We are now being told that it is worth paying higher gas prices and spending billions of dollars a day to prosecute a war against Iran. At the same time, the administration continues to pursue expensive domestic vanity projects and monuments bearing Trump’s name. For all the talk of sacrifice, the spending priorities feel disconnected from the urgency being invoked. Governments often invoke sacrifice most solemnly while continuing to spend freely on symbolism.
We are also told that Iran’s leadership has been weakened so severely that it is not even clear who remains in charge. Yet if that is true, it becomes harder to understand what lasting assurance can realistically be secured. What would a durable agreement even look like under such conditions? Would a framework similar to the Obama‑era nuclear deal have sufficed? And if not, what precisely is the new standard?
Which raises the harder question: Why Iran specifically?
Iran’s regional behavior—its proxies, its rhetoric, its destabilizing actions—is often cited. These concerns are real. But they do not fully explain why nuclear capability is treated as uniquely intolerable in this case when other, deeply dangerous precedents already exist.
North Korea already possesses nuclear weapons. South Korea has lived alongside that reality for decades under the protection of an American alliance. The situation is dangerous, imperfect, and deeply uncomfortable—but it exists. The world, however uneasily, has learned to live with it. Containment, deterrence, and alliance structures replaced the fantasy of elimination. Russia possesses nuclear weapons and still invades its neighbors. The world manages that reality too, if nervously and at great cost.
So when Trump argues that war is justified because Iran “cannot have a nuclear weapon,” the more difficult question is whether military action itself increases the long‑term incentives for proliferation. Nations observing these events may conclude that nuclear capability is not a liability but a form of insurance. Pakistan is already nuclear despite longstanding instability and regional tensions. Others may quietly decide they should be as well. The lesson some governments may draw is not that nuclear ambition invites danger, but that lacking such weapons invites vulnerability.
And military action cannot eliminate knowledge. It can destroy facilities, but it cannot erase expertise, scientific networks, or national incentives. In some cases, it accelerates them.
This is why diplomacy and multilateral institutions still matter, however frustrating or imperfect they may be. Decisions about nuclear legitimacy cannot rest solely on the instincts or preferences of individual leaders. They require negotiation, verification, coalition‑building, and broad international legitimacy. The alternative is a world in which each nation reserves unto itself the authority to decide which governments may possess deterrence and which may not—a principle unlikely to remain stable for long, particularly once other nations begin applying it in return.
However unfashionable that may sound in an age increasingly impatient with restraint, it remains a more durable foundation than perpetual escalation.