The US’ Iran war forgot about nukes

The existential nuclear question that the war was supposed to address has been forgotten as the focus shifts to reopening the Strait of Hormuz

• By Marc Champion / Bloomberg Opinion

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When was the last time you heard a meaningful proposal to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear arsenal?

There has been nothing on the subject since the June Memorandum of Understanding between the US and Iran; the promised 60 days of talks to settle questions around Tehran’s uranium-enrichment program never began and have long since expired.

When the war was launched, on Feb. 28, a resolution of the nuclear dispute was prominent among the dizzying array of US and Israeli aims to explain the attack. But as should be clear by now, the attempt was entirely reliant on achieving regime change. That was always a Hail Mary pass, and from the moment it became clear that the Islamic republic would survive, there has been no nuclear strategy whatsoever.

Illustration: Ting Louise

Arguably, it was only before the war began that this issue was at the center of attention, where it belonged. That was back when US-Iran nuclear negotiations in Geneva got cut short by the surprise airstrike that killed then-Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei and set the conflict in motion, with all the unintended — if widely predicted — consequences that have followed.

Wherever one chooses to stick that pin, it is undeniable that the existential nuclear question that this war was supposedly launched to address has been forgotten, drowned out by the more immediate need to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

“There may not be a nuclear agreement,” US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright told ABC’s This Week on Sunday, adding that the administration might just destroy capabilities instead. “An agreement may await the next administration in Iran. We simply don’t know that.”

Wright went on to say how important it is to stop Iran getting a bomb; I agree. First, a nuclear deterrent would provide immunity to a dangerous regime that is repressive and totalitarian with an Islamist twist that is anti-Semitic, sectarian and expansionist. Such a combination leads to a second reason: Others in the Middle East — including Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates — would feel obliged to follow or even race to get there first.

The proliferation threat here is so significant that, despite the late supreme leader’s fatwa pledging not to develop a weapon, the suspicion that he was lying warranted the decade-plus of economic and diplomatic pressure that culminated in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). That deal ensured intrusive nuclear inspections and the reduction of Iran’s enriched-uranium output and stockpiles to near-zero.

The JCPOA was flawed in that it sunset those limitations over a 10 to 15-year horizon. I would argue that this failing was big enough to have justified demanding a renegotiation and extension of the deal’s restrictions once it was due to expire, with a return to sanctions and other forms of pressure as necessary.

In fact, the prospect of a nuclear Iran was bad enough that it might also have warranted US President Donald Trump’s premature decision to renege on the deal in 2018 — but only if he had had the ability to force a better one. Unfortunately, and again predictably, he did not. His rejection of the agreement allowed Tehran to abandon its terms as well, enriching uranium in larger quantities and to higher, near-weapons-grade levels than ever before.

Given this state of affairs, the airstrikes that the US and Israel carried out last year could also be justified as a measure of last resort, if credible evidence had emerged that the Iranians were weaponizing their fuel stocks. However that caveat, which was not met, is crucial. The risk of partial success — of showing Iran that it lacked the defenses to prevent the destruction of nuclear assets, without the land war needed to ensure they were not rebuilt — was that it would simply drive Iran to build the nuclear deterrent it did not yet have.

This is precisely how events appear to be unfolding. It is why Israel wanted to finish the job just six months after Trump had declared the Iranian-enrichment program “obliterated.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took his argument for a mass strike that would trigger regime change all the way to the White House. This was not necessarily wrong because it was immoral or illegal: Who would seriously have complained if February’s airstrikes had indeed succeeded in toppling the regime, freeing a desperate population and ending Iran’s destabilizing pursuit of both its nuclear program and its proxy wars across the region

Instead, the strikes were unjustifiable because it was evident that they would not succeed. They were considered and avoided by all previous US presidents since 1979, because Iran’s first step would, inevitably, be to block Hormuz to international shipping, with the immediate impact on the global economy that this implied.

Through their disruption of Hormuz, Iran’s leaders now have international leverage and a deterrent power that they never before possessed. And because the ever-present question of whether the US and Israel were willing to take Iran on in open warfare has now been answered, the Islamic republic has more reason to build its own nuclear arsenal. Israel, the country that so often cried wolf on this subject, is now probably right about its urgency.

“Iranians are clever. They are diverting all of the discussions to the Straits of Hormuz,” Major General Tamir Hayman, a former Israeli military intelligence chief, said in a podcast on Wednesday last week for Tel Aviv’s Institute for National Security Studies, where he is now executive director.

The US “is cooperating with that and focusing on the Straits of Hormuz, and while we are doing that we are losing eye contact to the ball — and the ball is the nuclear aspect,” he added.

I have seen no proof that the Iranians are currently seeking to weaponize their nuclear program, or that they are knowingly using Hormuz as a decoy to achieve that — I suspect control of the strait is valuable enough to be a goal in its own right. However, the debate within Iran’s elite over whether to develop a nuclear deterrent has now spilled into the public domain, and why not? What else to conclude but that North Korea is untouched, while Ukraine and Iran lie in ruins, because only Kim Jong-un has a working nuclear arsenal.

Indeed, Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, can only believe he is in hiding, wounded and mourning the deaths of his father and family because Iran did not have one. Either he capitulates to the US, or he survives long enough to achieve a nuclear breakout, but seen from the vantage point of Khamenei’s bunker, nothing in between is likely to make much sense.

Hormuz is a problem that will have to be managed. That will be the cost of the mistake Trump made by going to war in February. However, the net result of his actions since 2018 is that the Iranian nuclear question is less resolved, more dangerous and more likely to result in a nuclear arms race than it was when he destroyed the JCPOA. He needs to put the issue back at the heart of his Iran agenda.

Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.