According to The Wall Street Journal, Trump is considering military action against Iran’s nuclear facilities:
President-elect Donald Trump is weighing options for stopping Iran from being able to build a nuclear weapon, including the possibility of preventive airstrikes, a move that would break with the longstanding policy of containing Tehran with diplomacy and sanctions.
The surest way to convince the Iranian government to build nuclear weapons is to attack their nuclear facilities. In addition to being reckless and wrong, “preventive” military action would practically guarantee the outcome that hawks say they want to prevent. The only thing stupider than using force to eliminate a non-existent threat is using force to create a threat that wouldn’t have existed otherwise.
An attack on Iran’s facilities would also likely trigger a larger conflict, as the Iranian government would feel compelled to retaliate against U.S. forces and U.S. clients in the region. A direct conflict between the U.S. and Iran would almost certainly be costlier and last longer than anyone expects right now.
Attacking Iran would be foolish and dangerous, but above all it is unnecessary. Trump and his advisers are “weighing options” for stopping Iran from doing something that it isn’t doing. Iran hasn’t had a nuclear weapons program for 21 years. In spite of everything that the U.S. and Israel have done to goad them into pursuing a bomb, the Iranian government has not decided to build these weapons.
Iran’s allies have been significantly weakened or deposed in the last year, so it doesn’t come as a surprise that the people that always have wanted war with Iran see an opportunity to attack. That doesn’t make the idea of attacking Iran any less insane than it has been for the last twenty years. No American interests are served by such an attack. No Americans should be put in harm’s way for this bad cause.
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Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.