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The best argument against attacking Iran’s nuclear program has always been that the attack would not work—that it would at best set the program back rather than end it, and that Tehran would respond by building back better, in a deeper bunker and with greater stealth. An enrichment facility capable of producing a nuclear weapon need not be large; it would perhaps have the size and power needs of a Costco or two. The Barack Obama–era nuclear deal secured unprecedented access for monitoring Iran’s known nuclear sites. The demolition of those sites means that any future ones will be unmonitored, remaining a secret from outsiders for years, as China’s was. Think of the cavernous chemistry lab built below the laundry-processing plant on Breaking Bad, but churning out uranium-235, not blue meth.

If any other country is thinking about going nuclear, it will learn the lesson of last night and start with the Breaking Bad approach, or better yet scrap its plans completely. From the perspective of nonproliferation, Trump’s strikes could be good news, in the obvious sense that countries that desire nuclear weapons now have more reason to think their centrifuges will be destroyed before they produce enough material for a bomb. Up until now, most countries that have persevered have eventually succeeded in going nuclear. The most notable counterexamples are Iraq, whose so-called “nuclear mujahideen” (as Saddam Hussein later called them) had their Osirak reactor bombed by Israel in 1981, and Syria, which built a secret plutonium-producing nuclear reactor only to have it destroyed, again by Israel, in 2007. If the strikes last night worked (and it is far too early for anyone, including Trump, to say), Iran will join the small club of nations whose nuclear ambitions have been thwarted by force.

“There will be either peace,” Trump said at his press conference last night, “or there will be tragedy for Iran.” What might peace and its alternatives look like? Trump did not say, as the Iran dove George W. Bush might have, that peace is conditional on the overthrow of Iran’s theocracy. Trump has always seemed open to Iran’s continued rule by any authoritarian or scumbag or religious nut who is willing to keep to himself and maybe allow the Trump family to open a hotel someday. So peace could conceivably still take many forms, some of which would disappoint Iranian democrats and secularists.

The alternative to peace, which Trump promises will draw such a tragic reply, could take immediate or longer-term forms. The immediate form would be continued Iranian strikes against Israel and the expansion of those attacks to include U.S. bases in the region. (The logic of international law, for what little it is worth, would seem to permit retaliation against Israeli and U.S. military targets—but not hospitals, apartment buildings, or other civilian infrastructure.) It would at this point be foolhardy for Iran to increase such attacks, rather than ending them or tapering them off.

But no one familiar with Iran’s history would expect it to limit its reply to conventional strikes, or to prefer them to the irregular forms of attack that it has practiced avidly for more than 40 years. A barrage of ballistic missiles, the regime understands, may invite tragedy for Iran. But what about the mysterious disappearance of an American from the streets of Dubai, Bahrain, or Prague? Or the blowing-up of a hostel full of Israelis in Bangkok? Or the brakes-cutting of some American or Israeli diplomat’s car in Baku? Small acts of harassment such as these force Iran’s enemies to make hard choices about how to retaliate. The difficulty of those choices is part of the reason for past presidents’ consistent reluctance to attack Iran. Do you attack Iran after the death of one U.S. Marine? How about two? How much proof of Iranian involvement in a diplomat’s car crash will it take to trigger a renewed state of war? Iran’s history suggests that under normal circumstances, it knows the level of provocation that will keep an American president from responding with direct force. Its estimations seem to have failed it with Trump (and Benjamin Netanyahu), but in the past and in the future, one can expect that it will, like a niggling spouse from hell, know the precise limits of its adversaries’ patience. The point of the prolonged pressure, staying a smidge under the threshold of renewed hostility, is to drive Iran’s adversaries mad, to tire them out, and to convince them to leave the region out of sheer stress and weariness. Ironically, Trump’s foreign policy is—or was, until yesterday—proof that this strategy is effective. Trump came to power as an isolationist in trade and a “bring ’em home” skeptic of U.S. military action abroad. In his first term, he fired John Bolton, a tireless advocate of regime change. In his second, he appointed Tulsi Gabbard, the high priestess of weary isolationism, as a top adviser.


Link: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/06/only-iran-hawk-trump/683278/?gift=nSqsbq99G5aLifkdkvvyM9gvBHsUgYx-ImBvF5Tfiyg