Trump must offer Iran more than bombs, rage and humiliation

Hindustan Times

4 hours ago

DONALD TRUMP was elected to keep America out of foreign wars. But on June 22nd American forces joined Israel's campaign against Iran, striking three nuclear sites. The president's task now is to press Iran's leaders into avoiding a ruinous regional escalation and, as a complement to that, to persuade them to abandon any thought of trying to get a nuclear weapon. Neither will be easy.
America's assault, early on Sunday morning local time, involved waves of B-2 bombers repeatedly attacking facilities at Fordow and Natanz. Submarine-launched cruise missiles also struck Isfahan. Mr Trump hailed the success of the mission, saying that Iran's programme had been 'completely and utterly obliterated'. He also warned Iran not to retaliate.
The bombing raid appears to have done serious damage to the three sites, but the president cannot be sure how much—not even Iran will have yet had time to assess its full extent. He is certainly right to be worried about Iranian retaliation. That risk explains why The Economist argued that rushing in was the wrong choice for America. We feared that the tradeoffs were, on net, negative: bombing would set back Iran's programme by an uncertain amount, but Iran, its proxies or terrorist cells could go on to kill American troops and civilians, terrorise the Gulf states and send energy prices soaring by, say, making the Strait of Hormuz too dangerous for tankers.
Now that Mr Trump has rushed in, he must minimise the chances that the region spirals out of control. Fortunately, the strike itself appears designed to do just that. In the past nine days Israel has attacked a range of targets that are political, military and economic, as well as nuclear. It has also suggested that it might seek to trigger regime change. America, by contrast, focused exclusively on nuclear sites, some of which are thought to be beyond the reach of Israel's air force. Mr Trump has made clear that he is not attempting to overturn the regime—at least for as long as Iran shows restraint.
Mr Trump should urgently turn to diplomacy. In his address he declared that 'now is the time for peace'. If he means what he says, he should immediately offer Iran an alternative that leads away from launching retaliatory missile strikes at American bases and Arab states. That means following up on the call by Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defence, to get Iran to return to talks about its programme. These would be more likely to get under way if, while insisting that Iran give up its stocks of enriched uranium and submit to intrusive international inspections, Mr Trump was open to the principle that Iran can have some enrichment capacity, probably as part of a regional consortium that operates outside the country.
If Mr Trump fails to seize the moment, Iran will be more likely to redouble its efforts to become a nuclear-weapons power, in an even more clandestine fashion. A first, unwelcome step would be for it to say that it was leaving the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). This would signal that the effect of American and Israeli bombing was to inflame its nuclear ambitions. Quitting the NPT would also put future efforts beyond the scrutiny of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Nobody knows whether the regime has managed to stash enriched uranium and key components before America and Israel attacked. After the damage from the attacks, the IAEA will never be able to account for Iran's stocks. If Iran restarts its programme, progress towards a bomb could span several years, or it could be rapid.
Either way, America will face the prospect of repeatedly having to help Israel strike it, or—as Sunday's mission suggests—doing the job itself. One motive for Iran to punish America today would be to complicate such future operations by showing that they carry a cost. The immediate offer of talks could help reduce any Iranian retaliation to face-saving strikes. If so, Mr Trump should ignore them and press Iran to come to the table.
And lastly, Mr Trump should launch a drive to shift the Middle East out of a pattern of continual war. With this bombing, he has badly shaken his Arab allies. After his visit to the Gulf in May, they came to believe that he would restrain Israel while he continued to negotiate. The prospect of repeated attacks on Iran by Israel supported by America is a grave threat to their vision of a region that finds peace through prosperity.
Mr Trump should attempt to rebuild trust using his new influence over Israel. Having helped its prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, by bombing Fordow, Mr Trump now enjoys unprecedented leverage over him. He should apply this not just to end the attacks of the Israeli air force on Iran—where it is anyway running out of nuclear targets—but also to get it to immediately end the war in Gaza, where it has reduced Hamas to ashes at the cost of tens of thousands of Palestinian lives.
There has never been a more propitious moment for a comprehensive peace plan, nor a more urgent one—including for the Palestinians. In the past 20 months Israel has devastated Iran's malign control of a crescent of militias and client regimes in the region. Now it has weakened the other pillar of its defiance of America and the West: its nuclear programme. Iran was always an obstacle to the 'prosperity agenda' of the Gulf states. Now is a good time to discover if that has changed.
Even if Mr Trump offers all this, Iran could nonetheless prefer to cause mayhem. Its leaders have just been humiliated. They were already unpopular at home, and have now left their people open to attack. The regime may calculate that, if it does not strike back, the coming months could bring a palace coup or a challenge from the streets.
That would put America in a quandary. If Iran killed a lot of Americans Mr Trump would be forced to respond. His war aims would shift to requiring Iran to stop attacking, or even to demanding regime change. And yet, using air power alone, even America would struggle to impose either of those. An operation with the welcome aim of stopping nuclear proliferation could thereby end up accelerating it. How much better for Mr Trump, after a dazzling display of American power, to pour all his efforts into seeking diplomacy without delay.
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