President Trump announced a cease-fire with Iran ahead of negotiations set for this weekend on a settlement of the U.S.-Iran conflict. Stephen Stromberg, an editor in Opinion, gathered the Opinion columnists Nicholas Kristof and Bret Stephens and the Opinion contributing writer Megan K. Stack to discuss the prospects for peace and the effects of the war so far.
The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Stephen Stromberg: How probable is it that the shooting will start again before the two sides reach a settlement? Bret, why don’t you start?
Bret Stephens: As the great physicist Niels Bohr is reported to have once said (or was it Yogi Berra?), “It is very difficult to predict, especially the future.” But I’d say this war isn’t over. Not by a long shot. I don’t think Donald Trump will allow Iran’s continued shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz to stand. I don’t think Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, will allow the cease-fire to get in the way of his country’s campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon. And I don’t think the people in charge in Tehran are interested in a settlement that leaves them without enriched uranium or the ability to enrich uranium.
Nicholas Kristof: I agree that we’ll see more shooting. The two sides are too far apart to quickly reach a deal, so I suspect that they’ll take some whacks at each other and test what they can get away with. But I also think each side would like a deal, the right one, so there may be some willingness to muddle along ambiguously even with violations by the other side, without a return to full-scale war. I hope so.
Megan K. Stack: I don’t believe the violence is about to end. But I do think there is a small chance — emphasis on “small” — that Trump will use the next few days to extricate the United States from the whole mess and declare victory. Lebanon, which yesterday got pounded by the most deadly Israeli attack so far, is a major sticking point. Does Trump want a cease-fire badly enough to try to stop Israel’s assault on Lebanon? Does Iran see enough advantage in getting a deal out of the United States now that it might abandon Lebanon? Trump’s history suggests he will not turn on Israel, but he’s in a situation of unprecedented pressure over what many — including me — see as a disastrous debacle in Iran.
Stromberg: What should President Trump’s red lines be in the coming negotiations?
Stephens: At a minimum? First, the Strait of Hormuz is an international waterway that must be open to shipping, free of threats of violence and free of tolls. Second, Iran can have neither its stockpile of enriched uranium nor the right to enrich uranium; if Iran wants low-enriched uranium to fuel nuclear reactors, we can supply it. Third, Iran must respect the sovereignty of all of its neighbors, including ones such as Lebanon, where it maintains proxies. There can be no peace in the region while Iran supplies terrorist groups with the means to undermine governments and attack neighboring countries. Fourth, Iran cannot again massacre its own people and expect immunity from attack: What’s called the “responsibility to protect” is something we owe Iran’s beleaguered people.
Kristof: The most important red line should be the nuclear issue. It would be a catastrophe for the region if Iran made a rush for nuclear weapons and became another North Korea, and I think this war has increased that risk. If Iran tests and accumulates nuclear weapons, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and maybe Egypt will acquire them as well. So the top priority should be some return to a nuclear deal that manages Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium and returns inspectors to the country. Iran made a pretty good offer on nukes on the eve of the war that the United States rejected; I doubt we can get something as good now, and Iran is likely to insist on some low-level enrichment capability. We may have to live with that, as long as we deal with the highly enriched uranium, limits on further enrichment and a robust inspection regime.
I don’t think that Bret’s other red lines are achievable if the war is to end; Iran would rather continue the war than give up the leverage it has acquired over the Strait of Hormuz. And I think it’ll insist on keeping proxies. So we’ll have to make hard choices, because we’re in a worse negotiating position today than before the war. Hard choice No. 1 should be to keep Iran from getting nuclear weapons even if that means conceding in other areas.
Stack: Red lines are fine, but Trump knows that he is not in a strong position to make demands. He appears to be desperate to get out of this war. I doubt he is happy to make concessions on the Strait of Hormuz, which could expand Iran’s control over the passage and could even see Iran profiting from tolling ships. But I would not be surprised if a deal like this emerges. It would create a source of revenue to help Iran rebuild after the war without directly giving in to Iranian demands for reparations. It would also shift the burden of doing something about the Strait of Hormuz to Europe and Asia, which Trump would like.
Stephens: I don’t think we should overestimate Iran’s strengths: They have a genius for bluffing that isn’t matched by their skills at fighting. They may be right that Trump wants a deal, but I don’t think he wants one at any price: If there’s something the president hates more than anything, it’s the appearance of weakness. And leaving Iran with more control of the strait now than it had at the beginning looks weak. I doubt Trump will stand for it.
Stack: I’m not sure about that. Trump had dialed back his rhetoric on the Strait of Hormuz, especially after he was unable to get European allies to help him take a stand against Iran earlier in this war. His current position seems to be that the United States isn’t dependent on the Strait of Hormuz, and those who are — Europe and Asia — can figure out their own solution. The reality is, Trump already looks weak, disastrously so. I think he knows it, and is seeking to cut losses.
Stromberg: The Strait of Hormuz is an international waterway. Can Trump legitimately negotiate its status? Would any deal that left Iran with substantial control over the strait be stable, given how the rest of the world would respond to an agreement that imposed barriers to passage that did not exist before the war started?
Kristof: Under international law, the Strait of Hormuz should count as an international waterway with free passage. But if Iran sets up a tollbooth, perhaps with Oman, I don’t see who will stop it. The most important counterpressure would be China, but there are estimates that Iran can earn $500 billion over the next four or so years by charging for passage, and it won’t lightly give that up.
Iran may say that for environmental and security reasons it has to coordinate passage through the strait. This would mean that Iran would emerge enormously empowered by this war. Trump would hate this, but he may grumble that he did the hard work, and now it’s up to the Europeans to open the strait — which would leave Iran in control.
Stephens: Ceding control of the strait to Iran — whether or not Oman is part of the bargain — would be a fiasco. It would set a catastrophic precedent: Should the Yemen-based Houthi militants now demand control of the Bab al-Mandab Strait at the mouth of the Red Sea? How about Indonesia in the Strait of Malacca? The United States Navy was born to guarantee freedom of the seas; this would be the end of it.
But we don’t need to give Iran control of the strait. Forcing Iran to open it is an achievable military objective for which the Pentagon has planned for decades. If we have to do it, we should — and legitimately insist on support from European and Pacific partners who are much more dependent on Persian Gulf energy than we are.
Stack: Recent reports suggest that Iran has put out maps of the strait that imply the passage has been mined, asking foreign shippers to discuss their routes with Iran to ensure safe passage. That’s an aggressive opening move going into this weekend’s negotiations.
Stromberg: Assuming you three are right and the shooting might well start again, what, if anything, could the United States do to gain more leverage?
Stephens: The Iranians are attempting to build a new underground nuclear site, even more impregnable than the old one at Fordow, in a place called Pickaxe Mountain. We should destroy it as insurance against Iran’s next illicit nuclear endeavor. We should take control of the Iranian islands at the mouth of the strait, even if that means deploying boots on the ground. We should destroy elements of the Iranian economy on which the regime depends, including oil installations. We could even help the Israelis in Lebanon, as a reminder that the threat Hezbollah poses isn’t to Israel alone.
But we should absolutely not target infrastructure, such as power plants, on which Iranian civilians depend. The last thing we should do is give this regime the unwarranted gift of the sympathy of its people.
Stack: The shooting has not really stopped — look at Lebanon! I also think it’s a mistake to believe the only U.S. problem going into these negotiations is a lack of leverage. There is also a severe lack of credibility. Why should Iran trust anything this administration says? Twice over the past year, Iran has gone into negotiations with the United States and declared an openness to make real concessions — only to get hit with surprise bombing attacks. Trump has nobody but himself to blame for so severely destroying his own trustworthiness. Now he has to negotiate in semi-desperation with an adversary who has no reason to believe him. I don’t think there’s any way to overcome these problems, and the U.S. position is only likely to worsen with time.
Kristof: Every time Trump tries to gain leverage, he loses it — and also looks more desperate. The approaches Trump has tried to gain leverage, such as killing leaders, threatening what could amount to genocide and contemplating seizure of offshore facilities, have backfired and weakened our position.
The one military step I might think about, but would probably reject, would be a joint effort with the United Arab Emirates to seize three disputed islands in the strait — Abu Musa and the Greater and Lesser Tunb — and then immediately hand them over to the Emirates to occupy and control. That would be a major blow to Iran, but the Emiratis would do the work. The problem is that Iran would almost certainly respond with a new salvo of missiles hitting infrastructure around the region. So maybe better than actually seizing the three islands would be to drop hints that we might do so if the talks collapse. It’s a better threat than it is an action.
We should also internationalize the negotiations. China and Pakistan have been the adults in the room so far, and we should bring them in — especially because China has good relations with Iran, wants the strait open and doesn’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons.
Stromberg: Of course, the Trump administration argues that, some six weeks in, the United States has already accomplished enough that the war has been worth the cost. If the war were to end now, how would the costs and benefits look?
Stephens: In the spirit of the Passover season, I take a “dayenu” — “it would have been enough” — approach to the war. Iran was pursuing a North Korea-like strategy of building up a vast missile arsenal that was intended to make the cost of attacking its nuclear sites unthinkable. (In the Korean case, the deterrence wasn’t so much conventional missiles but artillery pointed at Seoul.) Israel and the United States acted just in time to vastly degrade that threat, which, at a minimum, bought the world several years of relative security against a nuclear Iran. That’s a dayenu! moment.
The destruction of so much of Iran’s military capability, coupled, hopefully, with continued economic sanctions on the regime, also means that Tehran will be much weaker in the face of the next, all-but-inevitable popular uprising. And the diminishing or elimination of so many of Iran’s regional proxies, including the Assad regime in Syria, creates opportunities for positive change in the region that could not have happened when groups like Hamas and Hezbollah were at full strength.
But all this depends on how the war ends. If it ends now, which is to say prematurely, these gains may prove the opposite of dayenu — that is, not enough. The 1991 Gulf war, which ended with Saddam Hussein still in power, showed what happens when you don’t quite finish the job and set the region up for its next crisis.
Kristof: This Trump/Netanyahu conflict will be studied as an example of how not to pursue war. The gains are very modest: We significantly degraded Iran’s Navy, Army and missile capacity. The costs are immense: We have left Iran for now in control of one of the world’s most important waterways; we have killed schoolchildren and volleyball players; we have expended quantities of missiles and armaments that weaken deterrence in East Asia and may put Taiwan at risk; we have strengthened the most intransigent and extremist elements within Iran and elevated the power of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps; we have increased the likelihood that Iran deploys nuclear weapons over the next five years; we have damaged the future of our Gulf partners; and we have raised the price of oil, fertilizer, etc. for some time to come.
More African children will die of malnutrition because of soaring fertilizer costs and reduced crop yields. I think particularly of the Iranian people, who so courageously protested for democracy in January and were brutally massacred — for we have left them worse off as well. The regime is so unpopular that in recent years it had been forced to back off on some issues, and there was a prospect that after Ali Khamenei died, Iran’s new supreme leader would be someone like Hassan Khomeini, who would have continued that path. Instead, we have given the hard-liners a new lease on life, and the repression is greater than ever.
And as long as we’re thinking about the cost of this war, there’s also the financial cost: roughly $1.3 million a minute just in short-term bills. Linda Bilmes, a Harvard expert on financing war, estimates that the total will reach $1 trillion. For less than three weeks of the cost of this war we could have provided universal pre-K in America for 3- and 4-year-olds, or made college accessible to every family earning $125,000 a year or less, or reversed the recent Affordable Care Act subsidy cuts for a year. We could have used these sums to make America stronger. Instead, we used these sums to, in effect, make Iran stronger.
Stack: If we flicked a switch and ended the war now, the United States would get: A weakened and damaged Iran (I’m not convinced this benefits the U.S. directly, but others would disagree). But: No regime change. No seizure of uranium stockpiles. U.S. military bases in the Gulf nearly uninhabitable. New tensions with Gulf allies. A very disapproving U.S. public. A global perception that we got talked into a war by Netanyahu and fell flat on our faces. Nick also raises an excellent point, which is that Iran is now more likely to seek a nuclear weapon, and other states are also likely to understand that the only way to protect yourself is to get a nuclear bomb. This is bad for everyone.
Iran would get: Thousands of dead, including many top officials. Severe physical damage that will take considerable time and money to repair. New animosity with Gulf Arab states. But: Delivery from the politically destabilizing pressures of sanctions. Control over the economically pivotal Strait of Hormuz. New tensions between the United States and Israel, and growing disapproval of Israel among U.S. voters. A global perception that Iran held its own against the world’s superpower.
Meanwhile, we’ve been watching Trump flail around trying to get back to … what he had before he started bombing Iran: an open Strait of Hormuz, and Iran at the negotiating table.
Stephens: Some of the criticism of Trump’s conduct of the war reminds me of the joke about the monk who complains about the cuisine at his monastery: “The food is lousy and the portions are too small.” Is the objection that we should never have gone to war in the first place? Or that we haven’t gone far enough in achieving our aims? It seems to me that once we decided (a) that a nuclear Iran is unacceptable; (b) Iran wasn’t negotiating in good faith; and (c) Iran had not been chastened by last June’s strikes on its nuclear sites and was moving swiftly to rebuild its military capacities, then it seems like another war was inevitable and necessary, and that the main thing now is to finish the job we started.
Stack: My objection is that the United States should never have gone to war in the first place. Trump should have stuck with negotiations that looked promising.
Kristof: The regime most weakened by this war may be Trump’s. I think the economic consequences of the war increase the likelihood that Democrats win the Senate as well as the House in the fall and also perhaps increase the chance of a Democratic president succeeding Trump. I think of King Croesus of Lydia consulting the Oracle at Delphi about whether he should attack the Persian Empire. The Oracle said that if he did, a great empire would be destroyed. So Croesus, pleased, went ahead. And the Oracle was right: Croesus attacked Persia and destroyed a great empire — his own.
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