Why we will wake up one morning, 10 or 20 years from now, to discover Iran has a bomb
As the B-2 bombers struck Iran’s nuclear sites on Saturday night, we all learnt more about President Trump. He is not averse to using American military power against another state, at least a much weaker one. He is fully capable of keeping a secret when it really matters. When he reaches a major decision, the views of allies and his own intelligence agencies – whose top official had said there was no evidence of Iran actually building a nuclear device – count for little. He is unpredictable until the last minute, a trait of which he makes a virtue.
Trump’s instinct to keep all options open, however, means he can end up making a difficult choice between options dictated by others. In this case, his own instincts were consistently for making a success of negotiations but he was pulled by Benjamin Netanyahu into an act of war. If he had wanted more time for diplomacy, he could easily have made clear he would not support Israeli plans for an all-out attack until negotiations were exhausted. Once he had declined to do that, Netanyahu set the agenda: Trump’s decision to send in the B-2s was a tactical decision, dictated by and in support of Netanyahu’s strategy rather than his own.
While there were many advantages, therefore, in the US attack on Iran – it was an impressive display of unique military power, is a useful warning to other potential enemies that Trump will use force when provoked, took advantage of a despicable regime being vulnerable and has probably done serious damage to Iran’s nuclear capabilities – it cannot be pretended that it was part of a longer-term strategy for the Middle East or for preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. It was an unintended consequence of letting Netanyahu go ahead with striking Iran.
Past experience in the Middle East suggests that more unintended consequences will follow. The Iranian regime is severely weakened and is clearly struggling to make decisions. With many of its military and intelligence chiefs dead and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei terrified of revealing his whereabouts, the system is moving only slowly and unwittingly, failing to appreciate the imminent danger of the US attacks even when it was obvious that plans were being made, and unable to adjust its stance on negotiations in time to delay them.
While all logic suggests that the Iranian response to the bombings should be limited in scope – probably to continuing to bombard Israel rather than risk a wider war with the US – a regime in the midst of such a crisis can easily make terrible mistakes. In the coming days and weeks, there will be a significant risk of a wider escalation of the war by militias in Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen, or Iranian action of some kind in the Strait of Hormuz.
More likely is that the Iranian leadership will hunker down and focus on self-preservation, while refusing to make any new nuclear deal. It is an attractive thought that this hateful regime could collapse and that the voices of millions of women, young people and others who believe in freedom and democracy could finally be heard. This cannot be predicted – remember how quickly regimes fell in Tunisia and Egypt, but for how long they endured in the case of Assad or Saddam Hussein – and it is counterproductive to call for it from the outside. When Trump speculates about regime change to “Make Iran Great Again” he is opening every opposition sympathiser in Iran to the charge of being his puppet.
The most important unintended consequence, however, is that, in the long term, the efforts to prevent Iran possessing nuclear weapons are more likely to have been weakened than strengthened. This is the key judgment. It is why we did the deal with Iran a decade ago and why it should have been renegotiated now. It is why Trump was pursuing a diplomatic strategy until diverted from it. We do not know what has happened to the 400kg of uranium that Iran has enriched. But we should not be surprised if future Iranian leaders will have drawn the lesson from recent events that the case for a nuclear bomb has now been demonstrated beyond all doubt.
This is the central problem with the attack on Iran. We can be reassured by the military dominance of our allies that results from Israeli ingenuity and American might; we can exult that a blinkered and despotic Iranian leadership has suffered a great blow and that its mountain fastnesses have been shaken; we can hope that the lesson learnt will be never again to approach the threshold of nuclear capability. But we do not know how much of Iran’s nuclear material and knowledge has survived and how quickly it can be put to use. We cannot anticipate the effect in future years of the spread of nuclear science or the effect of rising geopolitical tensions that could make it easier for Iran to obtain, purchase or assemble nuclear or perhaps biological weapons.
Everything we have seen in the Middle East for several decades tells us that the unintended consequences of our actions will be the most important. That is why, much as I would like to think that the huge blows inflicted on Iran in the past ten days will solve this problem, it is actually more likely than it was before these events that we will wake up one morning, ten or 20 years from now, to discover that Iran has a bomb.
Just as worrying is that the treaties and understandings that have kept the lid on the spread of nuclear weapons are in trouble. As on Iran, Trump is starting out with many of the right instincts. He has bemoaned the amount of money being spent on nuclear arsenals, and talked of seeking new agreements with Russia and China, which is currently building new nuclear missiles at a rapid rate.
Yet many of the actions of the Trump administration are adding to the problem: falling trust in the reliability of the US as an ally incentivises countries like South Korea to consider their own deterrent; the proposed “Golden Dome” to protect America will speed up the race by other countries to be able to overwhelm it; and progress on strengthening the crucial non-proliferation treaty is being held up by China and lacks senior leadership from the US. The New Start treaty between the US and Russia, the key restraint on the size of nuclear arsenals, will expire next year.
The crisis over Iran reminds us that nuclear proliferation is a serious threat to the peace of the world. Trump has seized a moment of opportunity with consequences that may take years to become clear. To ensure there are not many more such crises in the future, Washington will need a long-term, coherent approach from which it will not so easily be diverted.
The Times
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