his invasion of Kuwait), though Hussein’s reign lasted another dozen years.
Trump’s bluster may thrill Fox News viewers, but the adrenaline rush he and they are enjoying will not last. “After you’ve dropped those bombs on those hardened facilities, what happens next?” former Central Command chief Anthony Zinni asked in 2009. We are about to find out.
It is highly unlikely Iran will unconditionally surrender, as Trump demands. They have a dozen or more ways of counterattacking American interests. Since the U.S. bombings of three nuclear facilities on Saturday, Iran has already launched new missile attacks on Israel. We will know shortly whether they will close the Straits of Hormuz, choking off one-fifth of the world’s oil supplies and crashing global stock markets. Or attack U.S. forces in the region. Or launch terror attacks against American businesses around the world.
Only a fool would try to forecast what comes next. Three unstable, unpopular, autocratic rulers are now locked in battle: Trump, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It is a nightmare three-body problem, impossible to predict. But we can say this: Trump’s war is just beginning.
He has already failed to obtain his immediate objective. Trump falsely claimed that U.S. bombs and missiles “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard leaders, however, said that they had already moved supplies of enriched uranium out of these areas last week. They claim to have other, secret centrifuge sites. “Iran has made no secret that they have protected this material,” Rafael Mariano Grossi, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told CNN on Sunday. “We may be heading for the worst.”
If true, this means that Iran may have already run some of its 400 kilograms of 60 percent enriched uranium back through its most advanced centrifuges and spun it up to weapons-grade levels of 90 percent enriched. It would take them about five days to produce the 25 kilograms needed for the core of one bomb. They may be able to turn that into a working device in a few months. Some experts estimate it could take only five or six weeks. More could follow.
They can certainly reconstitute the damaged nuclear facilities over time. Trump’s bombing raids are “not necessarily the death blow to Iran’s nuclear program,” Representative Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, told MSNBC on Sunday. “It sadly does not take that long to build centrifuges once you know how. So this assumption that their nuclear program is gone and they’ll never be able to build it is simply wrong at this point.”
After campaigning as the “peace president” who “would end wars, not start them,” Trump has plunged the U.S. into a new war that a majority of Americans do not want. He has, once again, violated the Constitution, usurping the sole authority of Congress to declare war. As Robert Kagan brilliantly argues in The Atlantic, warning that “American democracy may not survive a war with Iran,” Trump will almost certainly use the war to suppress dissent and supercharge his drive to create an American dictatorship.
He has further isolated the U.S. from its key allies, strengthened Russia and China, and triggered global condemnations from U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres, who called Trump’s war “a dangerous escalation,” to Pope Leo, who warned that the war risks opening “an irreparable abyss.”
And why? We had already solved this problem. The 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal had shrunk Iran’s program; put it it in an iron box under lock and camera. That deal had forced Iran to rip up thousands of centrifuges and limit its permitted stockpile of low-enriched uranium to a token 300 kilograms. It would have taken Iran over a year, instead of days, to break out—and we would have seen them doing it.
Trump ripped up the agreement in 2018—at the urging of Netanyahu—and promised that his policy of “maximum pressure” would force Iran to agree to a longer, stronger, better deal. It was complete nonsense. He achieved nothing of the kind. Now he is trying to fix the problem he created—and Netanyahu is getting the regime-change war he always wanted.
Having watched Trump lie repeatedly about Iran and about his own brilliance, having watched Netanyahu manipulate Trump into finally giving him the war he has wanted for decades and all previous U.S. presidents had refused, having seen Trump drop a dozen of the much-ballyhooed, 30,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs on Fordo with uncertain results, only a fool would expect anything good to come out of this unnecessary, illegal, extraordinarily dangerous bombing campaign.
No country in history has ever been overthrown by air power alone. It takes the type of ground invasion that is beyond anything the United States or Israel can conduct.
This is not the end of Trump’s war. It is only the first act.