Trump's Iran strike likely kills nuclear nonproliferation efforts for good

There's not much to say about the supposed logic behind Donald Trump (R-seditionist)'s military strikes against purported nuclear targets in Iran. There is no logic to it, and Trump-loyal or bomb-loyal pundits trying to backfill a non-idiotic rationale to Trump's acts must, as usual, contend with the narcissist's actual history.

In his first term, Trump scuttled the nonproliferation agreement with Iran that was forged during the Obama administration, insisting he could get a somehow "better" pact through his own trademark belligerence. He not only failed—primarily through indifference—to do it, but in unilaterally nullifying the extant deal he allowed Iran to restart uranium refinement—and drastically expand it.

After nearly a decade of promising he could bully Iran into taking a better deal than the one he ripped up, Trump got nowhere. What happened instead is that longtime neoconservative bomb-tosser Benjamin Netanyahu, the current Israeli prime minister, decided to expand the war in Gaza not only into southern Lebanon but to Iran.

Netanyahu critics have pointedly accused the far-right leader of prolonging and expanding Israel's war as a way to postpone comeuppance on his longstanding domestic corruption charges and, now, an international war crimes tribunal. And Netanyahu's government began bombing Iranian nuclear facilities even knowing full well they did not have the equipment to finish the job; a key Iranian site, Fordow, is buried so deep underground as to be impenetrable by Israel's own weapons.

So Bibi began bombing, then phoned up the Trump administration to demand that the United States bomb the places Israel itself couldn't reach, and Donald Trump appears to have agreed because he thought it would make him look Important on television, and nobody gave a damn whether the action would be legal or illegal because that is not something anyone in government still gives a damn about, and here we are. There are no administration officials or friendly pundits piping up with realistic predictions of what might happen next; what they will insist will happen is that Iran will mount no response whatsoever, come crawling to Dear Leader's negotiating table, and promise forever more not to piss off Israel or the United States by pursuing the same nuclear deterrent that neither of those other two countries would ever contemplate living without.

The bombing will set back Iran's nuclear efforts. But it likely will not end them. The Iranian facilities appear to have been evacuated in advance, and evidence suggests some or all of the uranium stockpiles at Fordow were moved elsewhere beforehand.

The unpleasant news that Trump and his buffoonish aides know but aren't willing to say is that Iran does, in fact, have many retaliatory options. It is not likely that Iran could, as they have threatened, close the critical Strait of Hormuz to oil traffic—but the threat to shipping may still roil oil markets. It seems unlikely that the nation would risk any direct military response targeting U.S. forces in the region—but it seems very likely that terrorist forces funded by or allied with Iran will take "kinetic action" of their own.

One of the more likely responses is a step-up of cyberwarfare; Iran has nontrivial hacking abilities, though nothing akin to the world-leading abilities of Israel and the U.S.. This would be less of a concern were various bits of U.S. industry and infrastructure still not notoriously slipshod in their online security efforts.

And then there's the stream of news reports, these last few months, reporting that Elon Musk's brigade of inexperienced D.O.G.E. hackers have been mucking with sensitive U.S. security systems throughout the government, part of their effort to datamine every available bit of U.S. electronic infrastructure so that the results can be stuffed into LLM-based "A.I." systems. And the appointment of a similarly inexperienced 22-year-old Trump booster as one of the nation's top, ahem, terrorism prevention czars.

Fear not; prior to being installed as head of Department of Homeland Security's CP3 division, Fugate previously worked as a landscaper and as a grocery clerk. That'll come in handy if Iran looks to hack into, for example, a botanical garden.

But it is futile to try to predict what will happen even hour-to-hour, because even if you claim to be expert enough to guess how Trump's actions will impact the future of Middle East diplomacy, you're never going to be able to guess whatever the hell Trump himself blurts out next. It's an impossibility, which is why the three rodents of the apocalypse (Pete Hegseth; Marco Rubio; JD Vance) continue to repeat only generic vapidities supporting whatever-the-hell Dear Leader last piped up with.

What we do know, almost for certain, is that decades of nuclear nonproliferation efforts are now dead, dead, dead. The lesson of 21st century diplomacy is a simple one: Nations that have nuclear weapons do not get invaded. Nations that do not have nuclear weapons do.

There are two events that would appear to have killed off nonproliferation efforts for the foreseeable future, and the United States figures prominently in both of them. The first is the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Ukraine was, in fact, once a nuclear power. In the breakup of the Soviet Union, Ukraine inherited roughly 1700 Soviet nuclear warheads; deemed more a security risk than assurance, Ukraine agreed to relinquish the weapons to Russia in exchange for security guarantees from the United States, United Kingdom, Russia, and other powers. It took just 20 years for Russia to nix its own promise, invading Crimea in 2014 and undertaking long-term efforts to seize the whole of Ukraine ever since.

The security guarantees from the U.S. and other nations have played out as we've seen, after those Russian incursions: The U.S. has been willing to hand over considerable war supplies for Ukraine's self-defense, after the full-out Russian invasion began in 2022, but no true guarantee of Ukrainian sovereignty has been forthcoming. Would Russian strongman Vladimir Putin have invaded, if Ukraine still had a handful of the aging nuclear weapons that they relinquished in the prior deal? History suggests not; no nuclear power has ever faced full-scale military invasion.

The lessons of recent history, in fact, all point in the other direction. Iraq was accused of pursuing nuclear weapons, and was invaded by the United States under that justification. North Korea has nuclear weapons, and its borders remain unchanged even while it exports nuclear technology to other nations. It is unlikely Israeli hardliners could have acted with the same military aggressiveness if Israel was not already a presumed nuclear power.

Nuclear powers have engaged in military acts against each other. China and the Soviet Union came to minor blows, as have China and India, and Pakistan and India. But no nuclear power has yet faced a military campaign against it meant to overthrow or annex the whole of the country, because no such aggressor has wanted to risk what might happen if such a campaign put a nuclear-capable regime in a position with little left to lose. And that is deterrence, and that is the plain history that every non-nuclear power can see staring them in the face.

The lesson of the 21st century is simple. If you have a bomb, major world powers will stay out of your borders. And if you don't have a bomb, you'd better damn well get one. Or five.

That is Trump's most immediate legacy. As previous United States presidents have, he demanded a nation negotiate an agreement to never pursue nuclear capabilities; he did so after nullifying the agreement the non-nuclear power had already signed, and mounted surprise airstrikes against that nation's nuclear programs while such "negotiations" were still ostensibly being pursued.

You can debate the wisdom of that, and especially the wisdom of being led into it by the nose by the ever-warmongering Benjamin Netanyahu, of all people. But the transparent lesson that every non-nuclear power comes away with is, yet again, that nations without nukes are at the mercy of world powers and nations with nukes aren't—and you can't claim that to be an irrational take. Not after the last half-century of history. Not after the United States proves itself, time and time and time again, to be indifferent to its own past promises.

UPDATE: Jeffrey Lewis analyzes the U.S. and Israeli strikes, expressing skepticism of both their effectiveness and claimed purpose. "This is why I said the strike is about regime change."