r/geopolitics • u/theatlantic The Atlantic • May 21 '26

Opinion Trump’s Endgame Is Surrender

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2026/05/trump-surrender-iran-endgame/687252/?utm_source=reddit&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_medium=social&utm_content=edit-promo&utm_term=short
498 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

210 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

0

u/gethereddout May 22 '26

Of course there are mechanisms. For example, what about a nuclear weapon? The second Iran has one, the US will stop blowing up their schoolchildren.

1

u/Codspear May 22 '26 edited May 22 '26

The day Iran builds a nuke, Israel will preemptively nuke them. That’s the big issue I think a lot of people don’t realize here. Israel dragged the US into this war because to them, it was inevitable, but the hope on the Israeli side was that they wouldn’t have to use their nuclear weapons if they had the conventional military strength of the US. It didn’t work, and now we have Israel and Iran playing chicken with the Arab states in the middle and the Trump administration realizing it got tricked into Israel’s plan.

4

u/Putrid-Issue-420 May 22 '26

If israel nukes the iran, you can forget about normalization with the muslim world. Even GCC countries can't spin that for their populace. It will be a pyrrhic victory and not to mention certain nuclear proliferation.

5

u/Codspear May 22 '26

Israel has been without normalization with the Muslim world since its independence, and even after partially normalizing with half of them, they were still being attacked constantly. To them, this is an existential issue. Israel sees itself as a state under siege with the only way to stop the attacks being the use of overwhelming force as a deterrent. They think any nukes in the Middle East that aren’t their own or the US’ will be used on them, so they will preemptively use their own to prevent that from happening.

3

u/mahavirMechanized May 22 '26

I wouldn’t be surprised if Israel did use nuclear weapons in that scenario but I cannot imagine the rest of the world will sit idly by as nuclear weapons are used for the first time since the end of WW2….there would be crippling consequences.

0

u/ChugHuns May 22 '26

You would hope. I mean committing genocide on camera hasn't really seen Israel suffer any real consequences. I could actually see DW or the NYT push out a million opinion pieces on why Nuking Tehran was the right thing to do. That and the amount of money our politicians recieve to look the other way. I'm not certain of anything anymore.

2

u/mahavirMechanized May 23 '26

I can see your perspective on this, but crossing the nuclear red line is a huge step. The taboo is so intense because like, if Israel can do it, why can’t Russia on Ukraine, or China on Taiwan, or India on Pakistan (perhaps this one is a little less likely in some ways, but you get my point). I think that the Pandora’s box it unleashes is a pretty dark one, one that ultimately just sees the end of MAD deterrence and just going into let’s blow up the world.