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| Source: Hotpot.ai |
Trump Has Dug Himself Into A Hole
Trump's original game plan seems to have been that the Iranian regime would give up and roll over once confronted with what a superpower can do, beginning with the obliteration of its top leadership and hundreds of military targets in one stupendous demonstration of American power.
Presumably flush with overconfidence from pulling off his coup against the Venezuelan autocracy, Trump badly miscalculated how the more cohesive Iranian regime would respond to what they perceived as a genuinely existential challenge. Trump's gambit against Venezuela succeeded because it did not in the end demand anything from the regime that threatened its grip on power. In contrast, the general 'surrender to our will' demands on the Iranian regime posed an unacceptable risk to its ability to perform its central function of protecting its members from the righteous, vengeful fury of the 85% of Iranians who despise or hate them.
This is international relations 101: regimes do not willingly give up - or sell out - their core interests. If you want those, you have to go in and take them.
The Iranian regime might have made a different choice if Trump had credibly guaranteed their future capability to maintain their rule by terror while merely demanding specific concessions on peripheral things like nuclear enrichment and Iran's regional proxy militias (Hezbollah Houthis, etc). But Trump didn't make such an offer. He seemed to have expected a definitive total victory which would allow him to dictate the terms of the regime's surrender and transformation into some kind of client state, so that he could brag about how easily he fixed the middle-east problem that no other president ever managed.
Further problems are that the US and Iran do not trust each other to keep treaty promises if they see an opportunity to advance some interest by breaking them (as we saw with the breakdown of the Islamabad Memorandum). Any peace settlement must be self-sustaining, i.e. based on in-built and robust deterrents to resuming war rather than mere words. But for the same reasons, no party will willingly give up any material advantage to achieve a settlement with hypothetical future benefits. Iran is not going to abandon its proxies and nuclear weapons development programme in case this weakens it in future military conflicts. (Ironically of course it is Iran's possession of these 'anti-deterrents' that drew the fire of Israel and America in the first place.)
Trump might also have achieved the effective surrender of the Iranian regime if he had been able to threaten anything worse for non-compliance than he already did to them on day 1 of the war. The prospect of going to war with America was supposed to fill the Iranian regime with fear and trembling because America is a superpower that has - in theory - comprehensive escalation dominance. Whatever the Iranian regime might attempt to resist Trump's will, as expressed kinetically by the US military, and however successful it might appear, Trump can always raise the stakes and inflict worse damage on things the regime cares more about.
Most obviously, Trump could order a ground invasion that would literally remove the regime from power, and thus also its ability to resist the US military by throwing missiles around the region, as well as the continuation of its regional proxies and nuclear weapons programme (and its cruel and incompetent misrule over 90 million people - not that Trump cares about that).
But of course Trump would never order a ground invasion. He loves drama (Venezuela) but is extremely casualty averse. The reason America has thrown away a vast percentage of its limited stockpile of exquisite and incredibly expensive long distance missiles on this war is Trump's reluctance to risk sending 5th generation fighter jets into range of even a 3rd rate power's outdated and beaten down air defenses. A full scale ground invasion, especially put together on the fly, would certainly lead to hundreds or even low thousands of US military deaths, and of course many more would follow from managing the inevitable insurgency (the lesson of Iraq). Iran's regime has no fear that Trump would invade.
Since Trump is so obviously reluctant to escalate, Iran's regime has been free to resist his demands by its own asymmetric 'horizontal' escalation of throwing ballistic missiles and drones at just about every country within range, with a special focus on soft civilian economic targets to maximise the political pain. America's Gulf allies are screaming their frustration at America's inability to protect them, while the whole world feels the pinch as a vast part of the world's supply of oil, gas, fertiliser, and so on is blocked off. Every day gas prices edge higher even in far off America and US public opinion turns further against the war as the midterms approach.
To recap: Trump is losing this war, and with every day the costs of that loss grow greater.
The Iranian regime is able to resist US aerial bombardment indefinitely: the US will run out of missiles before the Iranian regime runs out of political will to ensure its own survival.
The Iranian regime can't bomb America back, but it is successfully attacking America's political will indirectly via its interdiction of the Gulf fossil fuel economy and consequent price rises and shortages. This may help the Democrats to sweep both the House and the Senate in the midterms, allowing them to end the war in a manner particularly humiliating to the man who claims to be a winner.
America is significantly less powerful in the world now than it was before Trump launched this war of his choosing, as its allies look elsewhere for their security and America's military resources to deter a peer power (i.e. China) are diminished.
In this dismal situation a bright light appears. Trump still has one option to out-escalate Iran and force its surrender: America has nuclear weapons and Iran doesn't.
The Case for Nuking Iran
The most sensible approach here would be a tactical nuclear weapon strike on the deeply buried sites associated with Iran's nuclear weapons programme. These are the same sites that Trump struck last year with the world's biggest conventional bombs - with significant but apparently incomplete success.
The military advantage of using a nuclear weapon for this task is that they are so much more powerful than conventional explosives, and so much more likely to succeed in definitively annihilating those sites.
The political advantages are many more.
First, by annihilating Iran's nuclear weapons sites Trump could portray himself as having achieved a significant war goal, and moreover a goal that many previous US presidents had tried and failed to achieve. This gives him the opportunity to declare victory and take his toys home.
Second, Iran's regime has no answer to nuclear escalation and therefore - Trump may suppose - they will have no choice but to end their resistance and accept Trump's declaration of victory. Peace and maritime traffic will return to the Gulf. (As a consolation prize Iran's regime may gain the world's sympathy, a valuable resource to a pariah trying to rebuild a shattered economy.)
Third, Trump would achieve this goal in a very MAGA way, demonstrating a ruthless willingness to use America's power to achieve its goals and contempt for global public opinion and international law. As a bonus, such use of nuclear weapons would do much to undermine the very idea of international law, as well as America's standing as its foremost proponent. This would be an example of politics as a war on the future, where political movements like MAGA that realise their moment in power is fleeting use it to destroy the possibility of the return of the status quo ante by setting fire to the institutions, laws, and social norms and the credibility of the US government on which it depends. (This seems to have been what DOGE was for.)
Fourth, by demonstrating a low threshold for first use of nuclear weapons Trump might somewhat reset the deterrence the US military has lost since it threw away most of its sophisticated missiles and missile interceptors on a silly war against a 3rd rate power. Xi Jinping would surely hesitate before risking his regime on invading Taiwan once he knew how easily such a war might go nuclear.
Of Course It Wouldn't Work
Unfortunately much of this is wishful thinking. One hopes that enough people with a connection and commitment to reality remain in positions of influence at the top of the US government and military to bring out its flaws in ways that even Trump can understand.
The biggest problem is that although such a nuclear escalation would look cool, it would not present any new threat to the survival of the Iranian regime that would make it sue for peace on Trump's terms. Suppose Trump nukes the Fordow nuclear fuel enrichment plant built into a mountain and succeeds in destroying it. So what? Why would this in itself stop the Iranian regime lobbing missiles and drones around the Gulf?
Nuclear weapons are not magic - as I hope the relevant people are repeating to Trump over and over again. They are just really powerful bombs that can destroy more things in one go than regular bombs. Unless you can use them to destroy - or threaten to destroy - something actually vital to a governing regime, they don't change the military balance of power. There are a handful of military targets, such as the underground bunkers where Iran stores its ballistic missiles, that might be more vulnerable to tactical nuclear strikes than regular conventional missiles, but destroying all such hardened targets still wouldn't do much at all to reduce Iran's capabilities to wreak havoc across the Gulf and thus its ability to continue to resist Trump's will.
Of course Trump might threaten to use much larger, strategic ('war ending') thermonuclear bombs on Iranian cities. The first problem here is that, even after breaking the nuclear taboo, such threats would simply not be credible. Murdering millions of Iranian civilians doesn't make any sense in terms of America's or Trump's goals in this case, nor their longer term narrative unity (the coherent picture of ourselves we present to others and which they rely on to interpret and predict our behaviour), and so would be understood as a bluff. Trump would have to actually nuke at least one city to make his threat to do so credible.
The second problem is that even if credible, the threat to nuke Iranian cities still wouldn't be a threat to the Iranian regime itself. Evil regimes don't really care about the population they rule over, except as tools and resources to plunder. Murdering millions of Iranian civilians wouldn't do any substantial harm to Iran's military capabilities, so it would be pointless as well as a horrifying crime that would certainly bring Trump's presidency to an ignominious end. (The precedent usually cited is incorrect: Japan's military rulers sued for peace because they could see Soviet armies lining up to invade, not because they cared about the mass murder of civilians by America's nuclear bombs.)
The other parts of the case for nuking Iran have similar weaknesses. For example, would Xi Jinping really be deterred from invading Taiwan by reflecting on the willingness of the US president to go nuclear with so little provocation? Or would he actually come away with the belief that Trump is so afraid of US military casualties that he will do almost anything to avoid them? The latter seems more likely, and would also make the conquering and enslavement of Taiwan more likely.
And then there are the wider costs of losing the global taboo on using nuclear weapons.
Most immediately, Putin is also stuck in a war of choice that was supposed to be easy but has turned into a humiliating, expensive and un-ending disaster for his regime. If there was no longer a severe cost to using nuclear weapons to escalate one's way out of such situations then Putin would probably also want to try it - perhaps on Odessa, as Ukraine's crucial export hub and major population centre. As with Iran, it is unclear what real military value Russian nuclear weapons could achieve on the battlefield. However, in contrast to Iran, Ukraine is a democracy, and so the mass murder of its civilians and credible threats to murder more is something the Zelensky government would care about, and would make major concessions to avoid, regardless of its military implications.
We would also see a surge of efforts by countries around the world to acquire nuclear weapons as deterrents to others, and as integrated components of their own conventional military forces and planning. This is unlikely to make the world a safer place, nor one in which America's hegemony is respected.
America's allies in particular were already signalling more or less openly their interest and ability to develop domestic nuclear weapons programmes, in response to Trump's 'strategic genius' attempt to exploit them: "You believed our promises and made yourselves dependent on them. Suckers! Now give us what we want, or else."
Up to now allies' interest in proliferation seems to have been mainly intended to cajole America back into keeping its promises to protect its allies and the world order. The allies were saying that they could make themselves independent of America's security umbrella, and the hegemonic status of its wishes, if they needed to, and so attempting to exploit their apparent dependence was misguided.
Were Trump to threaten, let alone actually use, nuclear weapons against Iran, those allies will switch from a posture of merely threatening proliferation as a form of political communication to Trump's regime, to carrying it out. They would recognise that the only way to guarantee their security against escalation by a more powerful conventional or nuclear armed rival is to build their own nuclear deterrence. America would go from having hegemonic, world-governing status as the linchpin of a world ruling alliance to merely the most powerful single country in a world stuffed with nuclear armed states free to pursue their own agendas without any particular interest in pleasing America nor fear of its displeasure.
