During his career as a real estate mogul, Donald Trump repeatedly bankrupted casinos. In his second term as president, Trump continues to indulge his love of high-stakes gambits—and the war-entirely-of-personal-choice he launched over the weekend with Iran might be the biggest gamble yet of his entire political career. The apparent death of Iran’s supreme leader in the opening hours of the war only heightens the danger for Trump, his war partner Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the entire region, and the world beyond.
On the one hand, the events of the weekend so far seem all-but foreordained. It was a war that almost everyone could see coming—the US military buildup has been underway for months and, in many ways, Trump’s been on this road since May 8, 2018, when he jettisoned the Iranian nuclear deal known as the JCPOA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which had been carefully negotiated by the Obama administration to limit Iran’s path toward an atomic weapon. Similarly, the Iranian response to the war’s opening salvos—missiles and retaliatory strikes against other Gulf States, including Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan—had been widely foreseen and telegraphed.
But where the war goes from here—how long and how far-reaching—and the fate of Iran’s regime in the days, weeks, and months ahead stand as some of the biggest unknowns ever contemplated in a famously fraught and explosive region.
All of modern history tells us that upheaval in Iran is the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings, with the potential of enormous yet-to-be-understood consequences that could unfold for decades. After all, the US is still dealing with the downstream consequences of the last upheaval in Iran nearly a half-century ago, when the US-backed shah—originally put in power by a 1953 CIA coup—was ousted in 1979 by Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini and whose 86-year-old Ali Hosseini Khamenei successor led Iran until his death in the Israeli and American airstrikes this weekend.
In the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War—America’s first great folly in the Middle East of the 21st Century—then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld spoke of the “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns” of geopolitical events. Today, understanding some of the “known unknowns” of Donald Trump’s grand new adventure in Iran helps to make clear the stakes of what’s ahead.
1. It has already caused American deaths. Donald Trump has been clearly emboldened in his global rambunctiousness over the last year by two major tactical military successes—a bloodless-for-America airstrike campaign on Iranian nuclear facilities last year, carried out with stealth bombers and in conjunction with earlier Israeli airstrikes, as well as the stunningly audacious raid just weeks ago to seize Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, which also was carried out without a single US death. History, though, is always a close-run thing—and earlier this week we received an unexpected window into an narrowly averted alternate history: At the State of the Union, Trump presented an Army special operations pilot, Chief Warrant Officer 5 Eric Slover, with the Medal of Honor for his brave and careful reaction after being wounded four times by machine-gun fire while piloting the lead MH-47 Chinook helicopter on the Maduro raid. It was on the one hand a wildly inappropriate made-for-TV moment—one rushed by the Pentagon to align with the president’s whim, bypassing a deliberate process that normally takes months or years—but what was even more interesting was how it revealed that, but for 45-year-old Slover’s bravery, dedication, and fortitude, the Maduro operation might have gone wildly sideways. The crash of the lead helicopter in the raid’s opening minutes might have tipped the whole operation from being seen as a smashing, daring success toward being remembered as a debacle like Jimmy Carter’s bungled attempt to rescue Iranian hostages, Operation Eagle Claw, which killed eight US servicemen and fatally injured Carter’s presidency.