'Reckless' Trump forces Iran's nuclear showdown

President Donald Trump’s ongoing showdown with Iran over its alleged nuclear arsenal is “reckless,” argued a pair of columnists in a Saturday editorial.

“Iran’s nuclear program has been severely damaged by U.S.-led air attacks over the past nine months,” wrote The New York Times’ national security contributor W.J. Hennigan and opinion editor Massimo Calabresi. “American officials and experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency believe the uranium has nonetheless survived.”

Because America is now at war with Iran, Hennigan and Calabresi argued, the question of Iranian uranium has been brought “to the fore,” making a “showdown” inevitable.

“If President Trump ends the war without getting control of the canisters, Iran will almost certainly speed toward going nuclear,” Hennigan and Calabresi wrote. “Grabbing it, on the other hand, would entail huge risk and the inevitable deployment of American or Israeli ground forces.”

Unfortunately for US interests, Hennigan and Calabresi assess the “very urgent problem” as having “no good options.” If America and Israel dispatch special force teams, “things could go terribly wrong” as they attempt to acquire nuclear weapons during an active war. The diplomatic approach, by contrast, may have become less feasible thanks to “the latest attacks,” especially given that “America and Iran have been negotiating over this question for more than a decade.”

The stakes of obtaining those uranium canisters could not be higher, the Times writers conclude.

“In a war filled with open questions, the fate of the Iranian uranium canisters is a terribly concrete determinant of what the future holds,” Hennigan and Calabresi write. “The nuclear question is likely to be the most consequential one, however it is solved. That may be the most reckless part of Mr. Trump’s attack on Iran: forcing a final resolution of the Iranian nuclear issue with no clear path to success.”

Trump himself has displayed a seemingly indifferent attitude toward the possibility of mass casualties. Mother Jones senior news and engagement editor Inae Oh wrote earlier this week that Trump has a “shruggy nihilism” toward the hundreds of Iranian deaths and ongoing American deaths, asking a question about whether there will be future US casualties by saying “I guess.”

The president then added, “But I think they’re worried about that all the time. We think about it all the time. We plan for it. But yeah, you know, we expect some things. Like I said, some people will die. When you go to war, some people will die.”

The Iran war is also having a negative impact on the US economy.

"The bad news comes in two parts," wrote economist Paul Krugman for The New York Times earlier this week. "First, any hopes that this war might be extremely brief are fading. The Trump Administration may have imagined that decapitating the Iranian government would bring swift regime change, but the Islamic state isn't a government of mere thugs — yes, they're evil thugs, but they're also serious religious fanatics facing what, for them, is an existential threat. And their grip on power isn't that easy to break…. Second, war in the middle of the world's most important oil-producing region — which is also a key source of liquefied natural gas — inevitably has major consequences for energy prices."