Is the US About to Attack Iran? |
Last April, the US and Iran agreed on a 60-day window for negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, its ballistic missile arsenal, and its support for murderous regional proxies including Hezbollah, Hamas, and Yemen’s Houthis. The US put a secret proposal on the table as time was running out, and tried again even as bombing began in June – offering full sanctions relief in exchange for “replacement” of enrichment facilities and ending support for proxies. The proposal said nothing about ballistic missiles.
Iran rejected the offer. Israel – at first alone, then joined by the US – destroyed Iran’s known nuclear facilities as well as its “brain trust” of top nuclear scientists and military leaders, severely degraded its missile capacity, and largely eliminated its air defenses. After 12 days, perhaps with the Nobel Prize committee in mind, Trump abruptly demanded an end to hostilities. Israel duly complied.
Last spring’s plotline says a lot about the motivations and constraints that will determine how the current tensions play out. For Trump, nothing is more sacred than a win. The geopolitical priorities recently laid out in his administration’s National Security Strategy are background noise; actual decisions aim for boastworthy projections of strength. It’s not merely ego; Trump exerts a personal degree of control over the Republican Party not seen since Theodore Roosevelt. While only 42% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents think Trump acts ethically in office, 94% see him as a strong and decisive leader. His strength is their strength and has retained their iron loyalty through scandals and missteps.
If Trump cannot afford to look weak, neither can Iran’s leaders. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is no more a praetorian guard to Iran’s leaders than those leaders are a figurehead to the IRGC’s national dominance. Together the mullahs and the IRGC form, as I have argued, a unified theocratic power blob that runs the country including its largest businesses. Kill the Supreme Leader and the IRGC will see to his replacement. In their hundreds of thousands, the IRGC can, and last June did, absorb the loss of key leadership figures.
What could split the IRGC is perceived national weakness. Iran’s top leadership – the mullahs and the IRGC brass – knows accepting sweeping US demands risks an internal backlash within the IRGC. Pragmatic security managers who also run the ports and business empires might welcome power-preserving de-escalation, but IRGC hardliners who, after all, were selected and promoted based on their ideological commitment to Islamic revolution may feel betrayed.
Whether that sense of betrayal could realistically lead to a civil war within the IRGC and a military coup by the hardliners is beside the point: neither the mullahs nor the IRGC leadership wants to find out.
If both Trump and Iran’s rulers see an existential need to avoid the appearance of weakness, is there an off-ramp as threats escalate and US military assets pour into the region? It depends on each side’s strategic options and its perception of the other side’s options.
For Trump, a knockout blow that topples the entire Iranian power blob is a tall ask. Iran’s military assets are spread over a wide area, as are IRGC and other security personnel. A realistic campaign to strangle the IRGC by systematically pulverizing its economic assets would take time and could ultimately fail: despite more than two months of sustained US bombardment, the Houthis’ rule over Yemen and their ability to menace shipping in the Red Sea stand largely intact. Particularly in an election year, Trump lacks political support for a long-term campaign against a country that, however malevolent, has committed no acts of war against the US.
The Iranian negotiating stance in talks with the US suggests it feels little pressure to buckle. To date, Iran has offered few tangible concessions and stretches out negotiations as a tenet of strategy. In particular, Iran has offered to suspend enrichment until Trump leaves office, which is no concession at all since it would take that long to reconstitute the vital infrastructure lost in June to US and Israeli bombs. The longer negotiations drag on, the more flexible Iran thinks Trump will become, even as a wave of ships, planes and submarines advances toward the Persian Gulf.
They know Trump is impulsive and unpredictable, of course. But eventually the passage of time may feel more like losing than accepting Iran’s terms, particularly if they’re sweetened a bit. Even after an attack begins, Iran can always offer a face-saving concession that will end hostilities as quickly as Trump stopped them last June. Outmatched militarily, Iran feels serenely confident strategically.
The country with the most to lose from this high-stakes contest is neither the US nor Iran, but Israel. Iran could ostentatiously agree to give up domestic enrichment, knowing it could subcontract the work to North Korea or Russia – and maybe even repatriate it one day with a less hostile White House in power. Iran would demand that the US prohibit Israel from attacking its missiles and air defenses, and as for support for proxies, that can be done quietly through other proxies. Money is fungible, banking relationships are opaque, and cryptocurrency can move untraceably.
Would the US go along? Recognizing the limits of its own military leverage and Trump’s need for a short-term win, maybe so. It’s easy to imagine Steve Witkoff delivering the message that with the nuclear threat removed permanently, Israel has nothing to fear from Iran’s missiles; that Israel’s international standing could use some rehabilitation following two bloody years of war with Hamas; and that no president has done more for the State of Israel than Donald Trump.
In fact, Witkoff need only dust off his notes, since he delivered a similar message to Israel the moment Trump took office and wanted a ceasefire in Gaza. It may come as an unwelcome realization, given the optimism following Israel’s stunning success against Iran eight months ago, how little actually changes in the Mideast.