Or: Where “Swagger” Gets You
When John Bolton was appointed National Security Advisor in April 2018 I was deeply alarmed. Just a year before he had given a paid speech at a National Council for Resistence in Iran event where he proclaimed that soon they would celebrate “in Tehran.” A short time later the United States pulled out of the JCPOA. Anti-JCPOA and pro-war actors (who I like to call “The Swagger Caucus”) inside and outside government were ecstatic, surely this meant that the U.S. was ready to get finally “get tough” on Iran, and that the glorious cathartic downfall of that hateful government was close at hand. Hysterical wonks, myself among them, warned that a catastrophic war was on the horizon. Iraq, but with an ’n’, and a thousand times worse.
Except that it wasn’t, and despite what the left-leaning media/think tank sphere would have you believe, it isn’t. In the fevered imagination of the Swagger Caucus, pulling out of the JCPOA would lead to renewed sanctions, which would lead either (a) Iran completely capitulating before their raw masculine prowess and agreeing to a deal with terms even more humiliating than those of the JCPOA, or (b) renewed sanctions leading to the Iranian government’s collapse via some combination of internal and external pressures.
Given the Swagger Caucus’s bloodthirsty rhetoric, its members occupying major seats of power, and Trump’s erratic nature, it made sense to be concerned. But for the sake of good analysis, not to mention my blood pressure, I should have more seriously considered option (c), the JCPOA pull-out leaving the U.S. so completely isolated that Iran could poke it in the eye over and over again and the U.S. would be powerless to stop it. The list of Iranian provocations since the JCPOA pull-out grows ever longer while the list of U.S. responses to those provocations remains at zero, the “tough” words of NSA Bolton and Sec. Swagger Pompeo notwithstanding. I say this with confidence because, in one of history’s most absurd ironies, while the U.S. unconvincingly pretends it’s ready to go to war with Iran to stop its nuclear program, it is simultaneously beginning the process of legitimizing the nuclear program of North Korea which, in the early 00's, was in an virtually identical position as Iran is today, except instead of the JCPOA it was the Agreed Framework, and instead of John Bolton it was, well, actually it was still John Bolton.
The Agreed Framework was a U.S.-DPRK deal signed during the Clinton administration in which the DPRK would stop trying to develop nuclear weapons in exchange for economic benefits and a free civilian nuclear power reactor. The impetus for the AF was the DPRK getting unambiguously caught trying to develop nuclear weapons, in violation of global norms and its NPT commitments. The AF staggared through the entirety of the Clinton administration, and was killed (largely at Bolton’s behest) shortly after Bush took office due to a minor but real violation of the AF’s terms. Bolton did this (at the time he was Undersecretary of State for Arms Control) becuase he was convinced that once the weenie-liberal AF was out of the way, the U.S. would “get tough” on the DPRK with more sanctions and even military strikes, and the DPRK would either capitulate or collapse or both. Instead the DPRK began a campaign of repeated provocation including but not limited to nuclear and missile testing to which the U.S. had no practical way to respond, and this campaign reached its conclusion in 2017 when the DPRK (probably) demonstrated the capability to hit the U.S. with a nuclear tipped ICBM.
Bolton lays out his reasoning for destroying the AF in his (highly entertaining and worth reading) memoir Surrender is not an Option, and he (without realizing it) reveals he was mostly motivated by a vague sense that all treaties interfer with American sovreignty and are therefor bad, and a desire to get one over on his bureaucratic enemies. There is a great deal of near pornographic description of how sad his rivals looked at meetings where he came out on top, and virtually no mention of what he thought the U.S.’s course of action should be after the AF was gone. I don’t know if Bolton had a course of action in mind but I’m will to bet that if he did it wasn’t the U.S. impotently watching for over a decade as the DPRK built up a credible nuclear deterrent (which, it must be stressed, the DPRK was not doing prior to the dissolution of the AF), which is what actually ended up happening. Surrender, thanks to Bolton’s arrogance and short-sightedness, became the only option. So it shall be with Iran.
The most recent Iranian provocation which the U.S. will fail to respond to is the announcement that Iran will exceed the JCPOA’s limit on the amount of LEU it can stockpile. This is a symbolic provocation that doesn’t mean much for Iran’s latent bomb-making capability; it is nowhere near as serious as Iran’s detonation of explosives on civilian ships Strait of Hormuz. The main purpose of those two provocations is to pressure other JCPOA parties into taking more meaningful action to circumvent the sanctions reimposed by the U.S. I cannot predict to what extent Iran will succeed, but I can predict that no matter what the other JCPOA parties do, the U.S. will bloviate, but ultimately do nothing except sanction entities that have already been sanctioned, and try to improve sanctions enforcement. The U.S. will do nothing kinetic because it has no allies that are willing to back it up (though I’m sure some Gulf State muckity mucks would Tweet supportively from their penthouse shelters in the Seychelles). The fact that U.S. allies won’t even publically acknowledge the unambiguous fact that it was Iran who comitted the recent bombings in the Strait of Hormuz shows just how little back up the U.S. has thanks to the go-it-alone attitude of the Swagger Caucus.
Those who disagree with my thesis that war with Iran is very unlikely will probably point to the fact that Trump only at the last minute called off a strike Bolton was pushing for in response to the downing of a U.S. drone. That strike, so the narrative goes, could have killed many Iranians, and thus could have lead to an action-reaction cycle that could have spiraled into war. My response is that (a) even if the strike had happened and it had caused an action-reaction cycle, both Trump and Iran have repeatedly publicly indicated a desire for that potential cycle to stop somewhere well short of a U.S. invasion, and (b) the strike didn’t, in fact, happen.
The present danger for war, such as it is, comes almost entirely from the potential for Iran to do something truly crazy. It could hurt or kill some civilians in the Strait of Hormuz or one of its Scuds fired from Yemen could actually hit something in Saudi Arabia, but U.S. recrimination would likely stop short of regime change. By my inexpert gut-level calculation, Iran would have to do something that left triple-digits of Americans dead before it was in serious danger of a U.S. invasion (in no small part because if Iran did do something so vicious international opinion would swing back into U.S. favor and it would no longer be isolated). But until that happens all of the talk of the U.S. being just about to try to topple the Iranian regime, whether it’s from the liberal-press or the Swagger Caucus, will be limited to talk, because the U.S. is simply too isolated to act.
In other words, don’t be terrified of war with Iran tomorrow, be concerned about how isolated the U.S. is today.
