Policymakers and intelligence agencies are still debating the extent of damage to Iran’s nuclear capabilities from Israeli and U.S. strikes this month.
The most optimistic assessment came from President Trump himself, who claimed that “bunker busting bombs” had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear facilities. Democratic members of Congress, media critics of the president, and even some U.S. intelligence agencies suggest Trump’s glowing account is more self-serving hyperbole and that the strikes set back Iran’s nuclear program by “only a few months.” Israel’s assessment, perhaps not surprisingly, is much closer to Trump’s, saying the attacks cost Iran several years of work on nuclear weapons development.
What is indisputable, however, are the geopolitical ramifications of the U.S. strikes, which crossed several strategic Rubicons.
What once seemed almost inconceivable — that Trump would risk being “dragged into another Mideast war,” let alone a direct conflict with Iran through a massive use of U.S. force — has happened. Additional strikes are now imaginable if Iran seeks to rebuild what it has lost from Israeli and U.S. attacks.
The fact that Iran has active strategic relations with Russia, China and North Korea, the three nuclear members of the new anti-U.S., anti -Western axis of evil, and was still attacked on its core strategic imperative is also a break from traditional U.S. restraint. It indicates that the Trump administration will no longer shy away from frontally challenging members of the aggressive collaboration. The action against Iran sends a strong message of deterrence to China, and North Korea as well, that Trump’s oft-stated aversion to military action is not as paralyzing as America’s enemies might have assumed.
Deterrence may be partially restored, with the glaring exception of Trump’s disgraceful acquiescence to Vladimir Putin’s criminal aggression in Ukraine and his blatant disrespect for Ukraine’s heroic president, Volodymyr Zelensky.
Trump’s lack of interest in Putin’s vast array of war crimes against the Ukrainian people will forever besmirch whatever credit he has earned for addressing the Iran nuclear problem. His kowtowing to Putin has been met with the Russian leader’s disdain and virtual mocking of Trump’s almost desperate entreaties to end the conflict. When Trump dismissed the defiant remarks of Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s earlier place-holder president, by noting that Putin is actually “THE BOSS,” he was implicitly acknowledging that in Putin’s Russia, no official says anything that Putin does not want said, so Medvedev was delivering Putin’s latest insult to Trump.
Trump need not respond with his usual personal vituperation. Instead, he can take more meaningful and permanent action to rid the world of the Putin problem, using some of the information tools he has just scrapped. He is, after all, not the first U.S. official to take a chain saw to a government agency devoted to influencing the world not with bombs but with ideas, though he has carried the operation to extremes.
In Congress’s 1999 budget discussions, then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), minority vice-chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, collaborated with chairman Jesse Helms to eliminate the United States Information Agency and consolidate its functions within the State Department. USIA was created in 1953 during the height of the Cold War to explain and support American foreign policy and promote U.S. national interests through a wide range of overseas information programs. The agency also encouraged mutual understanding between the United States and other nations by conducting people-to-people educational and cultural activities. Its influence is credited with helping to liberate Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union by providing information to the peoples of the “captive nations” that was denied them by their communist oppressors.
While USIA’s functions under the Helms-Biden plan were absorbed into the State Department, the transfer was problematic from the start. U.S. diplomats conducted their official communications between governments whereas USIA, Voice of America, Radio Liberty, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Free Asia all conveyed accurate and unbiased information, without a suspect government slant, directly to the people. Eastern and Central European populations found the broadcasts refreshingly credible, laying the foundation of receptivity for Ronald Reagan’s rhetorical attacks that ended “the Evil Empire.” Trump’s rampant cutting of U.S. information agencies severely constrains America’s ability to replicate the liberation experience that brought a peaceful termination of the Cold War.
It appears that the extreme Islamist regime in Iran is on its last legs thanks to the military pressure from Israel and America’s unique advanced weaponry. The Iran precedent will strengthen Trump’s leverage to advance peaceful regime change in China, Russia and North Korea if he is inclined to pursue that goal. As of now, his administration denies even seeking it in the case of Iran. The U.S. Information Agency, by that organizational name, can remain buried in the ash heap of history, but the imperative of reaching out to the hearts and minds of the repressed populations can continue under a special Trumpian rubric.
Trump can easily exploit his penchant for creating new institutions and/or new names for existing entities. While the name of Trump’s social media outlet, “Truth Social,” may be self-serving, he could institute a new, historically accurate information outlet named “Truth Strategic” that, without explicitly calling for regime change, could offer essential information support to the Chinese, Russian and North Korean populations yearning for liberation from their tyrannical rulers.
The destruction of Iran’s ominous nuclear program re-opens the door to peaceful political transformation that Trump, in his quest for international recognition, should be loath to ignore — even if his erstwhile friend, Putin, is an early target of Trump’s peace through strength endeavor.
Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He is a nonresident fellow at the Institute for Corean-American Studies, a member of the advisory board of the Global Taiwan Institute and member of the advisory board of the Vandenberg Coalition.