Trump, Iran, and the “Nuclear Taboo”
Twenty years ago, when Danny Postel was Senior Editor of openDemocracy magazine, he wrote the Prickly Pamphlet Reading Legitimation Crisis in Iran (2006) about the intelllectual ferment and “liberal renaissance” within the theocratic state. Today, he’s the Politics Editor at New Lines magazine, where he continues to produce essential commantary on the war in Iran.
This week, Hussein Banai, associate professor of international studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, warns that the historical narrative in America surrounding the end of WWII may lead Trump down a cataclysmic path.
“A president unable to achieve a decisive political conclusion through conventional means may begin to contemplate options that more conventional strategists would treat as categorically foreclosed,” says Banai. “The comparison that would animate his self-understanding is with Harry S. Truman: the one American president who took the decision to use the bomb and, in doing so, in his own telling and that of his defenders, ended a war and imposed an American order on the wreckage.”
That comparison, though, is deeply flawed. Historians have long argued that Truman’s decision to use nuclear force was more about stepping up the Cold War than ending war with Japan, which was already on the brink of surrender. So Trumps’s military calculus isn’t just based in politics and ego—it’s also factoring in a misunderstanding of history.
Danny Postel himself has also weighed in. Trump has backed the himself into a corner in Iran, one where the “nuclear taboo” becomes a frighteningly real consideration.
Trump’s disturbing, expletive-ridden rhetoric about bombing Iran “back to the Stone Age” has concerning precedent. Banai points to multiple instances from 2016 when he indicated a willingness to use nuclear weapons. But even if, as Banai suggests, “a nuclear strike on Iran is not probable,” the very notion that such an outcome can be considered is cause for alarm.
Get a copy of Danny’s pathbreaking analysis of Iranian intellectual culture here or order it at your favorite bookstore.
