The Alternative Was Not Nothing

Quadrant

This essay forms part of a longer series on Donald Trump’s second presidency – examining the erosion of constitutional constraints at home and the consequences for American power abroad.

Peter Smith asks a fair question. In Trump and the Paradox of American Power, I wrote that I had long favoured taking out Iran’s nuclear facilities – but not like this. Peter wants to know what “not like this” means. What was the alternative? He deserves a straight answer.

But first, a word about his Harry Truman analogy.

Peter invokes the atomic bombing of Japan to frame his challenge. President Truman, he notes, faced two coherent alternatives to the bomb: invade Japan island by island, or negotiate a peace short of unconditional surrender. The existence of those alternatives is what made Truman’s decision a genuine choice rather than mere necessity. By implication, anyone who says “not like this” about Iran must be able to name a comparable alternative – or stay quiet. It is a good analogy. But it does not work in the direction Peter intends.

Apply the same logic to Iran. What were the coherent and comprehensible alternatives available to Trump on 27 February 2026? There were two: continue the diplomacy that was producing results, or pursue strikes confined to nuclear facilities. The first was already delivering. On that very day, Oman’s Foreign Minister announced that a breakthrough had been reached: Iran had agreed in principle never to stockpile enriched uranium and to full verification by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Talks were expected to resume on 2 March. The second was surgical strikes on nuclear facilities specifically – precisely the option Israel and America had already demonstrated was achievable when it conducted targeted strikes on Iranian nuclear sites in the Twelve-Day War of June 2025.

Trump chose neither. He launched a full regime-change war against a country of 93 million people while Oman’s mediators were still counting what they believed was a historic diplomatic victory. That is what “not like this” means. It is the distinction between a limited operation with a defined objective and an open-ended war with three shifting justifications – self-defence, non-proliferation, and regime change – none of which shows any signs of producing the outcome it promised.

The Truman analogy is nonetheless instructive in a second way – because of what Truman prepared for. He had a plan for the morning after: MacArthur, the occupation, the reconstruction of a society that had just been devastated. A military decision must answer for what comes next, not only for the objective it sets out to achieve. Trump had no such plan. Indeed, the White House appears not even to have taken the prior step: serious scenario-planning for what would happen if Iran did not follow the script.

The non-proliferation objective – the most compelling justification for action – remains unmet: Iran’s nuclear material has not been accounted for, and the regime, far from collapsing, has elevated Mojtaba Khamenei, the dead Supreme Leader’s son, to his father’s chair. The Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed four weeks into the conflict, with crude oil above $110 a barrel. And over the weekend, the president issued a 48-hour ultimatum to obliterate Iran’s power plants if the Strait is not reopened – a threat that, if carried out, will plunge 93 million people into darkness and prompt Iranian retaliation against Gulf desalination infrastructure serving tens of millions more.

Iran’s strategy is not to defeat American forces – it cannot. It is to widen the war horizontally, striking Gulf energy infrastructure, drawing in neighbouring states, and multiplying the arenas of cost until Washington is forced to negotiate on Tehran’s terms. It is precisely the logic of Vietnam – an adversary raising the price of staying rather than trying to win. General Westmoreland’s assurances that the light was visible at the end of the tunnel were followed by the Tet Offensive; Trump’s declaration that the operation was “very complete, pretty much” was followed within 48 hours by an ultimatum to destroy Iran’s power grid.

But this is Vietnam with features that make the exits narrower: a closed global energy chokepoint, a regional war already drawing in Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, strikes exchanged near Dimona and Natanz, and an Iranian ballistic missile programme that America’s own ambassador to the United Nations warns can now reach much of Europe. Vietnam was a tragedy of geopolitical overreach. This has the potential architecture of something categorically worse.

Peter argues that Iran’s regime is evil, and that evil regimes seeking weapons of mass destruction should be stopped if at all possible. On the first point he is correct, and no serious person disputes it. The regime’s massacre of thousands of protesters in January and February – the stated catalyst for Trump’s ultimatum – was a moral obscenity. But detecting “evil” is not a strategy. It is a description. Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were evil, as Peter notes – and they were stopped by evidence, due process, and conviction. The method of stopping evil matters enormously, because methods establish precedents, and precedents outlast the individuals who set them.

Those who dismiss such concerns as Trump Derangement Syndrome might pause to consider that the complaint here is not about Trump’s character but about a specific decision made at a specific moment when a specific diplomatic alternative was actively in play. Disagreeing with one consequential choice is not a syndrome. It is a judgment about evidence.

Here is what the evidence now shows. The non-proliferation goal was real and legitimate – but it was severable from the method. Surgical strikes on nuclear facilities had already been shown to work. The regime’s savagery toward its own people strengthened, rather than weakened, the humanitarian case for a targeted operation with international support.

Instead, the administration launched a regime-change war without congressional authorisation, without consulting its closest ally, Britain, and without a plan for what follows the bombs. For conservatives who claim to revere Madison’s constrained republic rather than Wilson’s executive state, that sequence should be a red flag, not a footnote.

The answer to Peter’s question has been in plain sight since June 2025: targeted strikes on nuclear facilities – with allied consultation, with congressional authorisation, with diplomatic channel kept open rather than discarded, and with an honest account to the American people of what the objective was and what it was not. That is not wishy-washy. It is the difference between a surgeon who removes a tumour and one who operates without diagnosis, anaesthetic, or a plan for the recovery ward.

Four weeks of rising oil prices, a closed strait, a martyr’s son in a martyr’s chair, a regional war spreading across the Gulf, and a 48-hour ultimatum to destroy civilian power infrastructure suggest that the question Peter asks – if not Trump’s way, what? – deserves a better answer than the one currently unfolding.

The voters who sent Trump to Washington to end military adventurism are living inside one.

The alternative was not nothing. It was not like this. To be clear: the alternative does not rule out bombing. It rules out turning a narrow non-proliferation problem into an open-ended bid to remake Iran by force.

This column was first published in Quadrant on 24 March 2026.