Foreign Affairs
An Iran War Would Consume Trump’s Presidency
An imperfect deal is probably a better outcome than another open-ended military commitment.
The Trump administration is now starting its third set of meetings with Iranian diplomats over a possible nuclear deal. It tapped State Department official Michael Anton to lead the technical team of negotiators. Anton is considered brilliant and tough, and was the administration’s point man in explaining why killing Iranian general Quasem Soleimani was the right thing to do during the first Trump term. But he is not part of the longstanding Beltway hawk consensus, and as an early Trump supporter thoroughly gets why stopping the “forever wars”, or not starting new ones, should be a vital American interest.
It must be difficult for foreign observers, even professionals, to gauge the future policies of President Donald Trump. No one knows whether he will take the counsel of senators close to him like Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton, the ever-present Beltway clique of hawkish think tankers, and, of course Bibi Netanyahu to take advantage of Iran’s “far weaker” military condition and “finish the job” against Iran’s nuclear program. That’s possible. He has recently broached, with seeming relish, the idea of bombing Iran “like they’ve never seen before.” What one can predict with far more certainty is that if Trump does choose war over an imperfect but seemingly achievable nuclear deal with Iran, the war will take over his presidency and overshadow whatever else he might do or hope to do.
There is an informed consensus that the only deal possible with Iran is one that monitors Iran’s nuclear enrichment, limits it, and assures that Iran will not have a nuclear weapon for the duration of a deal. That in broad outline resembles what Obama and John Kerry (and Russia, China, France, Britain, and Germany) negotiated with Iran in Obama’s second term. It was a lengthy and exhausting negotiation, chronicled in Trita Parsi’s detailed study Losing an Enemy. The deal meant that Iran could not develop a bomb while the deal was operative. Since Tehran has always insisted, honestly or otherwise, that it has no desire to build a bomb, the deal found the common ground between an Iranian regime, which desired the end of Western sanctions, and the rest of the world, which wanted assurance that no Iranian bomb would soon arrive. Obama and Kerry were barely able to neutralize opposition to the pact from AIPAC and Israel’s Netanyahu government. Iranian negotiators had their own constraints, representing a regime inclined to view the United States as inherently untrustworthy and always seeking to deceive and destroy Iran.
The JCPOA deal was, from an American perspective, far from ideal. Iran retained some centrifuges, some enriched uranium, and its knowledge of how to carry out uranium enrichment; in a worst-case scenario it could abrogate the deal, block international inspectors, and race to the bomb with an estimated breakout time of about a year. The deal only lasted 15 years, after which it could be scrapped, extended, or renegotiated. But there was no indication, as there is none now, that Iran could be threatened or persuaded to negotiate away its knowledge and ability to process uranium. Those who insisted then, as now, that Washington can get a “much better” deal leaving Iran with zero nuclear capacity are not realistically arguing for a better deal; they are arguing for an Israeli-American military strike to destroy Iran’s centrifuges and reactors and if possible its nuclear scientists and engineers.
No one can predict with certainty the outcome of such a war. As was remarked by the last century’s most evil dictator, the beginning of a war is like opening the door to a dark room. Thirteen years ago, when Geoffrey Kemp and John Allen Gay completed War With Iran with its granular military analysis, they couldn’t really know the outcome. But their knowledge of American and Israeli weapons systems and Iranian capabilities led to highly plausible conclusions. Israeli forces would have great difficulty taking out Iran’s nuclear capacity on their own, but could certainly damage it severely. America, with greater air power, could do better.
But then what? Iran had a large spectrum of ways to retaliate, and could do so at its leisure and in increments. A massive Hezbollah attack on Israel from Lebanon is less plausible than in 2013, because Hezbollah’s capacities have been considerably degraded by Israel’s exploding pagers. Israel could well be less vulnerable, in a military sense, than it was 13 years ago. On the other hand, Iran now has a far more robust arsenal of missiles and drones (the latter a word that hardly appears in the 2013 book) than it did then. It borders the Strait of Hormuz, through which Middle East oil exports pass, and could intermittently shut the strait down or make passage expensive and risky. Saudi Arabian and other gulf oil installations are within easy Iranian missile range. So are American bases in Iraq. One doesn’t know what would happen, but a solid bet is a sharp increase in oil prices, doing enormous damage to the world economy. If this were the consequence of a war that Trump and Israel initiated, who would be blamed? It’s not as if Trump has a huge, pent-up reservoir of international goodwill to spend down.
Assuming that the United States does not have the resources or desire to launch a land invasion of Iran to actually overthrow the regime, when would such a war end? The phrase Israel has used for nearly 20 years—“mowing the lawn”—to depict its periodic anti-terrorism attacks on Gaza since 2005 comes to mind, with the United States committed to a program of “retaliatory” air strikes against Iran for an indefinite future. But the lawn in this case would be a large landmass nearly four times the size of Iraq, containing 90 million people. And during this period it is more than likely that Iran would, in the most covert way it could, actually begin the race towards a bomb it has yet to commence. As John Allen Gay pointed out to me last week, American airstrikes might well “incentivize” the very nuclear bomb pursuit it was intended to stifle.
The critical question of course is not what analysts think most likely to happen, but what Trump will decide. He is being pushed to go for a no-deal outcome with Iran and eventual military action by Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, by senators he listens to, by hawks in his own administration. National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, with the neoconservative Jeffrey Goldberg on speed dial, is an Iran hawk. Several key members of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s staff who are not have recently been fired under very unclear circumstances. The pro-Israel widow Miriam Adelson, who was Trump’s largest donor before Elon Musk came around, surely favors whatever Netanyahu favors and has long had Trump’s ear. Trump jokes about that.
Trump himself is a friend and admirer of Israel, and with his Jewish grandchildren and New York real estate background, is quite plainly the most culturally Jewish president the United States has ever had. During his first term he shocked many by the extent to which he would break with American diplomatic practice to do Israel’s bidding—recognizing, as no other country has, Israel’s conquest of the Golan Heights and moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. It is obvious he cares not the slightest about the Palestinians, having ignored their national aspirations in his first term and more recently floating the idea that Gaza’s third-generation refugee population be removed to make way for a Trump Riviera in the Gaza strip.
But Trump’s closeness to American Jews does give him a perspective which many of Israel’s most ardent American backers lack, the knowledge that there is a wide spectrum of Jewish and Israeli opinion. It is a fair bet that Trump knows well and respects—as Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton probably do not—dozens of American Jews who consider Netanyahu bad news and some of his more messianic ministers, like Itamar Ben-Gvir, genuinely unhinged. He may not know that key retired Israeli intelligence officials urged him to retain Obama negotiated JCPOA as the best deal under the circumstances, but he certainly understands that Israel’s official position does not have to be that of the United States.
Years ago, Trump’s newly appointed under-secretary of defense, Elbridge Colby, committed what might be called a Kinsley gaffe. Writing that however undesirable a nuclear-armed Iran would be, containment and deterrence would work effectively against it; that a nuclear Iran would not be some sort of existential disaster, for Israel or the United States. In the run-up to his confirmation, Colby backed away from this position, reverting to what is the only politically tenable position in Washington. That position is that Israel, which has a developed nuclear triad of deliverable nuclear weapons by plane, missile and submarine, should have a regional nuclear monopoly. That may be comfortable for Israel but is not necessarily an outcome the United States has the power to enforce in perpetuity.
How else does the Mideast and global situation differ from that when Trump arrived in the White House the first time? Israel is not directly threatened, as it was then by Hezbollah forces in Lebanon. Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states are exploring a kind of détente with Iran; in 2016 they were openly rooting for a U.S./Israeli attack on Tehran; by every indication, Saudi Arabia now considers that its own push for economic diversification from oil would be impeded by the eruption of a major war in its neighborhood.
Importantly, Israel is much less popular in the United States and globally than it was before the still-ongoing war in Gaza. You need not be one of the many who label Israel’s Gaza campaign “genocidal” or call for the eradication of Israel “from the river to the sea” to wish that Israel had succeeded more in destroying Hamas and less in rendering Gaza uninhabitable for Palestinian civilians. (It is hard to imagine that the United States would not have responded with comparable brutality, and fought, as it has in the past, by Second World War rules, after going through what Israel did on October 7.) Pollsters rarely drill down beyond the binary of favorable versus unfavorable, but opinions about Israel are far more negative among Democrats and all young people than ten years ago. Many opinions are mixed: There are certainly many who admire Israel’s achievements in science and technology, respect its intellectual vitality, are impressed and even envious of the readiness to sacrifice and absence of woke self-hatred among its citizenry. And yet they don’t want to see the United States putting its own armed forces and reputation on the line to satisfy the whims of Israel’s current leadership.
Trump may well be this sort of Israel admirer. The accusations of antisemitism leveled against the American campus left and a handful of rightwing influencers could well be overstated. But it is a virtual certainty that a joint Israeli-American war would raise the temperature in ways pleasing only to extremist accelerationists of all stripes.
An Israeli-American assault on Iran, an action with no clear endpoint and with the potential to spark a global recession and who knows what else, would eat up the Trump presidency as nothing else. One suspects that Trump knows this. His public comments when indicating a readiness to talk to Iran hardly matched Obama’s flowery outreach to the mullahs (“let us remember the words that were written by the poet Saadi”), but Trump’s “they’re great people, I know so many Iranians from this country” probably reflected a true sentiment. The pressures brought to bear against diplomacy by Israel’s hawkish friends in the coming months will be immense. But, if forced to bet, I would wager on Trump taking a deal that leaves Iran with no nuclear weapons and more than zero nuclear capability over a war which would define his presidency.
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