A spate of break-ins has been taking place in your neighborhood. Armed thugs associated with a crime syndicate have been knocking down doors and grabbing what they can. The police show up only after the assaults, which have led to injuries and even a few deaths. Under-resourced and overstretched, they haven’t been able to thwart the robbers.

Someone in your neighborhood puts up a sign: This Homeowner Is Armed and Dangerous. The next night, the thugs break into the houses on either side, not even bothering to test whether the homeowner in the middle has a gun or knows how to use it. They just leave that house alone.

Question for you: do you buy a gun?

Maybe you don’t believe in guns. So, do you consider putting up a similar sign even though the most dangerous item in your house is a nail clipper? The evidence seems clear. Even just the threat of retaliation is enough to dissuade the would-be attackers. Your life and the lives of your family are on the line.

This is the dilemma facing many countries around the world, except that the gun in this analogy is a nuclear weapon. Countries without nuclear weapons—Libya, Yugoslavia—experienced attacks that eventually led to regime change. Countries that possess even just a few warheads—North Korea, China—have managed to deter states with malign intent.

Iran, a country that has put up a warning sign in its window without fully committing to acquiring the ultimate deterrent, was recently bombed by both Israel and the United States. A tenuous ceasefire now holds in this conflict. The Trump administration imagines that it has destroyed Iran’s nuclear program. It also believes that it can now put more pressure on Iran to give away its nuclear weapons program at the negotiating table.

But the obvious takeaway for Iran after the recent attacks is that it’s certainly dangerous to semi-covertly pursue nuclear weapons but it’s perhaps even more dangerous not to have them. If nuclear powers don’t suffer devastating bombing campaigns, insecure nations conclude that they best acquire a nuke as quickly as possible.

It’s not just Iran. Other countries are drawing similar conclusions about how to survive in an international environment where collective security—the global equivalent of the police—is falling apart as quickly as a fence in a hurricane.

Iran’s Complex

Guns can be used for different things—to hunt, to hit clay targets, to massacre children at a school.

Likewise, nuclear complexes can serve very different purposes. Iran has long maintained that its nuclear facilities are for the production of energy, medical isotopes, and so on. But a country doesn’t need to enrich its uranium to 60 percent, as Iran reportedly has done, to achieve these peaceful goals. Nuclear power requires an enrichment level of 3-5 percent. Weapons-grade uranium, meanwhile, is 90 percent.

The Obama administration, with a number of international partners, negotiated a nuclear agreement with Iran that capped the level of enrichment at 20 percent and began diluting Iran’s uranium stockpiles to 3.5 percent. The Trump administration pulled the United States out of the agreement. The enrichment level of Iran’s uranium not surprisingly began to creep upwards.

Iran has maintained two underground enrichment facilities at Natanz and Fordow. These were two of the targets of U.S. bunker-busters. The 14 bombs the United States dropped on these targets might be expected to have returned Iran to the pre-nuclear stone age. And that’s certainly what the Trump administration has claimed.

But Donald Trump is quick to claim victory even in the throes of obvious defeat (remember COVID, Afghanistan, and the 2020 election?). According to an anonymous source in the Defense Intelligence Agency, the recent U.S. attack set Iran back “maybe a few months, tops.” The Trump administration dismissed this assessment as a leak from “an anonymous, low-level loser in the intelligence community.”

But the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, echoed the DIA report: “The capacities they have are there. They can have, you know, in a matter of months, I would say, a few cascades of centrifuges spinning and producing enriched uranium, or less than that.” Even Iranian officials, caught speaking privately about the attack, were surprised that the damage was not as great as they’d anticipated.

Even if the capacity to enrich uranium had been destroyed, the U.S. and Israeli attacks couldn’t root out the knowledge of these processes from the minds of the Iranian scientists—or the desire to acquire nuclear weapons from the Iranian population as a whole. According to a poll from June of last year, nearly 70 percent of Iranian respondents favored the country going nuclear—this after nearly two decades of public opinion opposing the weaponization of the program.

Memo to both the United States and Israel: it’s not just Iran’s political leadership that wants nukes. In other words, regime change is not going to resolve this nuclear question. Iran’s complex.

Future Negotiations?

Considering Trump’s cancellation of the Iranian nuclear accord back in 2017, diplomacy wouldn’t seem to be top on the administration’s agenda. But it wasn’t diplomacy per se that Trump rejected, only diplomacy associated with the Obama administration.

As late as the Friday before the U.S. attack, even as Israel was continuing its own bombing runs, the Trump administration was conducting secret talks with Iran. According to CNN:

Among the terms being discussed, which have not been previously reported, is an estimated $20-30 billion investment in a new Iranian non-enrichment nuclear program that would be used for civilian energy purposes, Trump administration officials and sources familiar with the proposal told CNN. One official insisted that money would not come directly from the US, which prefers its Arab partners foot the bill. Investment in Iran’s nuclear energy facilities has been discussed in previous rounds of nuclear talks in recent months.

That sounds a lot like the Agreed Framework that the Clinton administration pursued with Pyongyang, with South Korea largely footing the bill for the construction of reactors that could power North Korea’s civilian sector. Those reactors were never built, and North Korea went on to assemble its own mini-arsenal of nuclear weapons.

Iran has said that it would consider returning to the negotiating table at some point after it receives guarantees that there will be no future attacks. Without much trust among the various sides, it would be hard to imagine Iran forever renouncing a nuclear option or Israel forever forswearing attacks on Iran, even if they both make rhetorical commitments for the purpose of restarting talks.

Trump the Opportunist

There is much loose speculation that Donald Trump is an isolationist, an anti-militarist, a believer in spheres of influence. The U.S. attack on Iran should dispense with such nonsense.

Donald Trump is a political opportunist. He takes positions—anti-abortion, pro-crypto—based not on principles but on how much they will boost his political (and economic) fortunes.

On foreign policy, Trump has raised opportunism to the level of a geopolitical doctrine. He has talked of steering clear of military conflicts in the Middle East, but then the opportunity presented itself to strike against Iranian targets effectively risk-free (because Israel had already secured the airspace). He has railed against corruption in Ukraine and declared President Volodymyr Zelensky a “dictator,” but then the opportunity presented itself to sign a minerals agreement with the government in Kyiv.

Trump has no problems negotiating with religious fundamentalists. He gets along just fine with Sunni absolutists in the Middle East, and he would probably be hard-pressed to explain the religious differences between the Sunnis of Saudi Arabia and the Shia of Iran. If an opportunity presents itself to negotiate a deal with Iran, Trump may well take it—mostly because he can then call himself the person who really vanquished that country’s nuclear “threat” (take that, Obama!).

Meanwhile, Trump continues to make it more likely that countries around the world will invest in their own nuclear weapons programs.

At home, despite some rhetoric about the lack of any need for new nuclear weapons, Trump is adding nearly $13 billion to the budget for nuclear weapons. And his plan for a “golden dome” will only encourage other nuclear powers to spend more to evade such heightened defenses Such dangerous one-upmanship was, after all, the rationale for the dearly departed Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty.

Trump’s reluctance to provide assurances to allies that the United States will come to their defense in case of attack has poked huge holes in the nuclear umbrella that hitherto covered much of Europe and Asia. Now European politicians are talking about building out their own nuclear capabilities—with the French arsenal at its center—and conservatives in South Korea have also begun talking about establishing a nuclear deterrent.

And the rest of the world? The Iranian parliament has begun drafting the country’s withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Only one other country has exited the treaty—North Korea—and only a handful of countries are not parties to it (Israel, India, Pakistan, South Sudan) If Iran goes, there may well be a rush to the exits, beginning with Saudi Arabia and Turkey, which have made noises about the nuclear option.

Nothing speaks louder than Trump’s actions. He exchanged “love letters” with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un (nukes), is a big fan of Vladimir Putin (nukes), and has indicated that he has more respect for China (nukes) than Taiwan (no nukes). On the other side of the nuclear fence, he has bombed Iran, threatened Venezuela and Cuba, and discussed the possibility of taking over Greenland and Canada.

I’m no advocate of nuclear armaments. But if I were Canadian, I might start thinking that a reputation for niceness just doesn’t cut it in TrumpWorld. A couple of nuclear-tipped ICBMs, however, would send a message that this White House more readily understands.

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