Donald Trump Is Not Gonna Bomb Iran
Yeah, I said it.
The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World spent all day today at Chatham House’s London Conference. You can catch my panel on whether the U.S. has handed the future to China by clicking here.
It’s been a long, fruitful day and I’m pretty tired. But before I go to bed I wanted to make a public prediction about whether Donald Trump will choose to join Israel and attack Iran. I offered some noncommittal musings on this topic earlier in the week. Now that Trump himself is saying, “I may do it, I may not do it. I mean nobody knows what I’m going to do,” and following that up by saying, “I will make my decision of whether or not to go within the next two weeks,” I feel compelled to weigh in on this question.
Trump is not gonna bomb Iran. This is a bluff.
Now I could easily be wrong — which is why I’m making the prediction. This seems like one of those moments when making an ex ante prediction is worth doing as a test of my international relations acumen. If I’m wrong, people can and will mock me. If I’m right, well, everyone gets lucky once in a while.
What’s the reasoning behind my prediction? It’s a combination of three factors:
First, this episode strongly echoes Trump’s approach towards North Korea in 2017. The maximum pressure sanctions, combined with the deployment of naval assets, combined with Trump’s incredibly bellicose rhetoric, combined with the evacuation of non-essential personnel from South Korea, combined with Beltway chatter convinced the hard-working staff over at Spoiler Alerts that Trump was serious about going to war with Pyongyang. However, once the DPRK offer to negotiate came through, Trump pivoted sharply.
This appears to be what Trump wants this time around as well. Seen through this lens, everything Trump has done over the past week has been an exercise in signaling he’s willing to launch a war in the hopes that the Iranian mullahs come to the bargaining table. If they ask for talks, even as an empty gesture, my hunch is Trump will take it.
Second, the two-week delay is a tell. Sure, Trump might be pausing to bring more U.S. military assets into the region. But extending a two-week deadline is also a way of pushing Tehran into making a decision on negotiations.
Finally, as noted here, here, here, here, and here, Trump is more predictable on foreign affairs than he or his team understand. If Trump thinks he is picking on a weakling, or an actor who cannot retaliate against the United States, he’ll go through with the attacks. But otherwise, Trump always chickens out. Iran has been severely weakened from the past week’s worth of attacks, but still possesses some asymmetric capabilities that could be directed against the United States. Plus, reporting suggests that Trump does not believe that the DoD’s bunker-buster bombs will work on Fordow. Under these circumstances, Trump is unlikely to take the risk.
Are there counterarguments? Sure. Maybe the Fox News effect will kick in. Maybe Trump will be persuaded by Rubio et al that sending bunker-busters to Fordow will work and it’s an easy victory. Or maybe Trump will act to contradict the TACO principle used to explain his foreign policy behavior.
Still, I think if he was going to bomb Iran he would have deployed by now. So this is me laying down a marker. In 2025, if I’m gonna be wrong, I would rather be wrong and loud about it.
As soon as he said “2 weeks”, the jig was up. If Donny TACO could be distilled down to a single *tell* that he’s gonna wimp out or he hopes something will magically go away, “2 weeks” has been it since he’s been in political life.
One thing I worry about is that in an administration where spectacular incompetence is a supreme qualifier to get appointed, the people with some specific responsibility for monitoring the possibility of asymmetrical attacks, aka "real" terrorism as opposed to saying bad things about Tesla, are especially and notably incompetent, and a number of initiatives for monitoring such threats have just plain been turned off. I think it's possible that there are people inside the Trump Administration who are actually hoping for a sort of Reichstag Fire event and it might well be that they would think inviting that kind of response is a good thing.