There Is No One-and-Done on Iran
Donald Trump's decision to bomb Iran's hard-to-reach nuclear site at Fordow couldn't have worked out better. Operationally, it was flawless, and the response it drew from Iran was the best the US president could have hoped for — bloodless and de-escalatory by design. Most important of all, Trump then tried to bounce Israel and Tehran into a ceasefire. Kudos where it's due.
And yet, this is not over. There will be more tough decisions for the White House to make, with profound implications for the cause of nuclear non-proliferation.
The problem here isn't that the ceasefire announced on Monday night was breached within hours. That's hardly unusual and, in this case, there's a good chance it takes hold over the coming days. Israel has run through most if not all of its target list; Iran is running low on ways to meaningfully respond without putting the regime's survival at risk. Even so, we aren't where Trump says we are.
Trump says his ceasefire will hold for all time, but there will be no forever-peace between the Islamic Republic and Israel. No doubt, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his politically powerful generals will take time to regroup and lick their wounds. They've suffered a severe military humiliation and there will be some form of reckoning at home. But hostility to Israel is in their political DNA. There is no one-and-done here.
Nor has Iran's nuclear program been wiped from the face of the earth, never to be rebuilt, as Trump claims. Let's say all the enrichment equipment at the sites that the US and Israel bombed over the last 10 days have indeed been destroyed. That's as-yet unknown except to the Iranians, but it seems very plausible. The point, however, has always been that Iran has the know-how and capacity to replace whatever gets destroyed.
We also don't know the whereabouts of Iran's stockpile of uranium enriched to 60%, a short step to weapons grade. Nor can even Mossad be sure there are no sites that were missed because they simply weren't known. These are just some of the reasons for which US presidents resisted bombing Iran's nuclear program in the past, preferring to achieve delays and visibility through diplomacy.
In other words, the risk that Iran acquires a nuclear arsenal remains. It will continue until the day that either this regime or a successor decides not to pursue one. And right now, there's no doubt — even if hardline officials weren't saying so in public — that the argument for Iran to get itself a nuclear deterrent has never been more compelling. Nobody, after all, is bombing North Korea.
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