It’s difficult to believe how misguided, counter-productive and dangerous American foreign policy has become under Trump. It’s even harder to believe it could get much worse. But it could – much, much worse.
While still unlikely, Trump has one more card to play, and it’s a big one. Given that Iran’s leadership and population seem immune to the sorts of conventional attacks formerly thought to induce shock and awe, perhaps Trump will finally follow through on his threat to bomb Iran back to the stone ages.
There’s one easy way to do this, which only the US has ever done before: use nuclear weapons. Thankfully, that still sounds unlikely, but if there’s one thing we know about Trump, it’s that he doesn’t like to be humiliated and he’s never been constrained by the norms of appropriate behaviour or polite society, even the international variety.
Despite Trump claiming that operation ‘Midnight Hammer’ had resulted in the ‘complete and total obliteration’ of Iran’s nuclear potential capabilities, clearly that is not the case. On the contrary, Trump’s threats to bomb Pickaxe Mountain, thought to be a key element of Iran’s remaining nuclear enrichment capacity, demonstrates that Trump thinks the threat Iran supposedly poses remains real.
Unfortunately for the Americans, the facilities are buried beneath solid granite, hundreds of metres thick, making it difficult to destroy – unless you had a big enough bomb, of course. So-called ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons, designed for battlefield use, are anywhere between 0.1 to 50 kilotons. The one dropped on Hiroshima was ‘only’ 15 kilotons.
The comparatively small size of tactical nukes – large ones are up to 800 kilotons – means that they are increasingly thought of as being ‘usable’, as Vladimir Putin never tires of reminding us. (The Center for Arms Control and Non-proliferation disagrees.) But surely no one would break the ‘nuclear taboo’ that has kept us safe from the apocalyptic prospect of total great power war? Perhaps. And yet the presumed effectiveness of nuclear deterrence may be over, some argue.
Policymakers in this country might care to remember as they enthusiastically offer to host American nuclear-powered and armed submarines that deterrence only works until it doesn’t. Our principal ally has become the most dangerous country in the world, and Trump is regarded as a ‘one-man weapon of mass destruction’. With friends like these…
No doubt apologists for the alliance and American strategy will claim that we have no ‘realistic’ choice other than to continue with strategic business as usual. After all, the Americans haven’t used nuclear weapons since 1945, so they’re not likely to start now, right?
Let’s hope so. But who would bet against Trump being constrained by morality, or anything else for that matter? In Trump’s mind there may be some potential payoffs in nuking his implacable foe, whom he describes as ‘scum’, It would certainly end all those jibes about ‘Trump always chickens out’. With looming mid-term elections, which are expected to be dire for the Republicans, he’d also have a perfect excuse for ‘postponing’ them, if the US was involved in a nuclear war.
No doubt this will strike many readers as entirely fanciful scare-mongering. Let’s hope they’re right. But someone who revels in the idea of himself as the most powerful man in history and believes that God’s ‘very proud’ of him is possibly not who you’d want in charge of America’s nuclear arsenal – especially as that really does make him the most powerful man that ever lived.
At this point in American history, perhaps the only thing that can stop Trump’s increasingly unhinged, impulsive, destabilising and unprecedented approach to ‘grand strategy’ is the refusal of those charged with carrying out his orders to go along with them. Don’t hold your breath.
All militaries rely on the chain of command and the willingness of subordinates to carry out their orders, no matter what they may be. There is little suggestion of pushback from the American military, despite Secretary of War Pete Hegseth ridiculing senior officers or Trump sending in the national guard to police American cities.
Perhaps, like Australian and other allied policymakers, they are waiting for the US to go back to ‘normal’ after Trump departs the political stage. But the changes Trump has already made domestically and the actions he is taking internationally suggest that we can no longer be confident that will happen. On the contrary, it seems nothing will stop Trump’s pursuit of untrammelled power and his ability to wield it domestically and internationally.
Mark Beeson is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Technology Sydney and Griffith University. His latest book is Environmental Anarchy? International Relations Theory and Practice in the Anthropocene, (Bristol University Press: 2021) He has also written Environmental Populism: The Politics of Survival; in the Anthropocene Palgrave 2019