President Donald Trump really screwed up this time. And I’m talking raised-the-chances-of-nuclear-catastrophe levels of screwing-up.
His war with Iran has sent energy markets into turmoil, creating “the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market,” according to the International Energy Agency. It has ignited a regional conflagration featuring successful Iranian strikes on Israel, Gulf countries, U.S. military assets, and American troops. Gulf Arab capitals are growing resentful of the White House for having initiated the war, and they are questioning the value of security ties with Washington.
The Trump administration is failing to achieve its war aims, to the extent that anybody can decipher what they are. Trump initially had said he wanted to spread “freedom” to Iran, but so far, the U.S. and Israel are spreading apocalyptic scenes of mass devastation—and without managing to collapse the regime. Senior U.S. and Israeli officials are ready to deescalate, and Trump himself may want to declare victory and get out, but Tehran gets a vote as to when this war ends.
The analysts whom I trust fear an escalation doom spiral.
To be sure, supporters of the war can point to military achievements, such as the strikes last weekend that killed high-ranking officials, including the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But the Islamic Republic survived, and this Monday, Iran’s Assembly of Experts appointed Khamenei’s hardline son Mojtaba to succeed him. Killing the old Khamenei during Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, has turned him into a martyr and rallied the regime’s supporters. Worse, the new Khamenei seems to be in no mood for compromise, having just lost his parents, a son, other relatives, and possibly a limb in U.S. and Israeli strikes.
And even the successful decapitation of Iran’s leadership wasn’t the PR coup the White House hoped for. It was overshadowed by U.S. strikes the same day on an all-girls elementary school that killed upwards of 160 civilians, mostly children. Even pro-Trump Iran hawks like Laura Ingraham of Fox News are demanding answers.
And while the immediate costs of the war so far—including at least seven dead U.S. troops and as many as 150 more wounded—are obvious, and while these early phases of fighting will probably continue to be grim, matters will only worsen if the conflict drags on. The U.S. and its allies are running low on interceptors needed to blast missiles and drones out of the sky. And despite relentless U.S. and Israeli bombing, Iran has retained the ability to continue lobbing its missiles and drones across the region.
Moreover, the second-order effects and longer-term consequences of the war will destabilize the international order, perhaps irreparably. U.S. allies and adversaries alike discern that the world has entered an era of Machtpolitik, of power politics governed by an ethos of “might makes right.”
The spectacle of two nuclear-armed powers attacking a state that doesn’t have nukes already has contributed to nuclear proliferation. “The clear lesson coming out of this for countries that are not friends of the United States would be: get a nuclear weapon,” Middle East expert Rosemary Kelanic told The American Conservative.
North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-un last week observed the launching of a cruise missile from the kind of warship that Pyongyang seeks to arm with nuclear weapons. “Kim must have thought Iran was attacked like that because it didn’t have nuclear weapons,” said a former South Korean defense official. The Iranian government itself surely sees things the same way, which experts warn will motivate Tehran to build nuclear weapons after the war.
Even historic allies of the U.S. are looking to increase their nuclear defenses. Two days after the war kicked off, France’s President Emmanuel Macron announced that France would produce more nuclear warheads for the first time in decades. “To be free, we have to be feared,” Macron declared during the announcement.
Not just nuclear proliferation, but even the actual use of nuclear weapons in combat, is disturbingly possible. I’ve warned that Israel might nuke Iran out of desperation if Iranian ballistic missiles rain down on its small territory. Some American foreign policy experts, including Arta Moeini of the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy, see another pathway to nuclear escalation.
“The United States could escalate through Israel or by itself to tactical nukes, as this one last Hail Mary of trying to get Iran to capitulate,” Moeini said in the latest episode of TAC’s weekly podcast. (So-called tactical nukes are less explosive than “strategic” nuclear weapons but still roughly as destructive as the bombs the U.S. dropped on Japan during the Second World War.)
The “nuclear taboo” is one major reason, according to political scientists, that no state leader has pushed the big red button since 1945. If that taboo gets broken in the Iran war, then world affairs will get darker and much more dangerous.
Whether or not we ever see mushroom clouds in Iran, the U.S. will have trouble navigating the new world disorder with the normal tools of diplomacy—because America’s diplomatic credibility is shot. That’s what happens when a nation uses negotiations as a ploy before attacking a state that signaled openness to making a deal, as the Trump administration seems to have done three times now (twice with Iran, once with Venezuela).
After the latest spectacle of diplomatic duplicity played out between the U.S. and Iran in February, Russian elites adopted a different, much more cynical view of Trump’s efforts to resolve the Ukraine war. “Negotiations with the Americans seem almost pointless,” writes the Russian analyst Fyodor Lukyanov in a recent piece. “The end result always demands surrender or exposes itself as a diplomatic simulation that merely prepares the violent solution.” Other Russian elites have expressed the same sentiment, which I’ve heard is widespread in Moscow including at the Kremlin.
Lukyanov told TAC that Moscow may still engage with U.S. mediation to end the war in Ukraine, but that “the Iranian experience will not be left unnoticed,” especially since the same American negotiators handle both the Russia–Ukraine and Iran portfolios. “In general, one can say that the chance to reach a negotiated solution has decreased now.”
In other ways, too, the U.S.–Israeli operations undermine longstanding international norms, including one that world leaders, understandably, have cherished. “I do think one of the underappreciated long-tail impacts of the Iran war may be the choice to violate the effective norm against the assassination of heads of state,” writes foreign policy expert Emma Ashford on X. Trump seems cavalier about this danger. “I got him before he got me,” he bragged after Khamenei’s assassination, alluding to (questionable) claims that Iran’s government plotted to assassinate him.
It’s a brave new world indeed, and a barbaric one, and Trump increasingly gets the blame for that from international commentators. Trump “and his entourage create a cult of naked force,” Lukyanov told TAC. He added that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who has unleashed outlandish rhetorical belligerence in recent press conferences, “sounds like a person from the distant past.”
Conservatives often criticize global liberalism, international law, and the so-called rules-based international order. But the rapid erosion of world stability and emergence of Machtpolitik weren’t what many conservatives had wanted or expected. In an audio message to TAC, Moeini warned that America’s violent pursuit of global hegemony will lead to overreach, and he counseled against a hyper-militaristic foreign policy that jettisons time-honored diplomatic traditions.
“I do believe that ultimately power is everything and it’s very important, but power is not reducible to force.”
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