The U.S. aerial strike against Iran was conducted under such unique circumstances that it offers as many questions as lessons.
The Israeli air campaign, conducted exclusively with fighter jets, had so crippled Iran’s air defenses that American B-2 Stealth bomber crews were almost assured of safe passage. The goal of the raid was significant but circumscribed: raze several nuclear sites. Given Iran’s weakened condition, the possibility of an immediate military response was slight.
Modern history doesn’t offer many examples where so much appears to have been achieved at so little cost. The cease-fire Israel and Iran agreed to on Tuesday underscores the seeming triumph. Credit President Trump for pulling the trigger, but it was less a profile in courage than a shot at easy pickings.
That said, Iran’s rulers might find a way next week, next month, next year to exact deadly revenge. Or perhaps the humiliation of the mullahs will inspire the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow the repressive theocratic dictatorship.
Anyone who tells you they know what the future holds is blowing smoke. Science may have greatly empowered us to predict what will happen in the natural world, but emotional, often irrational, humanity remains a deep mystery.
History is as much the story of miscalculation as calculation. The story of what people did is often shrouded in the riddle of why they did it. If the British had pressed their advantage in Brooklyn in 1776 or the Nazis had done the same against the British at Dunkirk in 1941, our world might be very different.
Today, Ronald Reagan is hailed for his role in ending the Cold War. But the demise of the Soviet Union wasn’t written in the stars. What if Reagan’s aggressive words and deeds had left Soviet Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrv fearful to the point where he trusted a malfunctioning Soviet early warning system and followed protocol and launched a retaliatory nuclear strike instead of waiting and seeing that the Americans had not launched its weapons? Just because these things didn’t happen doesn’t mean they couldn’t have.
Consider the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, which many critics of the U.S. attack on Iran have invoked as the colossal mistake that should have warned us off more meddling in the Middle East. There is no disputing the loss of lives and treasures and the political turmoil that followed. But what would the world look like if the U.S. had allowed Saddam Hussein to remain in power? What if he had revitalized his frightening chemical weapons program – or realized his own plans to obtain nuclear weapons? Or, more likely, if he had continued to say he would get them? What price would he have demanded to keep his program in check? What mischief might he have fomented with the ransom paid? We will never know for sure because of the U.S. invasion.
Such speculation does suggest a silver lining to the colossal mistake – one that may provide some guidance about how the U.S. and its allies might proceed regarding Iran.
If recent history teaches us anything, it is that the mere threat of acquiring nukes is almost as good as possessing these weapons. Fears of what Iran might do with that horrific technology gave them tremendous leverage.
Critics of the recent attack, for example, are arguing that Trump created the very problem he thunderously addressed by pulling out of the Iran deal that President Obama negotiated in 2015. Writing in the New York Times this week, former Secretary of State Antony Blinken asserted, “The nuclear deal effectively put Iran’s program to make fissile material, the fuel for a nuclear weapon, in a lockbox, with stringent procedures for monitoring Iran’s nuclear program.”
What Blinken didn’t mention is the stiff price paid for that lockbox – the release of billions of dollars that Iran used to support terror. One of Iran’s clients was Hamas, which perpetrated the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, sparking the terrible war in Gaza. But what if instead of orchestrating the Iran deal, the Obama administration had imposed the suffocating sanctions Trump later imposed on Iran? Might we have been spared the current devastation in Gaza?
The war in Ukraine provides another data point. It was clear in the first few weeks of the invasion that the Russian bear was a paper tiger. The military that Vladimir Putin has reportedly ship-shaped for years was exposed as a corrupt mess.
Instead of seizing the opportunity to try to rid the world of Putin’s murderous regime, the U.S. and its NATO allies proceeded with fearful caution. Russia, after all, remains a nuclear power. We will never know if Putin would have responded to a vigorous counter-offensive through a suicidal launch of weapons. What we do know is the terrible price paid by the people of Ukraine and Russia because of the protracted war that he was allowed to pursue.
Amid conflicting reports about the effectiveness of the strikes against Iran’s nuclear program, Trump has correctly suggested that the challenge going forward is not just preventing Iran from creating these fearsome weapons, but from restarting its program to develop them. Achieving that would almost certainly involve unexpected consequences that could range from negligible to horrific. That is the true lesson of history.
RealClearPolitics published this column on June 26, 2025. Follow J. Peder Zane on X @jpederzane.
