Donald Trump delivers remarks in the East Room of the White House. Photo by Getty Images
I’m sure I’m not the only one who has observed how Donald Trump has handled Israel’s war against Iran over the latter’s nuclear weapons program and experienced a sort of vertigo. Though for the most part Trump has adopted at least the posture of a man of peace in the Middle East, he ordered “bunker buster” bombs dropped onto two Iranian facilities. In light of this, how should we assess Trump? It’s a question that invites historical perspective.
One of the great ironies of modern times is that the threat of Armageddon that has been hanging over our heads for decades now actually has its origins in a failed program to develop nuclear weapons — Nazi Germany’s Uranverein, or Uranium Club. After getting wind of the project, the U.S. and its allies took measures to try to stop it. American and British bombers dropped their payloads onto a heavy water production plant in Nazi-occupied Norway, which was also raided by Norwegian commandos and British paratroopers.
The Nazis’ program ultimately failed because of a lack of key resources and foot-dragging by scientists who wanted to keep Hitler from acquiring an atomic bomb. Hitler lost interest in the project and it was scrapped in 1942, the same year the Americans began their Manhattan Project under J. Robert Oppenheimer and with the help of German émigré scientists. It took the Americans just three years to produce the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the start of an arms race that at the height of the Cold War saw the U.S. stockpiling 23,000 nuclear warheads, and the Soviet Union with about 40,000.
Global rivalry between the U.S. and the Soviets led to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. War was averted through back channels between Washington, D.C. and Moscow, negotiations, and compromise. Realization that nuclear war could annihilate humankind spawned a slew of agreements that were intended to keep the world safer, including the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which recognized five nuclear-armed states (the U.S., Russia, China, France, and the U.K.) and committed them to work toward disarmament, while non-nuclear states agreed not to pursue atomic weapons. Bilateral agreements between Washington and Moscow during the Cold War reduced their nuclear stockpiles. Israel, India and Pakistan never signed the NPT though they are known to possess nuclear weapons.
While opening up lines of communication, using back channels, and negotiating agreements on such steps as monitoring and compliance have helped limit the size of the world’s nuclear club, this approach hasn’t always worked. Starting in the 1990s, successive U.S. governments tried to reach deals with North Korea that would have prevented the rogue state from acquiring nuclear weapons but each effort ultimately collapsed. North Korea announced its withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 2003 and two years later admitted to having nuclear weapons.
International pressure, fear of attack by the U.S. military, and a besieged economy prompted Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi to abandon his weapons of mass destruction programs in 2003. The apartheid government of South Africa had secretly built nuclear weapons but dismantled them, hoping to overcome isolation on the world stage.
The use of military action against nations suspected of pursuing nuclear weapons has been rare, with the exception of Israel. In 1981, Israeli warplanes destroyed an unfinished nuclear reactor in Iraq. In 2007 the Israeli air force flattened a reactor in Syria.
Infamously, President George W. Bush justified his 2003 invasion of Iraq by claiming that it was in pursuit of nuclear and chemical weapons, but it turned out that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was not lying when he insisted he had dismantled those programs after losing the 1990-91 Gulf War to a U.S.-led coalition of nations.
Now it’s Donald Trump’s turn to deal with a nuclear crisis. His approach has been inconsistent, naïve and seemingly driven more by ego than anything else. He deserves credit for standing up to Benjamin Netanyahu by telling him to give negotiations with Iran some time to produce results, and by at first resisting the Israeli leader’s pleas that Trump order the use of America’s “bunker busting” bombs to penetrate and demolish the underground uranium enrichment facility at Fordow. But as Trump watched Netanyahu’s air force take out Iranian nuclear facilities and kill Iran’s military leadership, it seems as though he wanted a piece of the glory and ordered that the 30,000-pound bombs be dropped onto Fordow and another facility at Natanz. This apparently is the first time that the U.S. military has made a direct strike on a nuclear weapons facility since those World War II bomber raids on the Nazi heavy water plant in occupied Norway.
We are left with a paradox. The same man who derides NATO, cozies up to autocrats and hurls figurative firebombs at America’s democratic institutions is, for now, playing statesman in the world’s most volatile region. But what does this say about Trump’s strategy — if it can be called that? Is it instinct, opportunism, or something more calculated? Or does his adventurism in the Middle East boil down to a desire to expand his family’s business empire, and perhaps to pick up a Nobel Peace Prize along the way? For all his unpredictability, Trump’s entanglement in the Iran conflict has real consequences. It reshapes regional alliances, emboldens hawks in Tehran and Jerusalem alike, and forces U.S. diplomacy onto unstable footing. If this is peace through strength, it’s peace on a hair trigger.
A president doesn’t need doctrine or even sound policy to reshape the world. Sometimes, it’s what catches our messianic leader’s attention on Fox News. And that should terrify us.
