When Vice President JD Vance appeared on Meet the Press on Sunday morning, anchor Kristen Welker asked him a simple question: Is the United States now at war with Iran?
In response, Vance said, “We're not at war with Iran; we're at war with Iran’s nuclear program.”
The Trump administration does not want to admit it has begun a war, because wars have a way of escalating beyond anyone’s control. It is easy to see how these initial strikes could escalate into something much bigger. It’s also possible neither occurs, and this stays as limited as currently advertised.
I don’t know how bad things will get — or even if things are likely to get worse. But there are at least three different ways that the American attack on Iran could escalate.
1) “Finishing the job”
We do not know just how much damage American bombs have done to their targets — Iranian enrichment facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. Satellite imagery shows that there are above-ground buildings still standing, but many of the targets are underground.
If the damage is relatively limited, the Trump administration will face two bad choices: either let a clearly furious Iran retain operational nuclear facilities, raising the risk that they dash for a nuclear weapon, or keep bombing until the attacks have done sufficient damage to prevent Iran from getting a weapon in the immediate future.
That commits the United States to, at minimum, an indefinite bombing campaign inside Iran.
But even if this attack did do real damage, that leaves the question of the program’s long-term future. Iran could decide, after being attacked, that the only way to protect itself is to rebuild its nuclear program in a hurry and get a bomb. Ensuring that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei doesn’t make such a choice would require a diplomatic agreement or a war of regime change aimed at overthrowing the Iranian government.
The first isn’t impossible, but it certainly seems unlikely. The US and Iran were negotiating on its nuclear program when Israel began bombing Iranian targets, seemingly using the talks as cover to catch Iran off guard. That leaves a full-on war of regime change. My colleague Josh Keating has argued, convincingly, that Israel wants such an outcome. And some of Donald Trump’s allies, including Sens. Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham, have openly called for it.
Such a dire outcome seems, at present, very distant. But the further Trump continues down a hawkish path on Iran, the more thinkable it will become.
2) A US-Iran cycle of violence
Iran’s actions could force American escalation — and there are two things that are more likely to now be on the table.
The first is an attack on US servicemembers stationed in the Middle East. Iraq, in particular, is home to several Iranian-aligned militias that could be ordered to attack American troops in the country or across the border in Syria.
The second is an attack on international shipping lanes, such as an attempt to use missiles and naval assets to close the Strait of Hormuz, a Persian Gulf passage used by roughly 20 percent of global oil shipping by volume.
In his Saturday speech, Trump promised that if Iran retaliates, “future [American] attacks will be far greater and a lot easier.” But we do not know whether Iran is willing to take such risks — or even if they can.
3) Things fall apart
Escalation isn’t a given. It is possible that the US and its Israeli partners remain satisfied with one American bombing run, and that the Iranians are too scared or weak to engage in any major response.
But those are a whole lot of “ifs.” Key decision points are ahead, like whether Trump orders another round of US raids on Fordow or Iran tries to close the Strait of Hormuz — and it’s hard to know which choices the key actors in Washington, Tehran, and Jerusalem will make.
I keep thinking about the 2003 Iraq war in part for obvious reasons: the US attacking a Middle Eastern dictatorship based on flimsy intelligence claims about weapons of mass destruction. But the other parallel, perhaps a deeper one, is that the architects of the Iraq War had little-to-no understanding of the second-order consequences of their choices.
There was so much they didn’t know, both about Iraq as a country and the likely consequences of regime change more broadly, that they failed to grasp just how much of a quagmire the war might become until it had already sucked in the United States. It’s over 20 years later, and boots are still on the ground — drawn in by events, like the creation of ISIS, that were direct results of the initial decision to invade.
Attacking Iran, even with the more “modest” aim of destroying its nuclear program, carries similar risks. The attack carries so many potential consequences, involving so many different countries and constituencies, that it’s hard to even begin to try and account for all the potential risks that might cause further US escalation.
It’s possible, despite all of this, that the Trump administration has adequately gamed out their choices here — preparing for all reasonably foreseeable contingencies and capable of acting swiftly in the (inevitable) event that some response catches the world by surprise. But if they didn’t, then things could go badly and tragically wrong.
