Trump’s Iranian Gambit: It Didn’t Have to Come to This

When President Donald Trump addressed the cameras this morning to announce the U.S.-Israel attack on Iran, he put the theocracy’s nuclear program in his sights: “They’ve rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions, and we can’t take it anymore.” He denounced them for attempting to “rebuild their nuclear program” and “developing the long-range missiles that can now threaten our very good friends and allies in Europe, our troops stationed overseas, and could soon reach the American homeland.”

What the president elides is that he scotched the nuclear deal that, imperfect though it was, provided monitoring of Tehran’s nuclear program and might have prevented this moment. He was trying to forge his own one through his son-in-law as recently as Thursday. The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was signed by Iran and the permanent members of the UN Security Council (the U.S., the United Kingdom, France, Russia, China) and Germany. The European Union also took part. The JCPOA was never intended to curb the Mullahs’ support for Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, or terrorists inside Iraq any more than the arms control regimes negotiated by American presidents from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan required the Soviets to abandon Eastern Europe or Communism. Instead, it had a limited purview. To unwind its nuclear program, Iran agreed to very low levels of enrichment of nuclear materials and an inspection regime that kept real human inspectors and sophisticated monitoring equipment at the country’s nuclear sites. In exchange, Tehran would get sanctions relief, including the unfreezing of certain assets. Hence, the infamous plane of cash dispatched to Iran for which Barack Obama received so much grief.

Did the JCPOA work? Not perfectly, and there were plenty of Democratic skeptics of the program, including Senator Chuck Schumer and former Senator Ben Cardin, who had chaired the Foreign Relations Committee, both of whom voted against the agreement. What is certain is that when Trump scuttled the accord, the P5+1 signatories and key international monitoring bodies, such as the International Atomic Energy Agency, lost their ability to assess Tehran’s nuclear status. Iran walked away from it, too.

In the absence of any international nuclear monitoring in Iran, we’re blind, in a situation where the U.S. and Israel supposedly eviscerated the Shia regime’s nuclear program last year, but were apparently caught unaware of its build-back efforts and are striking again. One minute, the president is doing an end-zone dance about crushing Iran’s nukes. Months later, he is sounding like George W. Bush, standing before Congress, suggesting America’s enemy is getting close to launching nuclear missiles.

No one should want Iran to become a nuclear power. The tyrannical regime has spent a fortune prosecuting terror at home, in the region, and globally. (Don’t forget Tehran-backed Hezbollah struck in Argentina.) Stopping Iran is a legitimate American and international goal, which is why Moscow, Beijing, Berlin, Washington, London, and Paris signed on to the JCPOA. 

Now we are trying to pulverize Iran’s nuclear program and foment regime change using only air power, but not boots on the ground. Is that likely to work? Given the regime’s willingness to inflict mass terror and carnage on its internal opponents, there’s reason to be doubtful that this strike will lead to “decapitation” or a Venezuela-style switcheroo where we find a Mullah willing to do our bidding.

But let’s at least be thankful that Trump evinces no interest in getting America enmeshed in a land war in the Middle East, unlike George W. Bush. We have an amarda in the region, but not an army. So, we’re going to keep bombing. What that leads to is anyone’s guess. But sticking with the JCPOA and restoring sanctions if the Iranians violated it, or breaking the agreement to use American air power to knock out the facilities if we had actionable intelligence that Tehran was making real progress, would have made sense. We’d still have our allies. We wouldn’t be alone, save for Israel.

Trump often has a certain feral intelligence about when to pull back from his own excesses, easing sanctions enough to avoid crashing the global economy, for instance. Maybe that’s at work here. I genuinely hope this enormous gamble pays off and Iran’s nuclear ambitions end along with a regime that’s brutalized its people and neighbors. If Trump’s right, we’ll all be better off. But there are myriad reasons to be doubtful and to believe his hatred of Barack Obama and thus the JCPOA led to this moment, along with, of course, Iran’s endless devotion to causing havoc.

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