It might be happening again.
A president is being driven – by events, fear of proliferating weapons of mass destruction and the need to back up his own words – toward a shock-and-awe entry into a Middle East conflict with no guaranteed way out.
Expectations are growing in Washington that Donald Trump will soon heed Israeli calls to try to strike a decisive blow against Iran’s nuclear program, using bunker-busting weapons that only the US can deliver.
The president’s rhetoric took a sharp turn following the apparent success of Israel’s early barrage that wiped out top military leaders and nuclear scientists and severely degraded Iran’s capacity to defend itself.
And CNN reported Tuesday that Trump was warming to the idea of using US military assets to strike Iranian nuclear sites and was souring on his previous unsuccessful attempt to settle the issue through talks with Iran.
As always with Trump, we must ask whether his tough talk is for real. Perhaps he is trying to bully Iran back to diplomacy and the “unconditional surrender” he demanded on social media.
This looks like a pipe dream.
“As long as President Trump is trying to capitalize on Israeli aggression against Iran, to get the Iranian leadership to surrender, it is just simply not going to work,” Ali Vaez, director of the Iran Project at the International Crisis Group, told Becky Anderson on CNN International’s “Connect the World” Tuesday. “What they see at the end of this slippery slope is basically full capitulation and regime collapse.”
And since Israel’s preemptive attack on Iran seems partly motivated by the desire to derail US diplomacy, who’s to say a president who has recently been ignored by Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping could stop Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu?
But Trump may be on the brink of a huge gamble that would repudiate his own political principles.
His own scathing contempt for US presidents who pushed regime change played a huge role in the former reality star’s dive into politics in 2015. If he goes to war in Iran, Trump will be ignoring a loud sector of his MAGA movement. The “America First” president would become the kind of interventionist he despised.
Still, there is a loophole in Trump’s isolationism. He’s always insisted that Iran, given its threats to eradicate Israel and sworn enmity with the US, would never be allowed to get a nuclear weapon.
A trail of failed US interventions
Trump is deliberating whether to use 30,000-pound “Massive Ordnance Penetrator” guided bombs to destroy Iran’s nuclear plant at Fordow, which is entombed below several hundred feet of concrete in a mountain.
But something important is missing: any public talk by top officials about what might happen next.
This is an extraordinary omission given Washington’s 21st-century misadventures, when it started wars and spent the best part of 20 years trying to get out.
“Anyone who is cheerleading the United States into a war with Iran has very quickly forgotten the disasters of the Iraq war and the Afghanistan war,” Sen. Chris Murphy told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Tuesday. The Connecticut Democrat recalled those conflicts “became a quagmire that ultimately got thousands of Americans killed and created new insurgencies against US interests and against our allies in the region.”
The United States rolled into Iraq in 2003 and quickly toppled the tyrant Saddam Hussein. But it collapsed the Iraqi state and unleashed a vicious insurgency that ultimately ended in a US defeat. Fragile stability has only now returned to Iraq more than two decades later.
In Afghanistan, President George W. Bush’s post 9/11 invasion drove out Taliban leaders harboring Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda. But two decades of failed nation-building led to a humiliating US withdrawal in 2021 that shattered then-President Joe Biden’s claims to be a foreign affairs guru.
President Barack Obama had his own debacle. He was persuaded by European allies and some of his own aides to overthrow Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi to protect civilians in 2011. “We came, we saw, he died,” then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in an interview. US hubris over Libya faded long ago. But it remains dangerous and impoverished.
Trump knows all this.
The moment it became clear that he’d change the hawkish Republican Party forever occurred when he slammed primary rival Jeb Bush in a 2016 debate over his brother’s wars. “The war in Iraq was a big fat mistake” Trump said.
And he hasn’t forgotten. He reminded the world of it just last month in a major speech in Saudi Arabia.
“The so-called nation-builders wrecked far more nations than they built, and the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves,” Trump said. “They told you how to do it, but they had no idea how to do it themselves.”
Is Trump now going to become one of his own examples?
How Iran might respond
Iran is not Libya, Iraq or Afghanistan. History doesn’t have to repeat itself. Maybe the hawks are right this time that a devastating, contained US military strike can destroy Iran’s nuclear program and remove an existential threat to Israel and national security risk for the United States.
But Iran’s clerical regime would almost certainly have to respond, if only to protect its own authority. Depending on its remaining military capacity after the Israeli onslaught, it might attack US personnel and bases in the region. Trump would have to respond in a cycle of escalation with no clear endgame.
It’s easy to draw up nightmare scenarios. Iran might shut down the Strait of Hormuz to choke the flow of oil to trigger a global energy crisis. Or it might target oil fields of its regional rivals, such as Saudi Arabia. Only one nation could lead a response: the United States, as it got sucked deeper into a regional war. Then there’s the possibility of mass Iranian cyber-attacks that could bring war to the homeland.
Few Americans would mourn Iran’s regime if Israel’s push for regime change or encouragement for Iranians to revolt against Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei pays off.
But political forces likely to be unleashed by the fall of the Islamic revolution, or the regime’s crown jewel – its nuclear program – could cause immense upheaval.
Anarchy or worse could be the result if a nation of 90 million people – which includes ethnic and sectarian fault lines among Persians, Azeris, Kurds, Baloch, Turkmen, Turk and Arab tribes – is suddenly leaderless.
A failed-state meltdown could send millions of refugees into the Middle East and Europe when immigration is already straining societal cohesion and fomenting extremism. A sudden security vacuum could lead to civil wars, or a brutalist takeover from the military or elements of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya know how quickly terror havens can spring up. Unrest could spread throughout the region and threaten already unstable nations like Pakistan.
It’s also worth asking how the US and Israeli governments would secure stocks of nuclear material left exposed by raids on Iran’s atomic plants to prevent them falling into the hands of terrorists or rogue states.
As dire as these possibilities sound, they may be immaterial to Israel’s thinking. After all, Netanyahu says the prospect of an Iranian nuclear bomb could lead to the eradication of his country and the Jewish people.
But history, current and distant, challenges the idea a joint US and Israel effort would be short and conclusive. Israel still hasn’t eradicated Hamas despite many months of bombardments in Gaza that have inflicted a terrible toll on tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians. Iran is likely to be a bigger challenge. And US efforts to shape Iran – including a CIA-backed coup in 1953, support for the repressive Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi that led to the Islamic revolution, and Washington’s backing for Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s – almost always made the situation worse.
The factors that may push Trump toward an attack
So why has Trump apparently shed his earlier reticence over foreign wars?
If he gives the go-ahead for a US attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, he could end up in a spot that any president might have reached. All his recent predecessors warned that Iran could never be allowed to get the bomb – although Trump may be blamed for failing with diplomacy to stop it happening on his watch.
But if Israel’s warnings that Tehran was racing toward a nuclear weapon were accurate, no US president could stand by and risk a second Holocaust – especially one who in his first term trashed a nuclear deal that Iran was respecting.
It probably not coincidental that Trump’s thinking evolved given the apparent success of early Israeli operations. He revealed on Tuesday that “we” now have “complete and total control of the skies over Iran.” A potential low-risk environment for US bombers might tempt a president who worships Gen. George Patton. He might sense a quick foreign policy win to make up for his failures to be the peacemaker he promised. And he’d love to crow that he – and not Bush, Obama or Biden – eradicated the threat from Iran.
Still, he’s a problematic war leader, having done nothing to prepare the country for a possible new escapade in a region stained by American blood and lost treasure. And Trump’s strategy of governing as a divisive strongman may deprive him of the bipartisan public trust all warrior presidents need to succeed.
Suddenly, a man who took great pride in never starting new wars has landed in a familiar place.
He’s a president debating whether to send Americans into a new Middle East conflict based on possibly questionable intelligence about weapons of mass destruction.
The fallen from the Iraq and Afghan wars lie in Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery. The very least they are owed is an explanation of what happens next, if the first US bombs start dropping in Iran.
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