Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Frank E. Petersen Jr. sails in the Arabian Sea for a mission supporting Operation Epic Fury during the Iran war at an undisclosed location, March 18, 2026. U.S. Navy/Handout via REUTERS
A naval blockade is not merely a coercive tactic to prevent vessels from entering or leaving a country’s ports. It is an act of war.
History points out that this distinction matters. Yet it is precisely this line that the U.S. under President Donald Trump chose to blur through its naval blockades of Cuba and Iran.
By straining the bounds of international law, those actions revived a historically dangerous logic: that economic strangulation can be used as a substitute for open conflict without triggering similar consequences.
The humanitarian consequences are already starkly visible in Cuba. The blockade, in place since Jan. 29, has contributed to a worsening humanitarian crisis marked by grid collapse, water scarcity, failing hospitals and shortages of food and basic goods for Cuba’s 11 million people, with hunger spreading. Trump has been explicit about the endgame: “taking Cuba.”
Under Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions (1949), starving civilians as a method of warfare, or inflicting disproportionate suffering on a population, is explicitly prohibited and constitutes a war crime. So, too, is collective punishment: penalizing an entire population for the actions of its government or military.
The blockade of Iranian ports carried serious international implications, as the world economy was already reeling from the largest energy-supply disruption in history, triggered by the 40‑day U.S.-Israeli war on Iran that began on Feb. 28. Trump’s Iran blockade was not merely a violation of the April 8 ceasefire understanding; it amounted to the initiation of new hostilities by other means.
Under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, nations have a right to self-defense only in response to an “armed attack.” A naval blockade, by contrast, is generally regarded in international law as an initial act of aggression.
History offers sobering lessons about where such actions can lead.
In 1962, the U.S. under President John F. Kennedy imposed what it termed a “quarantine” on Cuba — a linguistic maneuver that did little to disguise the reality of a blockade. The result was the Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought the world to the brink of a calamitous U.S.-Soviet nuclear war.
The crisis was ultimately defused not because the blockade was stabilizing, but because both sides stepped back from the abyss.
Two decades earlier, the U.S. had pursued a different form of economic strangulation: the 1941 oil embargo on Japan. While not a naval blockade in the strict sense, it had a comparable effect — cutting off vital supplies to a major power. Tokyo interpreted the embargo not as a reversible economic measure but as an existential threat.
Widely seen as the point of no return, it led to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor — which, in turn, triggered a protracted Pacific War culminating in the U.S. nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The pattern is difficult to ignore. Measures intended to coerce through deprivation are often perceived by their targets as acts of war, demanding a forceful response. In such circumstances, legal distinctions that may appear clear in theory become secondary to the imperatives of survival and deterrence.
This is the central danger of blockade as a strategy. It rests on a fragile assumption: that one side can impose escalating pressure while retaining control over the threshold of war.
Yet history suggests otherwise. Once a capable, resilient nation is subjected to what it perceives as strangulation, the incentives shift toward escalation, often in unpredictable and asymmetric ways.
For the U.S., the risks from the latest blockades extended beyond reputational costs to the danger of strategic miscalculation.
More ominously, the normalization of blockade as a tool of statecraft risks further eroding the already-fragile constraints on the use of force in international relations. If powerful states can act this way without clear legal justification, the precedent will not remain confined. Others will follow and the distinction between war and peace will become increasingly difficult to sustain.
There is a reason why international law has sought to regulate — and in many respects restrict — the use of blockades. It reflects a hard-earned recognition that strategies of strangulation carry within them the seeds of major escalation. They do not freeze conflicts; they intensify them and widen their human cost.
The lesson of both the Pacific War and the Cuban Missile Crisis was stark: When a nation is being strangled, restraint becomes politically and strategically untenable.
In the nuclear age, strangulation is not just coercion; it is a gamble with uncontrollable escalation.
Brahma Chellaney, a longtime contributor to The Japan Times, is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”
To bail himself out of his self-made Iran war debacle, Trump has turned Pakistan into his backchannel to Tehran — effectively asking one Islamic republic to dissuade another from pursuing the very nuclear-weapons path it was once permitted to take. In other words, Pakistan is being asked to warn Iran against becoming another Pakistan.
A nuclear-capable Pakistani missile, displayed during a 2022 military parade. AP Photo
By any reasonable strategic measure, the divergent nature of U.S. policy toward Iran and Pakistan defies logic.
Both are Islamic republics. Both are authoritarian in structure. Both have had links to transnational terrorist networks. And both have long had fraught relationships with Washington.
Yet one is relentlessly sanctioned, threatened and even denied civilian nuclear rights under international safeguards. The other has been indulged, armed and repeatedly excused, even as it built nuclear weapons while fostering terrorist proxies.
In Western political discourse, “Islamic Republic” has become shorthand for Iran. But that is historically inaccurate. The first Islamic republic of the postcolonial era was Pakistan, which adopted the title in 1956, more than two decades before Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution.
The label, in other words, does not explain Washington’s choices. It only exposes its inconsistency.
Consider Iran first. For decades, Washington has treated Tehran’s nuclear ambitions as an existential threat. President Trump scrapped the 2015 Obama-era nuclear deal despite Iran’s verified compliance. Under that agreement, Tehran shipped out most of its enriched uranium, capped enrichment levels and accepted intrusive international inspections.
Yet today, the U.S. insists that Iran must go further — that it must not merely agree never to develop nuclear weapons but abandon uranium enrichment altogether, even under stringent international monitoring.
The demand for zero enrichment goes beyond the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which explicitly guarantees non-nuclear states the “inalienable right” to peaceful nuclear energy, including enrichment. This explains why non-nuclear states like Germany, the Netherlands, Japan and Brazil operate active enrichment programs, including maintaining enriched uranium stockpiles.
So long as international inspectors can verify Iranian compliance with its commitments, zero enrichment is not required to prevent Iran from building the bomb.
Now contrast this with Pakistan, the only country to have developed nuclear weapons while cultivating terrorist proxies as instruments of state policy. It built its arsenal outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, expanded it steadily and continues to invest in new warheads and delivery systems, including tactical nuclear weapons designed for battlefield use. Washington largely looks the other way.
Even as the U.S. warns about the dangers of a hypothetical Iranian bomb, it has largely ignored Pakistan’s ongoing nuclear and missile buildup. At its current pace, Pakistan’s arsenal is expected to grow significantly by the end of this decade.
More striking still is that the U.S. intelligence community, in its recently released 2026 Annual Threat Assessment, has for the first time placed Pakistan alongside China, Russia, North Korea and Iran as a missile and nuclear threat to the American homeland.
This contradiction extends beyond weapons to governance.
Both Pakistan and Iran are structurally undemocratic, but Washington treats their internal politics very differently.
Last November, Pakistan’s army chief, Asim Munir, effectively staged a constitutional coup, consolidating power behind a legal facade. Munir accomplished what Pakistan’s previous military dictators never quite managed: He seized absolute power cloaked in constitutional legality.
Yet Washington turned a blind eye, in part because Trump has repeatedly praised Munir, including calling him “my favorite field marshal,” “a great, great guy” and “an inspiring personality.”
Less than four months after Munir’s power grab, Trump on February 28, 2026, launched military action against Iran aimed explicitly at forcing regime change in Tehran.
The inconsistency becomes almost surreal in diplomacy. Washington recently leaned on Pakistan to host high-level U.S. talks with Iran, effectively asking one nuclear-armed Islamic republic to persuade another not to follow the very path it was allowed to take.
In other words, Pakistan was asked to warn Iran against becoming another Pakistan.
The deeper history makes this double standard harder to dismiss.
Pakistan’s bomb did not emerge in isolation. It was enabled by external assistance and illicit procurement, much of it orchestrated by A.Q. Khan, who ran the world’s most extensive nuclear-smuggling network. Yet Khan was never held to account by Washington. When his network was exposed, Pakistan staged a controlled confession, pardoned him, and barred international investigators — an outcome Washington quietly accepted.
Geopolitics explains the indulgence. During the Cold War and the war in Afghanistan, Pakistan was seen as indispensable. Its nuclearization and internal conduct were overlooked in exchange for strategic cooperation.
Iran, in contrast, has been cast as a permanent adversary. Its theocratic system is often cited as justification. The U.S., however, has long partnered with Islamist regimes elsewhere, including in Gulf Arab states. The real dividing line is not ideology but alignment.
Pakistan, for all its contradictions, has been a security partner. Iran has not.
Yet the selective enforcement of nuclear norms carries consequences. It undermines the credibility of U.S. nuclear nonproliferation policy. It signals that strategic utility can excuse almost anything.
Most dangerously, it distorts incentives. If Iran sees that compliance with international agreements leads to sanctions, while defiance — Pakistan-style — ultimately leads to acceptance, what lesson is it supposed to draw? Indeed, why should any state trust that nuclear restraint will be rewarded?
American policymakers often frame their Iran policy as a defense of global order. But order depends on consistency. When rules are applied selectively, they cease to be rules at all. They become instruments of convenience. And in a nuclearized world, that is profoundly risky.
US President Donald Trump returned to office last year vowing to end “stupid wars.” Instead, he has delivered one of the most strategically self-defeating wars in modern American history. His war against Iran has not only failed but backfired on every front.
It has weakened American power, strengthened the very clerical regime it sought to crush and handed geostrategic advantages to US challenger China, all while eroding America’s international credibility and standing.
The Iran war has fundamentally altered global perceptions of American power. While the US and Israel succeeded in decapitating Iran’s leadership and degrading its military capabilities, the price was strategic overextension that has left the US looking diminished in the eyes of adversaries and, increasingly, among partners and non-aligned states.
At its core, the war exposed an uncomfortable reality: tactical success does not guarantee strategic victory. The US and Israel retain overwhelming military superiority, yet the conflict revealed clear limits on how that power can be converted into durable strategic outcomes when faced with sustained asymmetric resistance.
Unable to compete conventionally, Iran turned to low-cost but disruptive tools: drones, missiles, naval mines and proxy attacks across the region. By persistently threatening shipping and energy flows, Tehran demonstrated how disruption, rather than dominance, can shape the battlefield. Most consequentially, it leveraged its geographic advantage over the Strait of Hormuz, effectively choking one of the world’s most critical energy arteries.
In doing so, Iran ensured that even a tactically successful campaign against it imposed significant strategic costs on the US and its allies—destabilizing global energy markets, straining alliances and laying bare the limits of American coercive power.
Those alliance strains were not incidental. The war opened visible rifts between the US and its Western and regional partners over how to deal with Tehran, raising broader questions about Washington’s strategic judgment and reliability.
At the same time, the war diverted American military resources, political focus and logistical capacity away from the Indo-Pacific, undercutting Washington’s ability to sustain support for Ukraine and maintain credible deterrence against China, particularly in the Taiwan Strait.
As Joe Kent, who resigned as the top US counterterrorism official in protest against Trump’s Iran war, has put it, “Like all of our previous interventions in the Middle East, we are worse off after the war (not that this is over) than we were before. Wars in the Middle East are a series of lose-lose scenarios for us, the sooner we learn that, the better off we’ll be.”
Ultimately, the war underscored a deeper constraint: even overwhelming power cannot compel favourable outcomes against an adversary willing and able to impose retaliatory costs. What emerged was a display of raw power without resolution, dominance without control and escalation without a credible endgame.
Gamble Fails
The central illusion behind the war was never about capability. As the world’s foremost military power, the US could always devastate Iran from the air. That was never in doubt. The real question was whether unrelenting bombing raids could compel surrender from a state ideologically conditioned, strategically prepared for asymmetric conflict and historically accustomed to absorbing punishment.
Just eight months earlier, Iran had withstood devastating Israeli airstrikes on a wide range of targets as well as the U.S. destruction of its nuclear facilities with bunker-busting bombs.
Yet, Trump bet that joint US and Israeli force, layered on top of suffocating sanctions, would finally break Iran’s will. That bet has failed spectacularly. The US-Israeli war only hardened Iran’s resolve, showcasing its remarkable resilience in the face of ruthless attacks.
This was not a war of necessity. It was a war of choice, launched without any provocation, yet dressed up as deterrence. What began as “maximum pressure”—economic strangulation, covert operations and targeted killings—mutated into open conflict once the US and Israel abandoned the shadows for direct, sustained airstrikes.
Two grave miscalculations defined the campaign. The Trump administration badly underestimated Iran’s capacity to absorb devastating strikes and retaliate asymmetrically across a wide geography. At the same time, it grossly overestimated America’s ability to control escalation and insulate the global economy from blowback.
As the war continued without any sign of weakening Iran’s determination to fight back, Trump’s frustration and even desperation became increasingly apparent. This was apparent not just from Trump’s incendiary language but from his public threats to commit war crimes—from returning Iran to the Stone Age and destroying a “whole civilization.”
International humanitarian law is unequivocal. The Geneva Conventions, reinforced by Additional Protocol I, explicitly prohibit attacks on objects indispensable to the survival of civilian populations.
Yet, Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu mocked international law by targeting civilian infrastructure—from health and educational institutions to railway network and bridges—in an apparent effort to “break the will” of the civilian population in supporting the regime in Tehran. Even a desalination plant on Iran’s Qeshm Island was bombed on March 7, which led to a tit-for-tat exchange targeting water facilities.
The World Health Organization expressed “grave concern” over what it describes as a pattern of attacks on health infrastructure. At least 20 health institutions were confirmed as targeted or damaged, including the historic biomedical and vaccine research centre, Pasteur Institute of Iran, Shahid Mutahhari Hospital and Psychiatric Hospital, all in Tehran. Strikes also hit plants producing specialized medications for multiple sclerosis and cancer.
The bombing of premier institutions like the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, the Iran University of Science and Technology, also in Tehran, and the Isfahan University of Technology appeared to be aimed at impeding the country’s scientific progress and R&D capacity.
Despite operating under heavy Western sanctions—and with its scientists often excluded from international collaborations—Iran has remained a scientific powerhouse, consistently punching above its weight in publication density and in high-tech niches such as nanotechnology, advanced physics and medical research. In terms of scientific output, Iran has often ranked first in the Islamic world. It is especially prominent in nanotechnology, where it frequently ranks among the top countries globally by volume.
Ultimately, despite Washington escalating US-Israeli attacks on Iran’s civilian and economic infrastructure, it was Trump who blinked first.
The White House effectively ghostwrote Pakistan’s public appeal for cessation of hostilities so that Trump’s climbdown would look less like a retreat and more like theatre. By leaning on his “favourite field marshal”—Pakistan’s de facto ruler—and the latter’s handpicked prime minister to “beg” for peace, Trump recast his ceasefire as magnanimity and statesmanship. In substance, it reflected a familiar reality, one that has earned him the acronym TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out).
America Emerges Weaker
Trump’s ceasefire took effect without regime change, without meaningful Iranian concessions and without enduring strategic gain for either of the two parties that initiated the conflict. Instead, the war entrenched Iran’s most hardline factions who gained ascendancy after serial targeted assassinations. The leadership that emerged from the US-Israeli decapitation strikes is more defiant and more uncompromising—politically strengthened by the very pressure meant to break it.
In effect, Trump rescued the theocratic Iranian regime from its own internal fragilities after launching a war to topple it. More significantly, instead of strengthening the US, the war weakened it.
Nowhere is this reversal more visible than in the Strait of Hormuz. Before the war, this critical artery of global energy flowed freely. After launching the war, Trump demanded “unconditional” freedom of navigation as a condition for de-escalation.
What is emerging instead is something very different: regulated passage under tacit Iranian oversight. Commercial shipping now moves through arrangements that implicitly acknowledge Tehran’s gatekeeping role.
Iran is determined to position itself to extract leverage—through inspections, coordination mechanisms and potentially transit fees—echoing Egypt’s stewardship of the Suez Canal.
A chokepoint once kept open by deterrence has been transformed into an instrument of Iranian leverage, thanks to Trump’s war. That shift will outlast Trump, haunting global shipping and leading energy importers like India, Japan and South Korea.
More broadly, the war demolished a longstanding assumption in American strategy: that the US can wage large-scale wars without suffering significant and sustained retaliation.
For more than seven decades after the Korean War (1950-53), the American way of war relied on an effective targeting logic: strike adversaries that lack the capacity to impose serious costs on America’s homeland or its forward military bases. From Vietnam to Iraq, the US suffered casualties and reputational damage, but not sustained, systematic retaliation against its critical regional infrastructure. Nor did its regional allies hosting American bases become targets of reprisal attacks.
Iran did not attempt to match US power symmetrically, platform for platform. It didn’t need to. It pursued disruption instead.
Over years of harsh US-led sanctions, Tehran invested in low-cost, high-impact systems that could be produced and launched in large numbers without a modern air force. Their purpose was not to win conventional battles but to impose costs in order to deny the US the ability to operate against Tehran freely and cheaply in Iran’s immediate neighbourhood
During the war, Iranian strikes rendered many of the 13 major US bases across the Persian Gulf region inoperable, inflicting significant damage despite advanced American air defences.
Swarms of inexpensive drones and missiles overwhelmed expensive interceptor systems, exposing the fundamental vulnerability of a US war model built on high-value, high-cost assets. Washington was forced to expend vastly more to defend against weapons that cost a fraction to build.
The asymmetry was not just tactical; it was economic. The US reportedly spent close to a billion dollars a day sustaining operations, depleting precision munitions and missile defence inventories at a pace that will take several years to fully rebuild. Iran, by contrast, relied on systems that were cheaper, scalable and easier to replenish.
This is the new logic of warfare: the advantage no longer lies solely with the technologically superior, but with the strategically adaptive.
It is a lesson that India, too, must learn, given its continued emphasis on imports of big-ticket weapon systems. India has consistently ranked among the world’s top importers of weapons, procuring $51.8 billion worth of arms from overseas in the period 2008-2025, according to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) data.
The Iran war showed that in an era of asymmetric warfare, even a country that looks weak on paper can impose intolerable costs if it is determined, prepared and unconcerned about conventional victory. The US can still inflict immense devastation. What it can no longer do is dominate the escalation ladder or control the consequences.
The damage from Trump’s Iran adventure extends beyond the battlefield—into diplomacy, where credibility is everything.
Under Trump, US negotiations became instruments of deception rather than resolution. Talks were used as cover for military attack.
In June 2025, US-facilitated nuclear talks in Oman coincided with—and arguably covered for—Israel’s devastating aerial assaults on Iran, catching Tehran by complete surprise. And on February 28, 2026, just as renewed American negotiations with Tehran were reportedly making significant progress, with Oman acting as the key mediator, the US and Israel launched joint strikes aimed at “bombing Iran into submission.”
This pattern of using talks as camouflage for military action has not gone unnoticed abroad.
From Russia and China to the Global South, American diplomacy is now viewed with deep scepticism, if not outright suspicion. The perception has taken hold that negotiations are not pathways to resolving differences or disputes, but preludes to pressure—or worse, attack.
The record of bad-faith negotiations has led many in Moscow, as the Washington Post reported, to question the sincerity of the Trump administration’s diplomatic efforts on the Ukraine conflict, with Russian officials now viewing US diplomacy through the lens of “dual-track” manipulation—offering talks while enabling or orchestrating escalation.
When a superpower treats diplomacy as strategic deception, it corrodes its own practical leverage. Once trust is broken, it is extraordinarily difficult to restore it. Why should adversaries place faith in US-led talks if the negotiating table doubles as a targeting mechanism?
At the same time, the Iran war exposed the erosion of US alliances.
Lacking a clear legal basis and broad international backing, the war left Washington geopolitically isolated. NATO allies distanced themselves. Key partners in Asia withheld support. Even states traditionally aligned with the US expressed unease.
Trump’s public berating of allies, especially those in Europe and the Indo-Pacific, only deepened the divide. Meanwhile, Gulf Arab states have been left to absorb both physical damage and reputational costs, having served as staging grounds and targets in a war that their own populations viewed as a disaster.
The net effect is a US more isolated, less trusted and more resented—not only in the Middle East but across much of the world. This could reduce Washington’s ability to build coalitions even when its cause is just.
Enduring Costs
The most economically disruptive war in decades has saddled the world with significant and enduring costs. It will take several years to fully repair the damage to energy infrastructure in the Gulf sheikhdoms and Iran.
If there is a clear geopolitical beneficiary of this debacle, it is China. Beijing did not need to act. It simply needed to wait.
With the US deeply entangled in Middle Eastern conflict yet again, China has gained space for its expansionism in the Indo-Pacific. While the US expended resources on a war with no clear gains, China conserved its strength while stepping up coercive pressure on Taiwan.
Following the Iran war, China’s push to pivot its energy imports away from vulnerable sea lanes toward overland pipelines from Russia and Central Asia, reducing reliance on chokepoints like Hormuz, has gained new urgency and validation.
Trump did not intend to advance China’s strategic position. But in practice, that is precisely what he has done, including helping expand yuan-denominated energy trade.
Even more troubling are the war’s implications for international norms. Strikes on water installations, universities, research institutions, health infrastructure and other civilian facilities have raised serious legal and ethical questions. Such targets fall under protected civilian categories in international humanitarian law.
When a superpower disregards the rules it helped craft in the past, it weakens the entire international system those rules sustain.
Finally, the war may have reshaped Iran’s long-term strategic calculus in the most dangerous way possible. A country that has endured repeated large-scale attacks is unlikely to conclude that restraint ensures security. Quite the opposite.
The lesson it will draw is that, unlike nuclear-armed states, non-nuclear states are vulnerable to external aggression. That logic, reinforced by experience, strengthens the case within Iran for pursuing a nuclear deterrent.
If a state already proficient in asymmetric warfare acquires a nuclear shield, it will mean the emergence of another Pakistan. But unlike Iran, which Washington has long targeted, the US, along with China, aided Pakistan’s covert nuclear-weapons programme. Both the US and China have also shielded Pakistan’s export of terrorism to its neighbours.
The ultimate paradox of Trump’s war is that in attempting to weaken Iran, it may have made it more dangerous.
The war’s legacy will not be the battlefield gains it delivered to the US and its partner Israel, but the structural damage it inflicted—on alliances and partnerships, on global energy and economic interests, and on the credibility of American power itself.
For decades, the US waged wars abroad without exposing itself to the risk of serious retaliation. This was made possible by selecting targets that lacked the retaliatory capacity to impose significant costs beyond their national borders. The Iran war has broken that intervention model, ending America’s illusion of relatively cost-free wars.
In a rambling address to the American people on April 1, US President Donald Trump claimed that the US war against Iran has been a success, vowing to “finish the job…very fast.” It was a statement in obvious conflict with the facts. Trump is still pretending that Iran is just another small US adversary that can only absorb punishment, lash out locally, and ultimately buckle under sustained military and economic coercion. In reality, Iran has upended the model on which US interventionism has long relied.
For decades, the United States has nurtured the belief that it could wage wars abroad without exposing itself to the risk of serious retaliation. This was made possible by the careful selection of targets—such as Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Libya, and even Venezuela—that lacked the capacity to impose significant costs beyond their borders, such as by striking US assets or allies in a sustained or meaningful way. Even when insurgencies wore down US forces, as in Vietnam and Afghanistan, the conflicts remained geographically contained.
This “asymmetric cost” model—a war the US starts will ultimately cost the other side far more—has proven vital in sustaining the illusion of American invincibility and limiting domestic political resistance to US military adventurism. Now, Iran has broken it.
Iran’s security doctrine is built on “forward defense,” which makes use of asymmetric military capabilities—including ballistic and cruise missiles, drones, and a network of partners and proxies—to protect itself and project power beyond its borders. When the US and Israel attacked, Iran was able to leverage this strategic depth to retaliate immediately against targets across the region, including US allies, military bases, and forward-deployed assets.
By threatening infrastructure, airbases, and economic chokepoints, such as the Strait of Hormuz and Bab al-Mandeb across the Gulf, Iran is effectively forcing US partners to share the costs of conflict. As the Gulf states, which have long hosted US bases in exchange for a place under America’s vaunted security umbrella, bear the brunt of Iran’s response, strategic friction is growing within America’s coalition. Thanks to Iran, allies that once enabled the US to project power in the Middle East now have a strong incentive to restrain it.
The US should have seen this coming. Following the US assassination of Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani in 2020, Iran responded not with proxy action or deniable escalation, but with a direct ballistic-missile attack on a US military installation: the Al-Asad Airbase in Iraq. This should have dispelled any doubt that Iran could retaliate against American forces with precision and without fear of immediate retribution. Since then, Iran has only refined its strategy of distributed retaliation.
The Trump administration failed to anticipate this perfectly predictable response partly because of another longstanding illusion among US military planners and politicians: that higher military spending automatically confers battlefield superiority. America could strike its “enemies” with such overwhelming force that they would have no choice but to heed its demands almost immediately. Yet, from the Vietnam War to the 20-year war in Afghanistan, the US has instead found itself trapped in expensive wars of attrition that it could neither decisively win nor politically sustain, resulting in its humiliating withdrawals.
Nonetheless, the illusion has persisted. With Iran’s defense budget amounting to a small fraction of America’s, the Trump administration apparently assumed that the country could not possibly put up much of a fight. What it failed to recognize is that Iran does not need parity; it needs disruption. Its arsenal of low-cost, high-impact systems is tailored not for a conventional victory, but for strategic denial. Swarms of relatively inexpensive drones or missiles can overwhelm even the most sophisticated air-defense systems, as Israel is learning.
With this strategy, Iran has turned America’s greatest strength—its global military footprint—into a source of vulnerability. It has also exposed a fundamental weakness in the American way of war: dependence on high-value, high-cost assets that can be degraded by persistent asymmetric pressure. The imbalance is both tactical and economic. The US is now being forced to spend vast sums to defend its assets and allies against weapons that cost very little to build and launch.
The US waged war on Iran with a framework honed against weaker, more isolated adversaries. It assumed that military force, combined with economic pressure, would ensure submission. Instead, it encountered a state that had spent years preparing for precisely this kind of confrontation and could absorb punishment while steadily ratcheting up the costs of escalation. Yet Trump continues to anticipate a quick capitulation.
The Trump administration’s strategic miscalculation extends beyond underestimating Iran’s retaliatory capabilities. It reflects a fundamental misreading of the nature of modern conflict. In a world of economic interconnectedness, geographically dispersed military capabilities, and low-cost weapons systems, a country that appears weak in conventional terms can cause serious harm. The message is clear: the age of relatively cost-free US wars is over.
The US can still unleash overwhelming force and inflict immense devastation. But it can no longer control the consequences or contain the fallout. What Iran has demonstrated is not just resilience, but the ability of a weaker state to steadily erode a superpower’s advantages. A superpower that once felt invulnerable must now reckon with adversaries that can drain its coffers, bleed its allies, and upend its strategic calculations.
The future of the Middle East—and of American power—hinges on whether the US internalizes the lessons of its miscalculation in Iran. If it fails to do so, it will continue to stumble into wars it cannot decisively win, cheaply sustain, or strategically justify.
Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press, 2011), for which he won the 2012 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award.
A Yars intercontinental ballistic being test-fired in 2022 as part of Russia’s nuclear drills. (AP)
One of the least-discussed but most consequential outcomes of the resurgence of major-power rivalries is the return of nuclear weapons to the center of international politics.
The global salience of nuclear weapons — once expected to diminish after the Cold War — is instead rising sharply. This revival is testing U.S. power at a moment when Washington faces a more complex and fragmented strategic landscape than at any time since the dawn of the nuclear age.
The problem is not just that nuclear arsenals are expanding. It is also that the geopolitical environment that once helped manage nuclear risks has eroded.
Advances in non-nuclear strategic technologies — including precision-guided conventional strike systems, cyberwarfare, anti-satellite weapons and layered missile defenses — are driving nuclear-armed states to harden, diversify and enlarge their arsenals to ensure survivable second-strike capabilities. At the same time, regional flashpoints — from Ukraine to the Taiwan Strait to the Korean Peninsula — heighten the risk of escalation through miscalculation or coercion.
No shift is more momentous than China’s sweeping peacetime military expansion — the most ambitious in modern history. Its naval output alone now surpasses the combined production of U.S. and Soviet shipyards at the height of the Cold War. Even more troubling is its frenzied nuclear buildup: China has more than doubled its nuclear-weapons stockpile in just five years and is on track to field as many deployed warheads as the U.S. by the mid-2030s.
Determined to supplant the U.S. as the world’s leading power, China is not only expanding but diversifying its nuclear arsenal. The aim is to give Beijing an expanded set of coercive tools and create new escalation pathways. In effect, China has already diluted its own longstanding “no first use” nuclear pledge. Few now view that declaratory policy as credible.
Although China’s nuclear surge is framed domestically as defensive, its purpose extends beyond deterrence. Beijing’s growing arsenal enables it to pursue coercive territorial and strategic objectives — from the South and East China Seas to the Himalayas. The implications for U.S. extended deterrence, especially in the Indo-Pacific, are profound.
Russia, meanwhile, has turned to nuclear weapons as the principal currency of its great-power status amid economic stagnation.
Its modernization program includes novel, destabilizing systems such as the nuclear-powered Burevestnik cruise missile and Poseidon underwater drone. These exotic weapons are explicitly designed to circumvent U.S. missile defenses. The Ukraine war has visibly increased the importance — and the coercive utility — of nuclear weapons in Russian strategy.
The combined nuclear expansions of China and Russia pose a challenge the U.S. has never confronted before: deterring two peer or near-peer nuclear adversaries simultaneously. During the Cold War, Washington could focus its strategic posture on a single rival, the Soviet Union. Today, the geometry is tripolar, and far more complex.
To make matters worse, the arms-control framework that provided essential guardrails for decades has nearly collapsed. Russia and the U.S. have withdrawn from key agreements, with Moscow recently suspending its participation in the New START Treaty and also withdrawing its ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. China, for its part, refuses to enter any arms-control negotiation that might cap its rapidly rising arsenal.
The result is a world sliding toward an unconstrained arms race, with fewer safety valves and greater risks of miscalculation.
This shifting balance reverberates through America’s alliance system. Allies who depend on the U.S. nuclear umbrella — particularly Japan, South Korea, Australia and NATO’s eastern members — are increasingly anxious about whether Washington would risk a nuclear exchange with China or Russia to defend them. Their concern is not theoretical: The simultaneous growth of Chinese and Russian nuclear prowess creates the very scenario U.S. strategists long feared — deterrence stress in multiple theaters.
As credibility questions grow, so does the risk of allied nuclear proliferation. If countries with advanced nuclear fuel cycles come to doubt long-term U.S. protection, they may seek independent deterrents. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is already strained by the modernization programs of nuclear-weapon states. Moreover, the U.S. bombing of Iranian nuclear sites earlier this year — while successful tactically — may deepen incentives for clandestine nuclear development elsewhere.
The U.S. now faces a stark reality: It must modernize its nuclear forces, reassure anxious allies, deter two nuclear peers and revive some form of strategic dialogue — all while preventing a ruinous arms race.
America’s challenge is to maintain credible deterrence across two theaters without overextending U.S. conventional forces. That pressure may tempt Washington to rely more heavily on nuclear weapons to compensate for shrinking force-projection margins vis-à-vis China in the Indo-Pacific and Russia in Europe. Such a shift would mirror the very trends that have made nuclear weapons so prominent in Russian and Chinese strategies.
In this volatile environment, risk-reduction mechanisms are essential. The world needs updated norms for emerging technologies — particularly artificial intelligence, hypersonic delivery systems and dual-use cyber capabilities — that could compress decision time or introduce new uncertainties in nuclear command and control.
Ensuring that nuclear-use authority remains fully under human control is no longer simply a normative concern; it is becoming a strategic imperative in the age of AI.
Was President Trump’s recent directive to resume U.S. nuclear testing — after a hiatus of 33 years — an actual policy decision? Or was it a political stunt to project toughness?
His surprise announcement stirred Cold War echoes and revived the old fears of Armageddon and “mutually assured destruction” that once defined nuclear deterrence.
The U.S. last conducted a full-scale nuclear explosion in 1992. Russia stopped doing them in 1990, China in 1996. Those moratoria paved the way for the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to prohibit all nuclear testing.
Although the treaty never formally entered into force, it has established a powerful international norm. Nations have gained confidence that any nuclear detonation would be quickly detected. Since the treaty opened for signature, no country other than North Korea has carried out a nuclear explosion — and even Pyongyang has maintained a self-declared moratorium since 2018.
Yet Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One, while returning from South Korea, that he had decided to restart testing.
“We’ve halted it many years ago,” he said. “But with others doing testing, I think it is appropriate that we do also.” On Truth Social, he posted: “Because of other countries’ testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our nuclear weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately.”
The announcement raised immediate alarms — and eyebrows. For one thing, nuclear testing is not the Pentagon’s responsibility, but that of the Department of Energy’s semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the design, production and stewardship of America’s nuclear arsenal. Trump’s reference to the War Department thus hinted at his unfamiliarity with the institutional framework governing nuclear weapons.
His vaguely worded vow to test “on an equal basis” with geopolitical rivals baffled security officials. And his boast that the U.S. has “more nuclear weapons than any other country” was flatly wrong — Russia has several hundred more.
Then came more mixed messages. In a “60 Minutes” interview, Trump spoke of denuclearization while simultaneously accusing Russia, China, North Korea and even Pakistan — whose only tests were conducted in 1998 — of “testing nuclear weapons.” Having confirmed his intention to resume tests, he immediately contradicted himself: “I believe we need to do something about denuclearization, and I have indeed discussed it with both [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and President Xi [Jinping of China].”
The confusion rattled allies and arms control experts alike. Energy Secretary Chris Wright soon intervened to clarify that any U.S. testing would involve not nuclear explosions but “what we call non-critical explosions” — non-explosive subcritical tests that use nuclear materials but stop short of a self-sustaining nuclear fission chain reaction.
In reality, the U.S. has been conducting subcritical tests for decades to ensure the safety and reliability of its weapons stockpile. As Brandon Williams told the Senate during his confirmation hearing as head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, “I would not advise testing, and I think we should rely on the scientific information.”
Beyond politics, there are hard technical obstacles to restarting full-scale explosive tests. Facilities at the Nevada National Security Site have degraded, and the specialized know-how to conduct live detonations has largely vanished after decades of reliance on supercomputer modeling and subcritical tests. Launching a live test would take months, if not years — making Trump’s call for “immediate” testing technically impossible.
Trump’s announcement appeared to stem partly from anxiety over recent Russian and Chinese developments. Moscow recently claimed to have tested two exotic nuclear-powered and nuclear-capable delivery systems — the Burevestnik cruise missile and the Poseidon underwater drone — designed for nearly unlimited range and stealth. Beijing, meanwhile, is racing ahead with a massive nuclear buildup, more than doubling its warhead inventory since 2020 and expanding its missile silos, submarines and bomber fleets. This surge aligns with China’s goal to achieve global primacy by 2049, the centenary of Communist rule.
Against this backdrop, Trump’s abrupt testing directive sent tremors through arms control circles. Even hinting at a return to nuclear testing risks unraveling the global test moratorium. If the U.S. — the principal architect of the test ban treaty — were to abandon restraint, others would likely follow, triggering a destabilizing cascade of nuclear test resumption.
Fortunately, Wright’s clarification defused the immediate crisis, reducing Trump’s order to bluster rather than policy. Still, the episode underscored how impulsive presidential words can reverberate globally, unsettling allies and emboldening adversaries.
Trump’s brand of nuclear showmanship may play well to a domestic audience seeking toughness, but it highlights the perils of improvisation in nuclear policy. In the nuclear age, restraint is not a sign of weakness but a strategic necessity.
History shows that nuclear deterrence rests not only on weapons but on credibility and clarity. When those erode, the risks of miscalculation rise sharply. Trump’s confused directive serves as a reminder that, when it comes to nuclear weapons, even words can be destabilizing — and confusion itself can become a form of danger.
Military strikes might slow down a nuclear program, but they cannot impose long-term restraint – especially when they are carried out by powers that flout the very rules they claim to be enforcing. The US and Israel are likely to learn this the hard way, as Iran abandons all doubts about pursuing nuclear breakout.
Israel and the United States have dealt punishing blows to Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. “Operation Rising Lion” and “Operation Midnight Hammer” have been portrayed as precision strikes that will stop the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program in its tracks. But whatever the bombings might have achieved tactically, they risk forfeiting strategically, as Iran is now more convinced than ever that nuclear weapons are the only way to deter future aggression and ensure the regime’s survival.
Iran was once brought to the negotiating table through a carefully calibrated mix of pressure and incentives. Despite its imperfections, that approach worked. In 2015, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was agreed, with Iran agreeing to limit its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief and other concessions. But – at Israel’s urging and despite Iran’s apparent compliance – Donald Trump abandoned the JCPOA during his first term as president, destroying whatever mutual trust had been built over the course of 20 months of painstaking diplomacy.
Now, despite pursuing new nuclear negotiations with Iran, the US has joined Israel in abandoning strategic patience in favor of spasmodic force. Some argue that Iran invited the attacks by deceiving the international community, stoking regional conflicts, and enriching uranium to levels well beyond those needed for any civilian application. These are legitimate complaints.
Even the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in a report released just before Israel’s campaign began, raised concerns about Iran’s compliance with its international obligations. Indeed, an analysis of this report by the Institute for Science and International Security argued that “Iran can convert its current stock of 60 percent enriched uranium into 233 kg of [weapon-grade uranium] in three weeks at the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant (FFEP), enough for 9 nuclear weapons.” That conclusion may well have lit a fire under the Trump administration.
But the IAEA also concluded that it had “no credible indications of an ongoing, undeclared structured nuclear program” in Iran, while underscoring the urgency of reaching a nuclear deal. “Iran,” the agency warned, “is the only non-nuclear-weapon state in the world that is producing and accumulating uranium enriched to 60%” – just a short technical step away from the 90% purity needed for weapons-grade material.
Even so, US and Israeli decision-makers green-lit attacks on Iranian nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan – facilities that are subject to IAEA safeguards and monitored under Iran’s Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) commitments. With that, they unraveled the legal and verification framework that exists precisely to prevent weaponization.
Beyond undermining the authority of the IAEA and its inspection regime, the attacks violated the NPT’s principle of peaceful nuclear use (Article IV) and breachedinternational law, including the United Nations Charter. The US, a nuclear superpower with a record of catastrophic wars aimed at regime change, and Israel, a clandestine nuclear-armed state that refuses to sign the NPT, have thus sent an unmistakable message: only the weak follow rules, and only the strong are safe. In fact, as long as you have nuclear weapons, you can violate international law at will.
This is true not only for major powers, but also for smaller states. Pakistan, for example, nurtures cross-border terrorism and exports proxy war with impunity, threatening nuclear retaliation for anyone who crosses it. This poses a more acute threat to regional peace than Iran’s hypothetical bomb, but the US remains silent.
This hypocrisy is deeply rooted. It was the US, after all, that aided and abettedPakistan’s covert pursuit of the bomb. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, successive US administrations ignored mounting evidence that Pakistan was secretly enriching uranium and building nuclear weapons – and continued funneling billions of dollars in aid to the country. The result is a fragile state armed with an “Islamic bomb.”
Today, with diplomacy derailed, inspections discredited, coercion normalized, and double standards embraced, what tools remain to convince Iran that remaining non-nuclear is wise and strategically viable? After years of debate over the value of a nuclear deterrent – with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei even issuing religious edicts against nuclear weapons – Iranian decision-makers are almost certain to decide that there is no other way to keep the country safe from attack.
Iran now has every incentive to exit – or at least limit – the IAEA framework and race toward nuclear breakout. Just as Saddam Hussein took his nuclear program underground following Israel’s 1981 bombing of Iraq’s IAEA-monitored Osirak reactor, Iran is likely to reject transparency and oversight in favor of secrecy and ambiguity. That would not be some dramatic act of defiance, but rather a rational response to a serious – even existential – threat.
And it is not just Iran. If powerful states can bomb safeguarded nuclear facilities with impunity, why should any country put its faith in the global nonproliferation regime? Any government that wants to avoid the fateof Saddam’s Iraq or Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Libya (or, for that matter, democratic Ukraine), will seek to acquire the bomb – or at least come close enough to keep adversaries guessing.
The only viable path to nonproliferation is and always will be diplomacy, not destruction. Military strikes might slow down a nuclear program, but they cannot impose long-term restraint – especially when they are carried out by powers that flout the very rules they claim to be enforcing. In the end, Operation Rising Lion and Operation Midnight Hammer may be remembered not as preemptive strikes against Iran’s nuclear breakout, but as catalysts for it.
Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press, 2011), for which he won the 2012 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award.
(AP Photo/Abdolrahman Rafati/Tasnim News Agency): Mourners carry the flag-draped coffins of men who were reportedly killed in Israeli strikes in the city of Asadabad, Iran, on Monday, June 16, 2025.
Israel has long pursued a strategy to remain the Middle East’s sole nuclear-armed state, using military force to preempt or prevent other regional powers from acquiring nuclear-weapons capabilities. But Israel’s strikes on Iran risk backfiring, with a wounded foe more determined than ever to acquire the nuclear bomb.
Israel’s strategic posture, institutionalized as the “Begin Doctrine” after former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, holds that it will not allow any neighboring state to even approach nuclear-weapons capability. In practice, Israel has expanded this doctrine to block even peaceful nuclear programs under international safeguards.
The Begin Doctrine was first operationalized in 1981 with the bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, which was built by France for peaceful research and subject to International Atomic Energy Agency inspections. Though Iraq was a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and had agreed to stringent safeguards extending beyond international inspections to prevent reactor misuse, Israel claimed Baghdad harbored military ambitions and struck preemptively.
The attack, which destroyed the $275 million reactor just before it was to become operational, was carried out with U.S.-supplied F-16 and F-15 aircraft. One French engineer and 10 Iraqi soldiers were killed. The operation triggered minimal diplomatic fallout for Israel, but pushed Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program underground — an outcome that would later lead to the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq under the false pretext of dismantling weapons of mass destruction.
In 2007, Israel again invoked the Begin Doctrine to destroy a suspected nuclear reactor under construction in Syria. The al-Kibar facility was flattened in an airstrike dubbed Operation Orchard. Israeli intelligence claimed the project, allegedly aided by North Korea, had covert military dimensions. The IAEA concluded three years later that the destroyed facility was “very likely” a nuclear reactor under development.
These precedents pale in comparison to Israel’s current military campaign against Iran, dubbed Operation Rising Lion, which aims to wipe out Iran’s nuclear program. The stakes are exponentially higher: Iran is a larger, more capable adversary located beyond Israel’s immediate neighborhood. And unlike Iraq or Syria in decades past, Iran has already accumulated significant nuclear know-how and material.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,invoking the Begin Doctrine, claimed that Iran was on the verge of developing nuclear weapons and vowed that Israeli strikes would continue “as long as necessary” to neutralize the threat. But this assertion lacks backing from key intelligence assessments.
On March 25, U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testified that the American intelligence community had assessed that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.” However, Gabbard — and the IAEA separately in a recent report — expressed concern over Iran’s stockpile of uranium enriched to 60 percent purity, which, if enriched further to 90 percent, would become weapons-grade material. The IAEA, like Gabbard, concluded there was no evidence of a structured nuclear-weapons program underway.
Yet Israel pressed ahead with its military strikes. Netanyahu’s government, in coordination with the Trump administration, seems to believe that such force will buy leverage at the diplomatic table.
In reality, the attacks are likely to achieve the opposite. Far from forcing concessions, the Israeli strikes have derailed nuclear diplomacy. Tehran has suspended talks indefinitely, accusing Washington of coordinating and authorizing the Israeli operation. This mirrors a pattern from Trump’s first term, when his “maximum pressure” campaign on Iran backfired, hardening Iranian resolve rather than moderating it.
Indeed, if Israel’s goal is to eliminate the Iranian nuclear threat, this strategy may prove deeply counterproductive.
Two key factors make this preemptive war particularly perilous. First, Israel cannot destroy Iran’s nuclear program by military means alone. Tzachi Hanegbi, Netanyahu’s own national security adviser, acknowledged on Israeli television on June 13 that Iran’s program “cannot be destroyed through kinetic means.” A negotiated settlement, he suggested, was the only sustainable option.
But with the collapse of diplomacy and deepening Iranian hostility, Israel may be forcing Iran toward the very nuclear path it wants to prevent. Tehran could emulate North Korea’s playbook: withdraw from the NPT, eject IAEA inspectors and weaponize its nuclear assets at speed. North Korea withdrew from the NPT in 2003 and tested a nuclear bomb just three years later, becoming a de facto nuclear-weapons state.
Iran, heavily sanctioned and increasingly isolated, may now conclude that it has little to lose from following suit. If Iran raises enrichment from 60 percent to 90 percent purity — a short technical leap — it could rapidly convert its uranium stockpile into bomb-grade material. That would mark a historic failure of U.S. and Israeli nonproliferation strategy and hand Tehran the strategic deterrent it long claimed not to seek.
Second, the underlying logic of the Israeli campaign may no longer be about nuclear rollback but rather regime change. Netanyahu has openly called for the fall of the Iranian regime, and Israeli strikes have expanded beyond nuclear and military sites to include economic infrastructure, energy facilities and civilian aviation hubs.
This broadening of war aims could lock Israel into a prolonged military confrontation with Iran — a campaign that could exact heavy human and economic costs. Even before the Iran operation, Israeli society was showing signs of war fatigue, with growing numbers of reservists declining to report for duty.
Meanwhile, U.S. forces are increasingly entangled in the conflict. In defending Israel from retaliatory missile and drone attacks, American troops are already operating in air, land and naval roles. A broader U.S. intervention remains a distinct risk.
Israel has long justified its aggressive posture on existential grounds. Its small size and hostile environment, it argues, require proactive and sometimes disproportionate defense measures. But the line between deterrence and provocation is perilously thin — and it may now have been crossed.
History shows that Israel’s pursuit of short-term tactical victories often undermines its long-term strategic interests. The Osirak attack contributed to decades of conflict in Iraq. The al-Kibar strike delayed but did not eliminate Syria’s nuclear ambitions. And now, Operation Rising Lion could go down as the moment when Israel’s policy of preemption made an Iranian bomb inevitable.
Israel remains the Middle East’s preeminent military power, possessing not only superior conventional forces but also undeclared nuclear weapons. That should afford it the confidence to pursue measured strategies.
Instead, by trying to preserve its nuclear monopoly through force, Israel risks fueling the very proliferation spiral it has long sought to prevent.
The Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima on Aug.5, eve of the 78th anniversary of the U.S. nuclear attack: Japan was already essentially defeated before the city was destroyed. (Photo by Yo Inoue)
Atomic bombings were more about demonstrating power than securing surrender
Months before the twin atomic attacks, it had become clear that the issue was not whether Japan would surrender but when. America’s own Strategic Bombing Survey concluded in 1946 that “Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped.”
The Hollywood blockbuster “Oppenheimer” carries the somber message that the nuclear age may have doomed us all.
The biopic about American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” has renewed international attention around the morality and military necessity of the nuclear attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 78 years ago.
Why the first and only use of atomic weapons occurred is still something of a vexed question, especially because Japan was already essentially defeated before Hiroshima was destroyed. Japan was then under a crippling sea and air blockade and conventional U.S. firebombing air raids were devastating its major cities.
Years later, plagued by guilt, the real Oppenheimer acknowledged that the bomb on Hiroshima was used “against an essentially defeated enemy.”
The U.S. may have won the war before the Hiroshima bombing but it was not content with defeating Japan. It sought Japan’s unconditional surrender.
Decades later, there is still no definitive answer as to why the U.S. attacked Nagasaki with a nuclear weapon just three days after Hiroshima’s destruction and before Japan had time to fully grasp the strategic implications of the first atomic attack.
Even if the Hiroshima bombing was justifiable as a way to force Japan to surrender, what military purpose did the precipitous second attack serve?
Telford Taylor, who served as chief prosecutor at the Nazi war crime trials in Nuremberg, Germany, said, “The rights and wrongs of Hiroshima are debatable, but I have never heard a plausible justification of Nagasaki.”
The unstated justification, I would argue, had little to do with Nagasaki itself. Rather, the administration of U.S. President Harry S. Truman judged the bombing as necessary to fully demonstrate America’s new destructive powers.
Truman, who took office in April 1945 days before Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler committed suicide, gave Japan no firm deadline to surrender before rushing into the second atomic strike. No warning was given to the residents of either city bombed.
To be sure, all sides, including imperial Japan, engaged in mass killings during World War II, a conflict in which nearly 60 million people died. The then-prevailing political-military culture that regarded the targeting of civilian centers as a legitimate tool of warfare certainly facilitated the atomic bombings.
Did the bombings alone lead to Japan’s announcement of surrender six days after the Nagasaki attack? Disagreement among historians still persists over this issue.
The entry of the Soviet Union into the war against Japan, one day before the Nagasaki bombing, gutted a bilateral nonaggression pact and was an equally, if not more, critical factor in Tokyo’s surrender. By opening a new front in the conflict, the Soviet move was a mortal blow to Japanese morale, making capitulation more certain.
The official U.S. narrative in the war’s immediate aftermath asserted that the atomic bombings by themselves accomplished the goal of compelling Japan to surrender, saving the lives of thousands of Americans who would have been killed if a full-scale invasion of Japan’s main islands had become necessary.
This “noble action” narrative later came under attack from American scholars who argued that Japan had been ready to surrender before the atomic bombings.
The revisionist thesis drew strength from the White House-initiated U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, which in 1945-46 examined the U.S. bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan. The report concluded that “Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped.”
In fact, months before the twin atomic attacks, it had become clear that the issue was not whether Japan would surrender but when. A key sticking point was the emperor’s role: The Japanese wanted the emperor to retain authority rather than be reduced to a figurehead as ultimately happened under U.S. military occupation.
In deciding how to bring the war to a close, the Truman administration overruled America’s military leadership. Indeed, a string of U.S. military leaders later publicly criticized the atomic bombings as unnecessary.
“The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace,” said Admiral Chester Nimitz, who served as commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. “The atomic bomb played no decisive part from a purely military point of view in the defeat of Japan.”
Admiral William Halsey Jr., the U.S. Third Fleet commander, said: “It was a mistake. … [The scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it.”
Hiroshima was selected as the first nuclear target because of its flat terrain and because it had essentially been untouched by U.S. aid raids, thus allowing the impact of the first atomic weapon, an untested uranium bomb, to be clearly assessed.
For the second attack, the U.S. chose to employ a more powerful plutonium bomb that had been secretly tested 24 days earlier in the New Mexico desert. The city of Kokura, now part of Kitakyushu, was chosen as the primary target, but because of heavy cloud cover there on the appointed day, the U.S. B-29 bomber carrying the weapon was diverted to Nagasaki.
The techno-political imperative to show off America’s unmatched destructive prowess to the world then set in motion a new U.S.-led global order. Indeed, while the bombings may have contributed to ending a hot war, they were the opening shots of a long Cold War.
The resulting proliferation of nuclear weapons created an edgy world that today bristles with more than 13,000 atomic weapons. The Ukraine conflict, meanwhile, has increased the risks of a cataclysmic nuclear war, with both Russia and NATO conducting preparatory drills.
The legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been to put humanity’s future in jeopardy. The world today has a nuclear test ban treaty but no treaty outlawing the use of nuclear weapons.
This ominously means that parties to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, while prohibited from testing on their territories, face no legal constraint to following the U.S. example in Hiroshima of employing an untested nuclear weapon against an adversary. For the time being, fortunately, political constraints still apply, even if tenuously.
Brahma Chellaney is professor emeritus of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and a former adviser to India’s National Security Council. He is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”
Biden, going beyond the traditional tools of deterrence and diplomacy, is relying entirely on his unprecedented sanctions to shape the behavior of a rival nuclear power, which has a long record of enduring economic hardship.
President Biden’s gaffes during his recent European tour – from suggesting to American troops in Poland that they would be in war-torn Ukraine and saying NATO would respond “in kind” if Russia used chemical weapons to seemingly calling for regime change in Moscow – led to considerable clean-up efforts by his team. Biden, by his own admission, has a record of being a “gaffe machine.”
But the president’s misstatements on issues of war and peace in this perilous time carry significant risks, which explains why his top officials were quick to walk back his apparent regime-change call, lest it further erode U.S.-Russia relations. U.S.-Russia ties are already at an all-time low.
More fundamentally, Biden’spropensity for making misstatements that land his administration in difficult situations is detracting attention from the larger question of whether the president has a strategy to end the war in Ukraine.
Biden’s statements, in fact, are making it increasingly difficult to negotiate an end to the war. Washington’s overriding focus on punishing Russia for its brazen invasion suggests that top U.S. officials are not thinking of how to terminate the war, even as Moscow and Kyiv hold talks.
Punishing Russia for invading Ukraine, while essential, has ceased to be a means to an end and has apparently become an end in itself.
This may explain why Biden has discarded some key tenets of diplomacy, including avoiding insulting another country’s head of state or conveying an unintended policy message to preserve space for direct negotiations.
The use of aggressive language began long before the Ukraine war. Just weeks after entering the White House, Biden said Putin is “a killer,” vowing that the Russian leader will “pay a price” for allegedly meddling in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
By contrast, Biden has treated Chinese President Xi Jinping with respect. Despite Xi’s coverup of the origins of the COVID-19 virus, his Asian expansionism and his Muslim gulag (which represents the largest mass incarceration of people on religious grounds since Adolf Hitler), the president has not hurled any personal insult at him. Nor has he imposed any sanctions on the Chinese leader or those in his inner circle.
The unintended consequence of Biden’s vilification of Putin is to seriously crimp space for the U.S. and Russia to reach a modus vivendi to rein in their conflict. Putin now has a greater reason to double down and continue his invasion until the Russian forces carve out a strategic buffer against NATO that effectively partitions Ukraine into two, with the Dnieper River possibly serving as the approximate dividing line.
Biden, going beyond the traditional tools of deterrence and diplomacy, is relying entirely on his unprecedented sanctions to shape the behavior of a rival nuclear power, which has a long record of enduring economic hardship. In the post-World War II period, the U.S. has generally relied on sanctions to help bring weak states to heel. Regime change likewise has been imposed only on weak, vulnerable nations.
Squeezing a major power with a raft of harsh sanctions is fraught with danger. The unforeseen consequences could trigger an escalating spiral leading to devastating armed conflict. It was U.S. sanctions against Imperial Japan that ultimately provoked the attack on Pearl Harbor, leading to the Pacific war and eventually the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Today’s Biden-initiated Western sanctions on Russia are the largest, coordinated punitive measures ever rolled out against any country in history. But just as Biden’s threat to impose such sanctions failed to deter Russia from invading Ukraine, their actual imposition, far from chastening Moscow, is likely to resurrect the Iron Curtain and spur the emergence of a remilitarized, neo-imperial Russia.
The U.S.-led sanctions that followed Russia’s 2014 Crimea annexation, while fueling Russian nationalism, compelled Moscow to pivot to China, turning two natural competitors into close strategic partners. Those sanctions also led Russia to build a parallel payments system that has now helped take the sting out of the recent exit of Visa and Mastercard, thereby setting an example for other nations to invest in building their own payments infrastructure.
Today, the rise in international oil and gas prices, by directly contributing to inflation and political trouble at home, is underscoring that sanctions also impose costs on their imposers. Those costs would escalate and possibly even engender recession if the cycle of sanctions, counter-sanctions and fresh sanctions substantially diminished Russian energy exports.
In a further reminder that sanctions are blunt instruments and often produce unintended and undesirable consequences, the West’s comprehensive hybrid war against Russia is helping boost Putin’s popularity at home. According to a poll by the Levada Center, an independent, Moscow-based pollster that has been designated a “foreign agent” in Russia, Putin’s approval ratings shot up from 69 percent in January to 83 percent in late March.
Biden’s primary strategic focus ought to be on preserving America’s global preeminence. For years, the U.S. waged self-debilitating wars in the Islamic world, allowing China to emerge as its primary challenger globally. Now, as it pours military resources into Europe, America’s renewed focus on European security threatens to distract it from its long-term strategic objectives.
After losing Afghanistan to sandal-wearing terrorists, Biden should not allow the impulse for revenge against Moscow to drive his foreign policy. Ukraine is Europe’s problem, and he should exert pressure on Europeans to take greater ownership of their security so that the U.S. can single-mindedly focus on arresting its relative decline.
The current crisis represents the most dangerous period since the end of the Cold War. Stable Washington-Moscow relations can help to avert a wider conflict and reach a NATO-Russia agreement on Ukraine modeled on the 1955 treaty under which Austria established itself as a buffer state between the East and West and declared its neutrality.
More broadly, the U.S. should seek to drive a wedge in the China-Russia axis, instead of becoming a bridge that unites them. The deepening China-Russia entente is perhaps the biggest U.S. foreign-policy failure of the post-Cold War era.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press).
A moment of silence is observed at 11:02 am on Aug. 9 at the Peace Statue in Nagasaki, marking the moment an atomic bomb was dropped on the city in 1945. © Kyodo
Stagecraft and Statecraft 
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