Iran Policy Has Gone Postmodern

• U.S. Foreign Policy
• Iran
• Middle East and North Africa
• Steven A. Cook

One of my colleagues who often has a way with words described the recent debate about bomb damage to Iran’s three main nuclear sites as “asinine.” It was certainly that, especially since most of the folks involved in the discussion had no information other than what U.S. President Donald Trump claimed—“totally obliterated”—a few hours after U.S. bombers struck and a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) leak to CNN suggesting otherwise.

The vapid back-and-forth over the state of Iran’s nuclear program was worse than it seemed, however. Setting aside the obvious problem that the participants in the discussion lacked any hard data, the debate reflected the destructive tendency within the foreign-policy community—broadly defined as elected leaders, foreign-policy analysts, and journalists—to offer narrative at the expense of fact-driven explanations.

One of my colleagues who often has a way with words described the recent debate about bomb damage to Iran’s three main nuclear sites as “asinine.” It was certainly that, especially since most of the folks involved in the discussion had no information other than what U.S. President Donald Trump claimed—“totally obliterated”—a few hours after U.S. bombers struck and a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) leak to CNN suggesting otherwise.

The vapid back-and-forth over the state of Iran’s nuclear program was worse than it seemed, however. Setting aside the obvious problem that the participants in the discussion lacked any hard data, the debate reflected the destructive tendency within the foreign-policy community—broadly defined as elected leaders, foreign-policy analysts, and journalists—to offer narrative at the expense of fact-driven explanations.

This narrative-driven analysis, which inevitably produces separate realities for people based almost exclusively on their worldview, is bad for U.S. foreign policy. The idea that “politics stops at the water’s edge” is a hoary old idea dating back to the 1940s and U.S. Sen. Arthur Vandenberg. The way it is used today often strips away the nuance of Vandenburg’s original statement, which affirmed the importance of debate in developing unity of purpose in international affairs. Vandenberg would likely be aghast at present-day Washington. In the world in which we now live, there is no debate and no unity. Consequently, Washington is at risk of pursuing policies that are mismatched for the real-world challenges the United States confronts.

The principal culprit in the imbroglio concerning the damage the United States did to Iran’s nuclear facilities at Esfahan, Fordow, and Natanz was, of course, Trump. His statement on June 21 that Iran’s nuclear facilities had been destroyed was pure bombast. It is a tactic that Trump learned at his mentor Roy Cohn’s knee: No matter the circumstances, tell people something that serves your interest and do it repeatedly until your manufactured reality becomes their reality. There is simply no way that even the president could know the state of Iran’s nuclear facilities so soon after the operation. No doubt he knew the bombs hit their targets, but the extent of the damage at the time was unknown. This lack of information has never been a problem for Trump, though.

Then came the DIA leak, which indicated that the U.S. airstrikes set back Iran’s program by only a few months. Journalists, editors, foreign-policy experts, and the president’s political opponents jumped on this report as if it were definitive. It was not. The leak reflected a “low confidence” preliminary conclusion of only the DIA, not the intelligence community writ large. Additional intelligence suggested that Iran’s enriched uranium was likely out of reach, buried below badly damaged facilities. This would necessarily lengthen the timeline necessary for Iran to rebuild its program. This did not appear to matter to folks who seemed more interested in scoring political points than grappling with the threat that Iran’s nuclear program posed—still poses—to the security of U.S. partners and interests in the Middle East.

The upshot of the bomb damage assessment debate (such as it is) is distressing and familiar. Washington has two stories about the strikes: 1) It was a success that ended Iran’s ability to threaten its neighbors, principally Israel, with nuclear weapons, and 2) it was a flop that risks Iranian weaponization and extensive retaliation. Each narrative suggests a different policy response, but it is hard to imagine a consensus developing around one or the other necessary for a coherent U.S. approach to Iran.

It seems that some observers are reluctant to follow the analyses to their logical conclusions perhaps out of fear of personal or professional penalty. For example, has any Trump supporter asked, “If Iran’s program was totally obliterated, why is the president offering to negotiate with the Iranians? What’s to negotiate?” Nope. They are all sticking to Trump’s narrative.

And the president’s opponents have not said, “If the Pentagon’s most recent assessment is accurate, the operation set Iran’s nuclear program back by up to two years. This is good news. It now buys us more time to develop policies to manage the challenge Iran continues to present.” Both the question and the statement are eminently reasonable and could provide the basis for a consensus on the way forward, but politics and its bastard child, social media posturing, have made this infinitely more difficult than it should or needs to be.

It is hard not to overstate what has become of Washington’s national security and foreign-policy debates. There was and will always be politics, but in the past not everything was narrative. There were thoughtful—often heated—debates over the deployment of medium-range nuclear-armed missiles to Europe and NATO enlargement. It is hard to imagine them happening today when people are most interested in servicing their preferred account of reality.

And what happens when that story turns out to be at odds with objective facts? Nothing. Trump continues to claim that Iran’s program was destroyed. It has not hurt him. Same with the analysts and elected leaders who were certain that the Israeli and U.S. operations would spark a catastrophic regional war that would benefit China. These folks just move on without ever examining their prior assumptions.

Longtime readers may be getting tired of me declaring in one way or another that to have a good foreign policy, leaders need good assumptions about the world. But it is very hard to develop these kinds of premises when Washington is awash in narrative-based analyses. Instead, you just get competing realities, which is no reality at all.