Nuclear Ambitions?

Oh hey I wonder why Iran wants a nuke?

American intelligence agencies believe that Iran’s new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, is far more interested than his father and predecessor in pursuing a nuclear weapon, according to officials briefed on the assessments.

Ayatollah Khamenei’s father, who was killed at the start of the war in an Israeli attack aided by U.S. intelligence, had sworn off developing a nuclear weapon. While American officials long asserted that Iran wanted to be capable of building a nuclear weapon, many believed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s hesitancy was genuine.

His successor has never publicly called for Iran to build a nuclear weapon. But U.S. intelligence agencies believe that Mojtaba Khamenei and the harder-line government that emerged after the United States and Israel killed many of Iran’s previous leaders have ambitions to develop advanced nuclear weaponry.

I have never seen a war pursued with less enthusiasm on either side:

The war between the United States and Iran remained on pause for a second straight day on Sunday, while the Iranian Foreign Ministry said that there had been some movement in talks between Tehran and mediators over the Strait of Hormuz.

No U.S. strikes on Iran have been reported since Friday, while Iran has similarly held off attacking American allies around the Middle East after about two weeks of skirmishes brought the two countries back to the brink of full-blown war.

President Trump decided last week to put off plans to escalate the U.S. assault on Iran, at least for now, according to U.S. officials. Mr. Trump and his aides were motivated in part by dwindling stockpiles of interceptors to shoot down Iranian missiles, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.

This conflict and the Russia-Ukraine conflict have demonstrated, in different ways, how difficult war termination can be in practice. In both cases both of the combatants have effectively given up on decisively achieving their war aims; Ukraine knows that it won’t get all of its territory back, Russia knows that it won’t displace the Kyiv government, Iran knows that it has suffered substantial damage, and the US has pretty much given up on regime change. And yet the conflicts continue over increasingly small stakes, largely because the aggressor powers (the US and Russia) can’t quite come to grips with how to manage the internal political process of admitting that war aims are beyond military means. I genuinely do believe that Trump wants peace more than Putin (Putin care about Ukraine and Trump doesn’t give a shit about anything) but Trump also has less control over the situation than Putin, in part because he has hamstrung the US diplomatic corps.

On this last thought… while there are important exceptions, there’s really not enough study of the dynamics of diplomatic negotiation in the field of international relations, just as I am told that the study of diplomatic history has declined. With respect to the former political scientists have preferred to study things that are more observable than semi-secret diplomatic negotiations, more or less treating formal diplomatic negotiations as an intervening variable when it’s treated as a variable at all. This is to say that basic military, political, and economic factors set the terms for war termination, and the professional diplomatic corps simply executes those terms, rather than playing an independent role. I know less of the latter but the turn against diplomatic history has, to my understanding, been part of the broader turn against top-down, elite driven approaches to politics.

I think we’re being reminded in real time that the diplomatic process plays an important independent role in war termination, meaning that wars may continue despite the fact that not very many people want the war to continue, because finding appropriate grounds for agreement and useful mechanisms for compliance is actually, like, hard and stuff. It is not enough, as Trump believes, to simply cut through the red tape and make a handshake deal. Conversely, complaining that perfumed diplomats spend too much time arguing about the size and shape of the negotiating table misses out on the real problems associated with how the structure of talks has an impact on outcomes.

Food for thought.