Rosemary Kelanic is director of the Middle East Program at Defense Priorities, a think tank that promotes a foreign policy prioritizing restraint, diplomacy, and free trade to ensure U.S. security. Kelanic publishes widely on energy security, great power politics, and U.S. grand strategy in the Middle East. She is the author of Black Gold and Blackmail: Oil and Great Power Politics (Cornell University Press, 2020), and has co-edited, with Charles L. Glaser, Crude Strategy: Rethinking the U.S. Military Commitment to Defend Persian Gulf Oil (Georgetown University Press, 2016). Diwan interviewed Kelanic earlier this week to discuss her publicly expressed scepticism that the recent U.S. attacks against Iranian nuclear facilities did the damage that President Donald Trump and officials in his administration have claimed they did.
Michael Young: You have just been cited in a New York Times article suggesting that the U.S. bombing of nuclear facilities in Iran last month was more successful than initially believed. In your remarks, however, you sounded a cautionary note about this assessment. Can I ask you to explain your reasoning?
Rosemary Kelanic: The assessments focus on the three big sites that the United States hit: Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. And while those sites are important, they are not the be-all and end-all of Iran’s nuclear program. Iran has been enriching uranium for over 20 years, and its capabilities are entirely indigenous, meaning that it manufactures its own centrifuges and other critical equipment. It has produced an entire generation of nuclear scientists and technicians, numbering in the thousands, that understands the technology and can rebuild what was damaged. The Iranian nuclear complex is sprawling and includes many additional sites beyond Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan that were not hit by airstrikes. Focusing too much on the fate of the big three risks being unable to distinguish the forest from the trees. And the forest is this: Iran has the knowledge to rebuild what was destroyed, probably within months.
MY: What is your personal assessment of the status of Iran’s nuclear program today, based on the available information that you’ve been able to examine?
RK: The Iranian nuclear program was built with redundancy in mind, specifically so it could survive this type of scenario. I think it has largely survived. The Iranian regime knew when it started pursuing a nuclear program that there was a risk that Israel or the United States could target their facilities with airstrikes—just as Israel destroyed Iraq’s nuclear reactor at Osirak by air in 1981. As I mentioned, there are other significant nuclear sites that do not appear to have been hit by U.S. or Israeli airstrikes, including one at Pickaxe mountain (Kuh-e Kolang Gaz La) and another secret nuclear enrichment facility, the existence of which Iran recently revealed, without naming its location. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) also recently admitted that it had lost the chain of custody of many nuclear materials, including centrifuges and stockpiles of enriched uranium that Iran had removed from the big sites accessible to IAEA inspectors, which could be anywhere. So my own assessment is that the status of Iran’s nuclear program as a whole is roughly the same as it was before the airstrikes: that if Iran really wanted to invest in the effort, it could probably produce nuclear weapons within six months to a year. But crucially, Iran has been six months to a year away from nuclear weapons for at least fifteen years, and so far it has chosen not to get them.
MY: In an article for Foreign Affairs in late June, co-authored with your colleague Jennifer Kavanagh (a former Carnegie senior fellow), you wrote, “The challenge that the Trump administration faces now is not with the severity of the threats it has issued [against Iran’s nuclear program] but with the credibility of the assurances it can provide to Iran’s regime.” In light of the fact that Tehran’s foes believe that, because it has not been transparent about its nuclear program, it is not in a position to receive assurances on anything, can you explain what you mean?
RK: What I mean is that Iran still holds some important cards here—chiefly, knowledge about the location and condition of its nuclear materials and facilities. If the United States truly wants to prevent Iran from ever getting the bomb, it needs Iran’s cooperation to ascertain the status of its program and physically dismantle it in a monitored, verifiable way. But Iran has no incentive to cooperate with the United States unless it thinks it will avoid future punishment by doing so—and that is where the need for assurances comes in. For coercive diplomacy to be effective, the United States needs to be able to credibly say two things to Iran: First, give up your program or else there will be bad consequences. Second, if you do give up your program, there won’t be bad consequences—we won’t just attack you again in the future once we’ve gotten what we want from you. President Donald Trump has done a lot to make his threats credible, but not enough to make his assurances credible. Now that Israel and the United States have attacked Iran in the middle of nuclear negotiations, it’s going to be very hard to convince the Iranians that the U.S. won’t do so again in the future.
MY: There is a belief among many people that the conflict with Iran, particularly U.S. involvement, was precipitated by Israel. You work for a think tank, Defense Priorities, that advocates for restraint in foreign policy. What were the main takeaways for you in the Trump administration’s decision to bomb Iran last month?
RK: What I found really striking about the whole thing was the utter lack of any rationale proffered by the Trump administration about why bombing Iran was necessary for U.S. national security. It never took the time to make the case to the American people the way that, say, George W. Bush spent eighteen months or so convincing the public that the United States needed to go to war in Iraq. I was never convinced by Bush’s argument, which turned out to be misguided anyway, but at least he made the argument. Trump didn’t even try; he just went ahead and did it without a real public debate or congressional approval. What I infer is that there was no strategic case to be made for why bombing Iran furthered U.S. interests. Rather, it seems to have been entirely driven by what Israel wanted and what it asked for, namely, help to destroy the big three nuclear sites. In fact, I think that the whole operation was counterproductive from the perspective of U.S. interests. Iran never posed a major threat to the United States—it is weak and far away. But now that we’ve struck them, we’ve given them more incentives to fear us, more incentives to pursue nuclear weapons for their deterrent value, and less reason to ever trust the United States.
MY: Finally, and following up from the last question, the conflict began and ended rather abruptly. In your reading, why was this the case? What brought about the sudden end of the U.S. bombing campaign, and was it because Iran showed it had an effective deterrence capacity, or some other reason? More broadly, will the conflict resume?
RK: My interpretation is that Trump didn’t want to attack Iran but felt boxed in by the Israelis. The reporting is clear that Trump had told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to strike Iran, but Netanyahu decided to do it anyway. That left Trump with an unenviable choice: either admit that the United States didn’t support Israel’s attack, which would have made him look weak for being unable to restrain the Israelis, or pretend it was his plan all along and join the attack to save face.
Trump took the path of least resistance that would avoid making him look weak: striking Iran. But he wanted it over with quickly. He did not want the U.S. dragged into another major Middle East war. So he took a largely symbolic move of bombing the three big sites that Israel requested U.S. help with—Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan—in one night and then said to the Israelis: fine, I did what you wanted, now stop the war. Trump subsequently declared the U.S. strikes a spectacular success and tried to shut down future asks from the Israelis by claiming the sites were “obliterated.”
Now, that doesn’t mean Iran’s program was obliterated—it wasn’t—nor does Trump necessarily think it was. Trump’s statement isn’t a description of reality so much as it is a political line. By claiming success and that Iran’s program is destroyed, he doesn’t have to deal with it. The most interesting question now is whether and when reality will catch up with him.
I doubt that Netanyahu is satisfied with the results of the Israel-Iran war, which neither destroyed Iran’s nuclear capabilities nor toppled the Iranian regime, which I believe was his true goal. It’s entirely possible that Israel will take another bite at the apple in the future, especially since Israeli officials have said they will bomb Iran again if it rebuilds its program. Netanyahu will probably try to pressure a reluctant Trump into participating again. Whether that will work is anyone’s guess.
