Operation Epic Fury will make it more difficult for the United States to conduct genuine diplomacy in the future.
A broad perspective toward the US attack on Iran and what led up to it yields three major impressions.
The first is how aggression—an offensive war of choice—seems to have become normalized in US policy discourse, as if it were no less innocent than a diplomatic demarche. Lest we forget, aggression is illegal. It violates Article 2 of the United Nations Charter. The Nuremberg Tribunal of 1946 called aggression the “supreme international crime.” And that is in addition to the illegality under domestic law of the war that the administration just launched.
The Iraq War that the George W. Bush administration launched 23 years ago moved the Overton Window regarding aggression. That war was the first major offensive war that the United States had begun in over a century, since the Spanish-American War of 1898. Every overseas US military operation in the 20th century was either a minor intervention, such as those in Grenada and Panama, or, in larger operations, a response to another country’s aggression.
A second impression is how remarkably little effort the Trump administration has made to justify its war against Iran. In this respect, it is far different from the Iraq War. The Bush administration preceded that endeavor with a sustained sales campaign aimed at both domestic and international audiences, featuring multiple presidential speeches.
In contrast, President Donald Trump had offered, prior to the attack last weekend, only the most casual utterances about how awful he considered the Iranian regime to be. Four days before the attack, he delivered a State of the Union address that, despite its record-breaking length, included only a brief passage on Iran. That passage contained some of the usual Trumpian falsehoods, such as an assertion that Iran is building missiles “that will soon reach the United States of America.”
Despite repeating his earlier assertion that US airstrikes had “obliterated” Iran’s “nuclear weapons program” in airstrikes last June, the only specific demand Trump mentioned that Iran could meet as an alternative to war was in this sentence: “We are in negotiations with them; they want to make a deal but we haven’t heard those secret words: ‘We will never have a nuclear weapon.’” No secret words are necessary. Iran has repeatedly and publicly disavowed any intention to build a nuclear weapon.
Perhaps the lack of effort to make a case for the war is just another example of Trump’s presumption to do whatever he wants without restraint or need for justification. Perhaps that lack reflects the weakness of any case for this war.
Iran’s nuclear program was not obliterated by Operation Midnight Hammer last June, but it was severely damaged. Since then, Iran has not been enriching uranium, and abstaining from such enrichment is probably the single most frequently mentioned US demand regarding Iran’s nuclear activities. As of last week, Iran was nowhere close to having a nuclear weapon, taking into account both the status of fissile material and the other engineering tasks needed to build such a weapon if Iran chose to do so—and there is no evidence that it had so chosen.
Internal repression in Iran is another issue that was mentioned in connection with a possible US attack, as when Trump said during widespread street demonstrations in January that Iranians should “keep protesting” because “help is on the way.” But a brutal regime crackdown quelled the protests weeks ago, and it is hard to see how the US military assault now does anything to protect either the lives or the cause of Iranian dissidents. This fact is reflected in statements from prominent reformist leaders such as former prime minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi and former parliamentary speaker Mehdi Karroubi, who have rejected any foreign intervention, including military intervention, while calling for constitutional change in Iran.
As for Iran’s ballistic missiles and relations with its regional nonstate allies (customarily mislabeled as “proxies”), any demands to restrain Iran, and Iran alone, lose sight of who has been attacking whom. Iran unsurprisingly rejects asymmetrical limits on its missile program, which it regards as an essential deterrent against attacks on itself. That is how it has used its missiles—in retaliation for aggression, including the US attack in Iraq in 2020 that killed prominent Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani, the unprovoked Israeli attack on Iran last June, and, of course, the most recent Israeli and US attacks on Iran. The Iranians have not used their missiles offensively, and it would be foolish for them to consider doing so.
The same picture prevails with the nonstate allies. Lebanese Hezbollah arose in direct response to an Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Palestinian resistance groups such as Hamas arose and have fought in direct response to the forceful Israeli subjugation of Palestinians. Aid to the Houthis became of significant interest to Iran only after Saudi Arabia launched a large-scale offensive against Yemen that helped to turn that country into a humanitarian disaster.
The third major impression is how the Trump administration, with its ominous warnings that “time is running out” and deployment of an “armada” to waters near Iran, created the image of a short-fuse crisis when the only crisis was of its own making. Iran was doing nothing, on the nuclear front or any other front, that implied urgency. There was no indication of any impending Iranian preemptive action, even in response to the US saber-rattling. The only respect in which Trump may have felt that time was running out was to get into his war before Congress held a debate on war powers this week.
Moreover, the diplomatic track for resolving differences with Iran was operating and open for further progress. Just two days before the United States and Israel attacked, US and Iranian negotiators held a six-hour round of talks in Geneva, following a couple of earlier rounds. Afterward, it was not just the Iranians but also the Omani foreign minister, who mediated the talks, who stated that significant progress had been made. A further round was scheduled to be held in Vienna and to include technical teams from both sides—generally a sign that enough progress had been made at the political level to start fashioning the details of an agreement.
All this time, Trump had repeatedly said, as he did in the State of the Union speech, that he favored a diplomatic settlement with Iran and that he believed the Iranians wanted a deal, which they surely did. It is not just the Iranians but other observers around the world who now will conclude that on the US side, the negotiations were a sham—an exercise at softening and deception that preceded a war Trump wanted all along.
This development damages US credibility in potential future negotiations—with any nation on any subject—and thus reduces the United States’ ability to use diplomacy to reach agreements beneficial to US interests. It will require a leap of faith on the part of any would-be foreign interlocutor to believe that the United States, at least during the current administration’s tenure, is entering a negotiation in good faith. Without good faith on the US side, the foreign state can see hazards in negotiations, such as appearing weak through concessions and giving up leverage without a promise of anything in return.
The foreigner may even have to consider how negotiations might mean giving up information that will be used in a military attack against them. This has been an issue in Iran’s dealings with the International Atomic Energy Agency, which Tehran suspects allowed sensitive information about Iranian nuclear facilities to get in the hands of Israel, which used it in targeting its attacks in June.
And what would-be mediator will offer his good offices when the Omani foreign minister was at best wasting his time and at worst was made to look like a fool?
The damage to the United States’ ability to exercise international influence extends not only to eliciting desirable behavior through negotiation but also to preventing undesirable behavior. A common mantra about deterrence is to talk about “restoring” it through military action. But deterrence has two parts, both of which must be present for it to work. The targeted country must believe not only that it will incur costs if it misbehaves, but also that it will not incur those costs if it cooperates.
A country will not be deterred if it believes it will be attacked even when it makes a constructive effort to resolve differences through negotiation. It will not be deterred when the attacker’s motives include escape from domestic difficulties at least as much as anything the foreign country does, or when an attacker seeks not cooperation but only weakness and chaos.
About the Author: Paul Pillar
Paul R. Pillar retired in 2005 from a 28-year career in the US intelligence community, in which his last position was as the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia. Earlier, he served in a variety of analytical and managerial positions, including as chief of analytic units at the CIA, covering portions of the Near East, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia. His most recent book is Beyond the Water’s Edge: How Partisanship Corrupts US Foreign Policy. He is also a contributing editor for The National Interest.
