A Reckless and Unnecessary War

What happens next in the US-Iran-Israel war is deeply uncertain

If you’ve listened to my latest podcast episodes on Iran, you’ll know I was fairly convinced that Trump would imminently take military action against Iran. I hoped I was wrong, but the writing seemed to be on the wall. By Friday, though, I quietly thought to myself: maybe I was wrong? Trump declaring that he’s giving himself two weeks to make the decision seemed to me to lay the groundwork for walking back the threats. Maybe he’d side with the MAGA base and not the neocons after all? (And, you know, TACO—Trump Always Chickens Out).

Well, I was right. Then I was wrong. And now the United States is embroiled in yet another war in the Middle East.

My two cents as a journalist who’s covered foreign policy for the last twenty years is this: By opting for war with Iran, Trump has invited an unpredictable future for the United States and the region. If and when Iran responds, it may very well respond directly against Americans. And it would likely do so asymmetrically. This could mean terrorist-style attacks against American interests and individuals in the region, throughout the world, and potentially on the American homeland. It’s not hard to imagine Iranian agents making use of our lax gun laws and shooting up a public place. If the regime is in its last gasps, it may lash out.

On the other hand, none of this may happen. Iran’s ability to project military power has been so severely degraded over the last year (and especially the last week) that it may lack the capacity to do much at all. Iran’s top military leadership has been wiped out in recent Israeli strikes, potentially undermining the command structure required for orchestrating asymmetric attacks. Meanwhile, it’s notable that Hezbollah is sitting on the sidelines—likely because Israel (in what appears now to be a test run) took out their top leadership last year. Iran’s Axis of Resistance—the regional proxies that it could tap to fight on Iran’s behalf—has been so degraded that they no longer pose much of a threat.

The point is: we just don’t know what will happen. We are in a new and unpredictable phase. That point of view is reflected well in David Remnick’s interview with Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who is one of the more reliably informed think tank experts on Iran.

“This is unprecedented, dropping a thirty-thousand-pound bomb,” he continued. “Anyone who has observed the last two decades of history in the Middle East would think hard about unleashing such an attack. You would want to think several steps ahead, and there is no evidence that the President has done that. His tweet and his public comments have given the impression that this is the end of war and the commencement of peace, but I suspect the Iranians think differently. They have a program on which they have spent hundreds of billions of dollars. The regime—perhaps not the people, but the regime—takes pride in that and now it is destroyed. No dictatorship wants to look emasculated and humiliated in the eyes of its own people.”

The question now is how Iran will respond. “If the Ayatollah [Ali Khamenei] responds weakly, he loses face,” Sadjadpour said. “If he responds too strongly, he could lose his head.”

“A lot of the options that they have for retaliation are the strategic equivalent of a suicide bombing,” he went on. “They can do enormous damage to our embassies. They might mine the Strait of Hormuz. They can continue missile barrages against Israel. They can attempt to do real damage to the world economy, though the regime might not survive the blowback.”

It’s worth emphasizing that we are now entering this highly volatile period in world history, with massive potential downsides, for no good reason. Benjamin Netanyahu upended direct talks between the United States and Iran by launching this war. He claimed Iran had made the decision to weaponize its nuclear program, an assessment that was not backed up by the American intelligence community. Meanwhile, Donald Trump arguably set this outcome in motion seven years ago, when he pulled out of the Iran Nuclear Deal, which was working as intended to prevent the weaponization of Iran’s nuclear program.

The point is—this is all so unnecessary, potentially very reckless, and profoundly dangerous. A diplomatic off-ramp existed. It was working. But Netanyahu chose escalation, and Trump—who lit the fuse by abandoning the Iran nuclear deal seven years ago—has now set the region and possibly the world on fire. What happens next is anyone’s guess, but one thing is certain: this was a war of choice, and the consequences could be catastrophic.