The Dangerous Consequences of Donald Trump’s Strikes in Iran

President Donald Trump brought the United States on Saturday to the War of Israel against Iran on Saturday. American plans and submarines have struck three sites in Iran, including two nuclear enrichment facilities – in Natanz and Fordow – and a complex close to Isfahan which contained uranium reserves. The Israeli government had pushed Trump to strike, in part because the Fordow site was considered accessible only with American planes and weapons. Before Israel’s attack on Iran, who started a little over a week ago, Trump had repeatedly declared that he wanted to conclude a nuclear agreement with Iran, despite his first mandate, having withdrawn the United States from the Barack Obama nuclear agreement with the country.

On Saturday evening, in a television address, Trump said that the three sites were “completely and completely deleted”, and said that Iran should now “make peace”, warn more attacks if this was not the case. The real extent of damage is not yet known, and it is not clear if and how Iran will be retaliated. (Trump had announced Thursday that the decision to know if it was necessary to strike would be taken “within two weeks” and that there was a possibility of negotiation.)

Late Saturday, I spoke by phone with James M. Acton, president and co -director of the nuclear policy program at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. During our conversation, which was published for duration and clarity, we explained why a successful strike could do less damage to the Iranian nuclear program than the Trump administration hopes that it will do so, if the action could lead to a greater conflict with Iran and why Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Nuclear Agreement of Obama destroyed the best chances of limiting the nuclear program of Iran.

What are your first impressions of what happened tonight?

I am a little dismayed, to be honest, as an American citizen – I applied that the president would begin military action without authorization from the congress. This is my immediate reaction. But, as an analyst of nuclear policy, I am very worried that it is the beginning of a prolonged conflict, not the end of one.

Why then?

In a large part of the coverage I saw, and in a large part of the plea for what President Trump ended up doing tonight, there was the impression that it would be a unique thing – the president would authorize a strike, Fordow would be destroyed, the Iranian nuclear program would be finished, and it would be a very rapid and completely decisive military intervention. There are two reasons why I think it’s bad. The first is immediate Iranian reprisals. Iran has many short -range ballistic missiles that can reach American bases and American assets in the region. Israel has not particularly targeted this infrastructure. It was mainly focused on Iranian missiles which can reach Israel. So I expect to see attempts at fairly dramatic reprisals by Iran, and I think it exerts enormous pressure on the president to react again. This is the first path to immediate short -term climbing.

A little more in the longer term, I think it is very likely that Iran will reconstruct its nuclear program. I think Iran is likely to withdraw from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (TNP) and thus launch inspectors. The TNP prohibits non -nuclear states, such as Iran, to acquire nuclear weapons, and forces them to accept the guarantees of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), such as inspections, to verify this commitment. This places us in the position where an American president or Israel could start to strike Iran over and over.

I do not want to speculate on the success of these strikes, but, if the strikes did what Trump claimed, how many blows would it be on the Iranian nuclear program?

My answer can be slightly unsatisfactory, but it depends on the quantity of others. There are two key things that worry me. The problem is not only to destroy the fixed sites. Iran also had a pile of highly enriched uranium which would formerly be stored in tunnels under Isfahan. And the Iranians said they had removed this material. And then, second, there are a whole bunch of components for the construction of centrifugal which were monitored when the Complete Complete Action Plan (JCPOA) was applied and is no longer monitored.

The JCPOA is the 2015 nuclear agreement, which was negotiated by the Obama administration, and which exchanged a decrease in sanctions for Iran for nuclear inspections and the limits of enrichment, and from which Trump retired in 2018.

Exactly. If highly enriched uranium and centrifuge components are small, it means that they are portable. They can be moved across the country; They can be hidden. So, if what the United States has done is destroying the major sites we know, the enrichment facilities, but have not destroyed highly enriched uranium and the components of the centrifuge, I think that Iran can probably reconstruct relatively quickly, perhaps in one or two years. It is very difficult to devote an exact moment on this subject. If the operations have succeeded in destroying part of highly enriched uranium, or all highly enriched uranium and the components of the centrifuge, then the reconstruction calendar is probably longer. What I would emphasize is that in any scenario, the reconstruction calendar will be much shorter than the ten to fifteen years of the JCPOA, that is to say how long the agreement should last. It should also be noted that people maintain that the JCPOA was a bad deal because only lasted so long. Even it was a bit misleading.

For what?

Because some parts of the JCPOA lasted twenty years, some lasted twenty-five years, some were in fact indefinite. It was actually a fairly complicated arrangement, the way the JCPOA gradually removed over time. The limits of enrichment and uranium-stockle sizes have lasted ten or fifteen years. AIEA’s right to monitor the centrifuge components lasted twenty years. The ban on arms activities had no time. But, even in the ten to fifteen years that have often been mentioned, we are probably dealing with a reconstruction calendar in a scenario which is much shorter than that.

A central point that you have raised, that I have seen in the past, is that the alternative to this strike and the Israeli action was not nothing but in fact the agreement that Trump left in 2018. Did this agreement succeed?

I think the JCPOA worked very well. The US intelligence community has assessed that Iran was complying with the agreement. The Iranian program was strongly limited and it was strongly inspected. In my opinion, it worked very well when Trump retired. And I think there was a thin but real opportunity for diplomacy in the past few days. Obviously, there was no possibility of reconstructing the JCPOA, but you had this interesting situation where Israel had started an attack; He couldn’t destroy everything in Iran, including, but without limiting himself, Fordow, and American threats gave Trump a certain lever effect. And Trump sometimes seemed interested in trying to use this lever effect to negotiate. I think there was a kind of window for diplomacy there. I’m just very sad that this window was never taken, and there was no good test attempt to take advantage of it.

The lack of good faith came from Trump, or from Iranians too?

We don’t know. But what I would emphasize is that a serious negotiation cannot be carried out in forty-eight hours or as long as Trump announced that he was going to give the possibility of diplomacy. He said this week that he would make a decision within two weeks. My feeling is therefore that there has never been a real attempt on the part of the United States to follow this and try to negotiate a kind of diplomatic regulations here.