Trump bombs Iran. What's next?

Gaming out the politics and strategy

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Here we go again:

1. Well, the United States is at war. But hey, at least the Secretary of Defense is a TV host who recently quit drinking and the president doesn’t seem to currently be talking to the Director of National Intelligence! Oh, wait, that’s bad.

2. Trump has gambled that hitting Iran’s nuclear sites is going to be a limited one-and-done strike. But it’s not at all clear that this is the case. We don’t know how much damage has actually been done to Fordow, whether and how Iran will retaliate, and whether and how Iran will seek to continue its nuclear program anyway. The idea of a quick and painless victory through air power has been around for as long as air power itself, and it rarely works out.

3. In previous assessments, the Pentagon thought it would take a month or so of sustained strikes to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. It’s not clear how much of that damage Israel has already done and how much remains to be done.

4. With Trump saying he doesn’t trust DNI Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hegseth a hack who is going to be desperate to convince the president he’s doing a good job, it’s not clear how exactly the president is going to carry out a damage assessment after the strikes and decide whether more strikes are needed. Overnight he retweeted one of those silly OSINT accounts, which is not a great start.

   

   But is it?

5. The other day a journalist asked me how deep and enduring the split within MAGA would be if Trump actually bombed Iran. My response was that if it really is just a one-and-done strike, the damage to Trump’s coalition will be minimal to nonexistent. And indeed, even the skeptics are rallying to his defense right now. But if this turns into a much longer campaign, particularly one in which Americans die, then the split will become more serious.

6. I expect a broader dynamic to play out in public opinion at large. The public was overwhelmingly opposed to this course of action, but they’ll still largely shrug and move on if it proves to be limited and contained. Military action also creates a rally around the flag effect which can be particularly powerful if the action looks easy and successful. But if things start to look messy, skepticism is probably going to remain the dominant force.

7. A corollary to this is that because Trump has been bounced into an unpopular course of action that he didn’t really want to take by the Israeli government and the more hawkish faction of the Republican Party, I wouldn’t be surprised if he proves to be a paper tiger if Iran finds a way to punch back hard. He is a weak and indecisive leader, which is why Netanyahu has been able to play him so well. He’s just as likely to fold as he is to escalate.

8. This is why the people who sold him on the idea that this would be quick and painless are probably pretty nervous right now. It may be that Israel really has dealt Tehran so many blows that it’s capacity to hit back at U.S. interests is limited. But it may also be the case that Trump has plunged into this without really understanding the stakes and is going to be panicking a week from now. After all, that’s been the dominant dynamic of his approach to tariffs, and that’s the policy area he has supposedly thought through the most.

9. It’s also worth noting that even the Israeli government doesn’t really think that this is a one-and-done thing. The plan, as far as I can tell, is to just come back and bomb Iran again if it attempts to reconstitute its nuclear program. Israeli intelligence penetration of Iran is clearly at insanely high levels, so it’s quite possible that, on one level, they can keep doing this.

10. But on another level, I’m not so sure. If you want to keep bombing Iran’s attempts to restart a nuclear program, that means a state of permanent - or at best on-again, off-again - war with Iran. And in order to maintain that, you also need to keep bombing Iran’s ground-to-ground missile launchers, its air defense complexes, and much else besides. Where does that end? How long can the Israeli economy or its missile defenses (which seem to be slipping notably in recent days) maintain that?

11. It’s worth remembering that defenders of the JCPOA - Obama’s deal with Iran which halted its nuclear progress - always said that the only realistic alternative to diplomatic limits on Iran’s nuclear program was a war on Iran which would probably escalate towards regime change. Critics of the JCPOA always said this was a gross slander and there was some magical, fairytale diplomatic deal available instead which the United States could achieve through “maximum pressure”. I’ll do a longer post about this in the coming week but the bottom line is that the critics were completely full of shit and the defenders are probably going to turn out to be right.

12. And that’s why Trump owns this war in an additional sense, even on top of being the guy who ordered the bombs to be dropped. After all, he’s the person who tore up the JCPOA in his first term for basically no reason other than his hatred of Barack Obama. That’s not to say that there wasn’t, on some level, a coherent (though I believe deeply flawed) case against the JCPOA. But let’s be honest with ourselves - it’s not like Trump studied that case assiduously and rationally made a decision on the merits. He got rolled by the neocon faction, and now the same thing has happened again.

13. I don’t know what Tehran is going to do next and I don’t trust anyone else who says they do either. Much as with China, Iran commentary in the West is dominated by “experts” who often have little real expertise on the country and who are often deeply invested in a particular course of action. They can game out particular possible scenarios but that’s about it.

14. I will just note though that the same people who wanted us to believe that the Iranian regime is so fanatical that it would choose to suffer nuclear annihilation if it could only drop a bomb on Israel first also want us to believe that it is so rational and pain-avoidant that it will now just roll over and give in if subjected to enough air strikes. An awful lot now rides on them being right about that.

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