Trump actions on Iran could trigger a Middle East nuclear arms race

National security advisor designate John Bolton outside the White House. Picture: AFP

Operation “Out of the Box” was Israel’s worst-kept secret operation. Even so, Israeli military intelligence chose last week to admit to the country’s 2007 raid on a nuclear reactor in Syria. The Israelis stayed silent at the time because they rightly calculated that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad would strike back if they bragged about the devastating effect of the mission. They had even used electronic warfare to bamboozle Syrian air defences by creating a “false sky”, the illusion that there were no intruders closing in on the nuclear facility.

Why is Israel coming clean now? One credible explanation: it is signalling to Iran that the military option could soon be back on the table unless Tehran makes concessions to US President Donald Trump. Iran’s nuclear deal with the US, Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia is not quite a dead duck but it is moulting and breathing with difficulty. On May 12, the US President must decide whether to decertify the deal — that is, unilaterally withdraw from it and reimpose hefty sanctions on the Tehran regime. He has enlisted the three European signatories to find ways to strengthen the deal by then, or he will pull the plug.

Diplomats everywhere are breaking a sweat. Israel has to find a way of deterring Iran should an unfettered Revolutionary Guard acquire a nuclear bomb. Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, has stated categorically that if Tehran obtains a nuclear weapon, his country would have to do the same. The E3 states are struggling to find a side deal that could address the sticky problem of inspectors’ access to Iranian military sites, or at least the framework for a new arrangement that could slot into place after the present curbs run out in the mid-2020s. Britain is wondering whether it will have to choose between siding with the Europeans and keeping the Iran deal more or less intact, or aligning with the US.

The appointment of Mike Pompeo to head the State Department and John Bolton to be US national security adviser suggest Trump is making confrontation with Iran his next big foreign policy priority. Pompeo has repeatedly called the Iran agreement a disaster. Bolton, as one veteran US negotiator put it recently, “has never met a war he didn’t like”. They are hard-headed politicos and there’s clearly trouble brewing for the clerical regime in Tehran. The open question, however, is whether Trump is exaggerating the threat to increase his leverage, or is he really on the warpath? This remains the riddle at the heart of all his foreign policy, whether it’s the prospect of a trade war with China or trying to intimidate Kim Jong-un with talk of “fire and fury”.

Trump may be just a transactional leader who prefers to panic people into a quick retreat. Sooner rather than later, however, he will trap himself into using force against an adversary. Nothing that he can get diplomatically out of Iran will ever qualify as a win, short of a supervised dismantling of every suspicious installation. He’s never going to achieve that through painstaking negotiation. And even if he did, he would still want an end to the many other malign Iranian activities, such as its ballistic missile tests, weapons factories in Lebanon, missile deliveries to the Huthi rebels in Yemen, and regular harassment of US navy vessels in the Gulf.

The Obama administration tolerated Iran’s obvious ambition to become the leading power of the region because it was determined to achieve a legacy-making diplomatic breakthrough. As a result, Iran’s behaviour is subject to only one check: certification by the monitors of the International Atomic Energy Agency that Tehran is complying with restrictions on its nuclear program. That’s not enough, and Trump is right to demand new restraints. He has been saddled with a multilateral accord that held out the promise of liberalising the Iranian regime and thereby stabilising the Middle East. It was based on a false assumption: since it was so generous to Iran, why would they violate its terms? In fact, it made criticism of Iran off-limits.

Foreign policy gurus wedded to the sanctity of the deal fret that the arrival of Bolton in the White House will resolve the Trumpian leverage-versus-war riddle in the wrong way. That is to say: if Iran does not open up more about its military programs, if it continues a pattern of regional subversion, the US will not block the road to a limited strike. Israel’s Operation “Out of the Box” a decade ago was made in close co-operation with the US.

But apart from the manifest risks of mimicking such a raid (Iran is much further from Israel than Syria is), what message would that send to North Korea, which may be flirting with the idea of denuclearisation? The Trump White House might say: a limited strike against Iran will focus the mind of Kim — a military action in one region that expands leverage in another. Bolton, after all, has written in favour of striking against both countries in the past.

I’m a fan of linked-up strategy but this would be a dangerous compression of two separate crises, an invitation to meltdown.

There is always a space in dealing with dictatorships between appeasement and war. That space shrinks when a tyrant becomes capable of mounting an existential threat. For Trump, working with China to defuse Kim’s ticking bomb should be the priority, not risking conflict with Iran.

The Times