CNN
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That’s a big decision, but whatever the outcome is, it slowly improves.
President Donald Trump has yet to decide whether to bring the United States into military involvement with Israel in the six-day conflict with Iran. But that’s all there is to it. What Tehran can do is have a very palpable and growing nature.
Israel has already crossed every red line imaginable in Iran’s diplomatic dictionary. It bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities and killed many military leaders. He has not killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and has not convinced the US to bomb the Fordow fuel enrichment plant, but it has exhausted the taboos to break.
Iran launched a barrage of ballistic missiles in Israel, causing horrific civilians, causing some widespread damage, killing nearly 30 people and wounding hundreds more. However, this is not an existential catastrophe that many feared Tehran would release. Iran lost nearly 10 times more civilians in Israel’s opening 48 hours in 48 hours of the conflict, according to the Ministry of Health. Tehran has already had to ease the punch as it is fighting a stock of exhausted medium-range ballistic missiles that could hit Israel.
Every day, the list of Israel’s targets is steadily hit. And that will reduce Iran’s ability to threaten the region. This must be the key to Trump’s inexplicable calculations. And it reflects the lessons learned perhaps after his decision after his decision to kill the most prominent figures in Iranian military Qassem Soleimani.
At the time, the assassination in response to a rocket attack that killed American soldiers in Iraq looked like a fantastical “glove-off” moment when Tehran’s great army could be unleashed. But it failed to happen. Iran responded by hitting another American base where the majority of the injuries were concussions. It just didn’t have the muscles to risk an all-out war with the United States, and it was five years ago. Since then, things have gotten much worse for Iranians.
Their main strategic ally, Russia, did not fall into a decisive three-year war with Ukraine. That is, Tehran would have barely returned from Moscow if it sought serious military support.
Proxies near Iran – Hezbollah in Lebanon and Assad regime in Syria – have been removed as effective combat forces. Hezbollah was cancelled last fall in an incredibly short, brutal but effective Israeli campaign, revealing that extremist groups are false threats that have been so defeated by the superior skills and intelligence of their southern enemies. The Assad regime suddenly collapsed in December – after years of diplomatic isolation against terrible abuse in a savage civil war, Syrian north neighbor Turkey helped overwhelm the rebels.
Iran has found himself out that he is outnumbering him in his hometown. It knows that it cannot take the US for many years.
These two facts take into account the risk of a big fire and the ease with which Trump’s choices seem. He simply can attack Fordow and other related nuclear sites with a single wave of stealth B-2 bombers, informing Iranians that the US will not seek further conflict, and anticipating muted acceptable retaliation. Iran lacks stocks to seriously attack Israel, not to mention another, more equipped enemy military base in the region.
Trump will be able to give Israelis freely targets over weeks, allowing Israelis to meet Iranian Abbas Aragut in Geneva on Friday, and presenting slowly worsening conditions to Tehran for diplomatic reconciliation. Or Trump can do nothing, making Iran’s broad powerlessness more visible as missile inventory drops.
However, inaction may place weakness and emphasis on Trump. The prospect of solving Iran’s problems and developing nuclear weapons would be a much-needed foreign policy victory for the Brattispatz-embedded White House with its allies, a stop-start trade war with China, and a volatile diplomacy with Moscow over Ukraine. Even German Prime Minister Friedrich Merz said Israel is doing “dirty work” for the Western world by removing Iran’s nuclear threat. Few people think that Iranian nuclear bombs are a good idea, except for Iranian hardliners.
The big risk Trump faces is that Iran, who has always argued that its program is peaceful, has a more sophisticated and secret nuclear program than his bunkerbuster can disable.
Such fears appear to fit the Israeli intelligence report assessment, which they claimed to have facilitated a recent campaign. But they would also seem to clash with the idea that further strikes could end Iran’s ambitions for the atomic bomb indefinitely.
Second, one might argue that now, the Supreme Leader is directly threatened and the capital’s sky is wide open, so Iran has already decided to compete for nuclear weapons. What else should Iran happen?
“The unknown” – what we don’t know – is abundant, as Donald Rumsfeld placed it before Iraq, an Iranian neighbour, was invaded by the US in 2003. And they are in a direction where Iran is more or less weakened, and whatever choice Trump makes, a calm or manageable response from Tehran will be met.
“Unknown and unknown” is what protected the United States in Iraq. By definition we don’t know what they are, but they probably have a lot. But they hide in the simple fact that neither Israel nor the US intends to occupy Iran. And Iran is seeing the red lines from decades ago disappearing quickly from sight, so it’s getting too weak and pointless.