Drezner: Wrong Again!!

Also breaking: sun rises in East.

Photo by Randy Laybourne on Unsplash

Hey, remember late last week when I wrote:

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.

Wrong and loud — that should be the new motto of Drezner’s World, because I was most definitely wrong!!

The hard-working staff would rather not delve too deeply into why it was wrong. If the New York Times’ account is correct, the Fox News effect appeared to be very real:

Mr. Trump had spent the early months of his administration warning Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel against a strike on Iran. But by the morning of Friday, June 13, hours after the first Israeli attacks, Mr. Trump had changed his tune.

He marveled to advisers about what he said was a brilliant Israeli military operation, which involved a series of precision strikes that killed key figures in Iran’s military leadership and blasted away strategic weapons sites. Mr. Trump took calls on his cellphone from reporters and began hailing the operation as “excellent” and “very successful” and hinting that he had much more to do with it than people realized.

Later that day, Mr. Trump asked an ally how the Israeli strikes were “playing.” He said that “everyone” was telling him he needed to get more involved, including potentially dropping 30,000-pound GBU-57 bombs on Fordo, the Iranian uranium-enrichment facility buried underneath a mountain south of Tehran.

As previously noted, Trump is a frontrunner when it comes to war, and all the reporting further suggests that this is what he thought the situation was in Iran.

The remaining question is: what now?

One possibility that needs to be considered is that it will all work out for the United States for the foreseeable future. After all, Iran retaliated by lobbing missiles at U.S. facilities in Qatar, but did so in a way that was weirdly de-escalatory rather than escalatory. Trump’s social media response to the missile strikes also appeared de-escalatory. Then the Wall Street Journal reported that, “Israel is looking to wrap up its war with Iran soon.” And soon after that Trump announced an Iran-Israel ceasefire via social media that will take effect on midnight tonight.

If all this holds up, then the Trump administration would deserve some credit. Knocking out key Iranian nuclear facilities with minimal blowback is a pretty significant accomplishment. Enabling Israel to embarrass Iran on the global stage and decapitate much of its top military leadership will yield additional policy dividends. The twelve-day air attacks continue a trend in which Iran and its proxies find themselves in a significantly weaker position than they were prior to October 7, 2023.¹

So does this mean it’s all over? Well…. not exactly.

For one thing, it is far from obvious whether the U.S. attacks actually succeeded in eliminating Iran’s nuclear program. Both the Wall Street Journal and New York Times have stories indicating that U.S. intelligence simply doesn’t know how to evaluate the success of the attack. The NYT’s David Sanger reports:

A day after President Trump declared that Iran’s nuclear program had been “completely and totally obliterated” by American bunker-busting bombs and a barrage of missiles, the actual state of the program seemed far more murky, with senior officials conceding they did not know the fate of Iran’s stockpile of near-bomb-grade uranium….

there was also evidence, according to two Israeli officials with knowledge of the intelligence, that Iran had moved equipment and uranium from the site in recent days. And there was growing evidence that the Iranians, attuned to Mr. Trump’s repeated threats to take military action, had removed 400 kilograms, or roughly 880 pounds, of uranium enriched to 60 percent purity. That is just below the 90 percent that is usually used in nuclear weapons.

The 60-percent enriched fuel had been stored deep inside another nuclear complex, near the ancient capital of Isfahan. Rafael Mariano Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said by text that the fuel had last been seen by his teams of United Nations inspectors about a week before Israel began its attacks on Iran. In an interview on CNN on Sunday he added that “Iran has made no secret that they have protected this material.”

Asked by text later in the day whether he meant that the fuel stockpile — which is stored in special casks small enough to fit in the trunks of about 10 cars — had been moved, he replied, “I do.” That appeared to be the mystery about the fuel’s fate that Mr. Vance was discussing.

That doesn’t sound terribly encouraging. If this attack forestalls Iran’s nuclear program by a couple of years and that’s it, it seems difficult not to conceive of a future where Iran acquires nuclear weapons.

In other words, contrary to Donald Trump’s initial statements, it is highly unlikely that this is a “one and done” attack.

For another thing, it sounds as thought Trump’s own ambitions are starting to expand as well:

That certainly sounds like “mission creep” to me! Or maybe it’s just Trump popping off, which he has been known to do.

Iran likely retains asymmetric capabilities, and it is possible that additional retaliation might be forthcoming. But my chief concern is not immediate retaliation but Iran deciding that their mistake was trying to be a near-nuclear power rather than a nuclear power.

For the short term, this has played out well for the Trump administration. And this is an administration that cares primarily about the short run. The long run, that’s for the haters and losers to manage.

But the most important takeaway from this post should be that I was wrong in my prediction about what Donald Trump would do about Iran. Readers should remember that if I am ever so foolish as to make a prediction about the Middle East ever again.

1. Russia proving itself to be a completely useless ally would be a pleasant bonus.