Trump's Iranian Gamble

Threshold moments often gain their full significance in hindsight as their chain of consequences unfolds. Regardless of whether one agrees with US President Donald Trump’s decision to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities, few doubt that it marks a turning point that the Middle East and the broader international community are bound to remember. Trump portrayed the move as the end of the nuclear conflict with Iran. Rather than an end, however, June 22 appears as the beginning of something. A decade or two from now, what will we remember this day for?

Will we remember it as the moment a bold decision enabled the birth of a new, more stable order in the Middle East, as Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have suggested? Will it usher in a region safer for Israel, free of Iranian destructive influence and nuclear ambitions, paving the way for a new age of Arab-Israeli cooperation, peace, and joint prosperity? 

Israelis saw themselves under an imminent existential threat and felt forced to act on a once-in-a-lifetime window of opportunity to eliminate the danger for good. Trump and his closest aides appear to have followed this argument, suggesting that US intervention will end Iran’s nuclear ambitions and rogue role in the Middle East while simultaneously assuaging potentially angry MAGA voters by calming fears of another endless Middle Eastern war. This  strike, Vice President JD Vance keenly assured them, is a one-and-done. 

The unspoken assumptions of this rhetoric, including barely veiled hints at regime change, however, could confirm renewed concerns about what successive US administrations have dreaded: that US strikes on Iran mark the beginning of a chain of events that unravels the Middle East and entangles the American military there for years to come. Notwithstanding the obvious limitations of historical analogies, it is worth remembering the major turning point that constituted the 2003 fall of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath regime in Iraq. The US military intervention, initially portrayed by the George W. Bush administration as a quick move to end conflict, opened a power vacuum that led to destabilization and structural changes. These included the ascendance of Iranian proxy power, the spread of sectarian violence, a new generation of jihadism and the rise of the Islamic State, and a stronger Russian and Chinese regional presence.

So, what will be the consequences of the move beyond the Middle East? Will Trump’s Iran strikes be remembered as the day US adversaries learned the president means business and can be expected to use force in almost any circumstance, even against his own stated intentions? The assumption that Trump’s campaign pledge to “end forever wars” abroad would keep him from using military force in the Middle East had led many observers to rule out this possibility. What lessons will China and Russia draw from this event to calibrate risk and strategy in their own theaters? This may well be the moment that cemented Trump’s military impulsiveness as a major deterrent.

Conversely, will this be remembered as the day the United States terminated its aspiration of a rule-based international security order, heralding a new age of impunity? It remains unclear if Washington struck Iran based on unmistakable evidence of an imminent Iranian nuclear breakout, which could be argued to justify a preemptive strike. But even then, lifting himself above domestic and international law, Trump did not seek approval of or consult with Congress, NATO allies or the UN Security Council. A superpower that preemptively bombs others without UN approval lowers the threshold for others to follow suit.

Multiple outcomes are thinkable, and the actual future may well not be among them. But one way or another, this US action will cast a long shadow.