President Donald Trump has framed his strikes on Iran as a costless triumph. The president is not asking Americans to accept sacrifices in service of destroying the Iranian nuclear program — only to applaud his already successful destruction of it.
“Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated,” Trump declared Saturday night. “Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace. If they do not, future attacks will be far greater and a lot easier.”
It’s possible that Trump’s war will unwind as advertised. The Iranian regime finds itself in a state of profound weakness. Israel has gutted its air defenses and flies largely unharried through its skies. Iran’s nuclear facilities are badly damaged, while many of its top atomic scientists and military leaders lie dead. Its most fearsome partner militias — Hezbollah and Hamas — are badly degraded. Its longtime allies in Damascus have been deposed. Its friends in Moscow seem to have too much on their own plates to lend much of a hand.
From this precarious position, the Iranian leadership might conclude that it can ill afford an escalating conflict with the world’s greatest military power. Perhaps, it will follow the same basic playbook it did following Trump’s assasination of its military leader Qasem Soleimani in 2020: Back then, Iran responded with face-saving strikes on US military bases in Iraq — but ones that it heavily telegraphed, enabling American soldiers to take cover and retain their lives, which in turn allowed Trump to call things even and end the conflict. Iran’s strike on a US base in Qatar on Monday could be interpreted as fitting this mold: The US said that it had advanced warning of the strike and that there were no American casualties.
What’s more, it is even possible that the Iranian regime could conclude that its nuclear program is more trouble than it’s worth and sheepishly return to the bargaining table, now ready to accept more stringent restrictions on its freedom to enrich uranium or build ballistic missiles.
But such rosy outcomes are far from certain. And if things do not transpire as Trump hopes, his war could impose significant costs on the American people — in terms of money, blood, and nuclear security.
How Trump’s war on Iran could impact the economy
For Americans, the most widely felt consequences of Trump’s war with Iran would likely be economic. Oil prices have climbed by more than 12 percent since the end of May, when Israel began threatening to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. An escalating US-Iran conflict could further elevate Americans’ energy costs.
The nightmare scenario here concerns the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s only waterway connecting the Persian Gulf with the open ocean. Each day, about 20 million barrels of oil — or about 20 percent of the world’s total supply — moves through the strait. Iran could plausibly choke off all shipping through the waterway if it wished to do so. And on Sunday, the Iranian Parliament reportedly approved such a course of action, although it remains up to the nation’s Supreme National Security Council to enact a blockade.
Were Iran to take that extraordinary measure, the price of oil could shoot up past $130 a barrel, according to industry analysts (as of this writing, a barrel is trading at $72). That would dramatically increase the costs of energy and transportation for US consumers. And since energy is an input into the production of more or less every good and service, a sustained blockade could push up prices more broadly. Faced with higher inflation, the Federal Reserve would likely scrap plans for cutting interest rates. In this scenario, Americans would see lower real wages and higher borrowing costs than they would have enjoyed in a world where Trump did not bomb Iran.
It’s worth saying that a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is unlikely. Were Iran to pursue such a policy, it would effectively be sabotaging its own economy, which is heavily dependent on exporting oil via the waterway. Nevertheless, the threat of disrupting shipping through the strait is the regime’s greatest point of leverage over other world powers.
Iran could also disrupt global commerce in more modest ways. Tehran is allied with Yemen’s Houthi militia, which is already threatening to recommence its attacks on US ships in the Red Sea. Any disruption to Red Sea trade could increase global shipping costs, which would eventually bleed into US consumer prices.
Alternatively, Iran could strike oil and gas infrastructure in Middle Eastern countries allied with the United States. In a 2019 drone attack allegedly backed by Tehran, the Houthis bombed two major oil facilities in Saudi Arabia, temporarily cutting the country’s oil production in half and spiking crude prices.
At a moment when the president’s tariffs are already nudging up the cost of imports, any war-related disruptions to global trade could prove painful for American households.
Trump’s attack has put American soldiers in harm’s way
As Monday’s attack on US troops in Qatar demonstrated, Americans stationed in the Middle East face a far graver threat than more expensive gasoline. More than 40,000 US soldiers are serving on bases and warships in the region, well within reach of Iranian missiles.
Trump’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities represented a far broader and more destructive attack than his strike against Soleimani five years ago. It’s reasonable to fear that Tehran’s response will be proportionally more severe, and that Monday’s strikes at Qatar represent only the beginning of its retaliation. At least, this is what the regime is telling Americans to expect.
“Any country in the region or elsewhere that is used by American forces to strike Iran will be considered a legitimate target for our armed forces,“ Ali Akbar Velayati, an adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said Saturday. “America has attacked the heart of the Islamic world and must await irreparable consequences.”
Some of these “consequences” could transpire on American soil. Although Iran’s immediate targets will likely lie close to home. Years after the Soleimani strike, Iran allegedly orchestrated failed assassination attempts against former national security adviser John Bolton, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Donald Trump.
According to US officials who spoke with NBC News, Iran warned Trump at this year’s G7 Summit that it could respond to an American strike on its nuclear facilities by perpetrating terrorist attacks within the United States. The regime claimed to have sleeper cells in America ready and waiting to commit such violence.
Trump may have made an Iranian nuclear weapon more likely
Trump’s war with Iran may risk making all Americans poorer while getting some of us killed. But in his administration’s ostensible view, these potential harms pale in comparison to the threat posed by Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon — a threat that Saturday’s strikes greatly mitigated.
It is not obvious how much Americans actually have at stake in preventing Iran from developing atomic weapons. No serious analyst believes that the Iranian regime is suicidal. Tehran is not going to order a nuclear first strike against the United States or any other country. Rather, it almost certainly sees nuclear weapons primarily as a deterrent against both foreign intervention and domestic challenges to its authoritarian regime.
Nevertheless, all else equal, Americans have an interest in preventing nuclear proliferation. Were Iran to acquire an atomic weapon, Saudi Arabia would be liable to pursue its own. And a nuclear arms race in the Middle East would increase the tail risk of a future atomic catastrophe.
And yet, it is possible that Trump’s strikes on Iran have actually made that nation’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon more likely.
Before Saturday’s bombings, Iran was engaged in negotiations over its nuclear program without the United States. And Tehran had previously reached an agreement to limit its enrichment of uranium in 2015, a nuclear deal that Trump tore up during his first term in office.
Now, all diplomacy over Iran’s nuclear program appears dead. And Tehran may see a nuclear weapon as more indispensable for its security than ever before. After all, the regime’s conventional military defenses have proven grossly inadequate to deter or defeat Israeli and American incursions.
Already, Iranian officials are signalling that the nation will withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), a move that would mean an end to the nation’s cooperation with United Nations inspections of its uranium enrichment. At present, the UN’s nuclear watchdog says it is uncertain about where Iran is storing the highly enriched uranium it has already produced. Tehran claims that, before Trump’s strikes, it had moved its uranium stockpiles out of the three sites that he targeted.
American and Israeli bombing has surely undermined Iran’s capacity to produce weapons-grade uranium. Tehran has lost some of its top nuclear scientists and suffered massive damage to its enrichment facilities. But Iran retains both the technical know-how and raw materials necessary for building an atomic bomb. And the world may have now lost visibility into its nuclear activities.
Ultimately, it is impossible for anyone to know with certainty what America’s war with Iran will bring. But what we do know is that, in the immediate term, Trump’s strikes have made Americans less safe, while heightening the risks to our economy — all in service of a geopolitical goal that likely could have been achieved through peaceful means, and which was not necessarily advanced by Saturday’s violence.
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