The Reality TV reveal version of war-planning and everything that is going on right now in the White House is so crazy I don’t know what to say about it. I’m reduced to trying to piece together what the various parties to the conflict and those adjacent to it may want or be trying to accomplish. I think TPM Reader JS is on to something in the email I just published a few moments ago. To the extent Trump may look to the Saudis and Emiratis as to what to do they may want him to finish this. When I responded to JS I told him that I agreed but with a major caveat. Even in the Move Fast and Break Things MBS era I think being a Gulf royal means being scared. Luck and geology made them fabulously wealthy and in part because of that wealth able to sustain deeply archaic political systems in which they have close to absolute power. That status is precarious. It’s one thing to build an anti-Iran coalition or an anti-Iran alliance with Israel. Blowing up Iranian state is a very different and profoundly dangerous and unpredictable proposition.
I hope that if the US is going to involve itself it will be solely to use American munitions to destroy the Iranian nuclear facilities. I think there’s a real chance that once we get involved Trump’s enthusiasm and encouragement from his hardliners will push him to go in the full regime change direction. I get the sense the Israelis are drifting in that direction too. That would be catastrophic at a level it’s hard to contemplate. But even if the US goals are narrowly focused on the nuclear facilities that could still lead to the overthrow of the Iranian state or some level of state collapse. Once the biggest military power on the globe rolls out its big strategic bombers and lets loose with the biggest conventional weapons it has, all bets are off. In general history tells us that populations hunker down and rally around even unpopular rulers. But once that much force, literal and consequential, gets brought to bear you truly don’t know where that ends up. That should scare us a lot. And I’m pretty sure it must scare the Saudis and all the other Gulf states a lot too.
One other thought that occurs to me points in a contrary direction. A lot of the contradictory things we hear about the Iranian nuclear program is a product of unclarity about the technicalities of how you make nuclear weapons. You can decide you don’t want to build a nuclear weapons but you’d still like to have all the parts on hand in case you decide you want them after all. That’s how I interpret this. If you listen closely to intelligence reports going back many years it seems clear that the US and other countries think that the Iranians were not trying to create nuclear warheads. That’s a big threshold to cross, one with a lot of consequences. But if you have all the parts (obviously speaking very loosely and in a simplified way) that still creates a threat to your adversaries.
I say all this to make the point that if the Iranians weren’t trying to build warheads before this you have to figure the experience of the last 18 months and especially the last week could change that calculus pretty decisively. So I wonder whether the Gulf states, notwithstanding the fears of chaos or unpredictable outcomes, may feel like the Israeli offensive has put in motion a train of events there’s simply no going back from.
