At any moment, President Donald Trump could decide to directly involve the United States in yet another war in the Middle East—this time against Iran.
The stakes could not be higher and this week, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., joins “The Signal Sitdown” to discuss.
“I think President Trump’s instincts are to try to keep us out of war,” Paul told The Daily Signal. “I think he has these instincts within his belief system of restraint and less intervention.” Nevertheless, Paul warned that there might be “forces within his administration that would like to get us more involved.”
The United States’ support for Israel in the war that broke out on Oct. 7, 2023, has, as of writing, been limited to assisting Israel defend against drone and missile strikes and providing Israel with intelligence, military aid, and weapons sales. At the same time, the United States was pursuing a new nuclear deal with Iran, and news reports suggested American and Iranian negotiators were getting close.
But the war entered a new phase when Israel launched Operation Rising Lion on June 13 in what the Israeli government has described as a preemptive attack on Iranian nuclear capabilities. The U.S. government has insisted this action was taken unilaterally by the Israelis but with some knowledge by the U.S. The extent of that knowledge and American policymakers’ feelings toward it remain unclear.
In the first hours of fighting, however, Israel’s strikes in Operation Rising Lion targeted not only Iran’s nuclear facilities but its nuclear scientists, as well as top military and political officials. “Senior leaders in Iran are already packing their bags,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed in a June 14 video address. “They sense what’s coming.”
“The real question is, ‘How is Iran going to respond to this?’” Paul said.
“This is the difficulty of foreign policy. We can say all the things we want: ‘We don’t want them to have a nuclear weapon,’” Paul explained. Yet he urged that Americans consider “how they will respond to being attacked.”
Iran has “been attacked by Israel—significant attack. Their scientists have been killed and their higher echelon of military leaders have been killed. So do you think they’ll come to the negotiating table or leave?” Paul told The Daily Signal. “I would imagine they are humiliated because they’ve been really, utterly decimated. I mean, Israel’s shown incredible military prowess. They’ve killed people at will. They rule the skies. They’ve knocked out a lot of nuclear capacity—probably not all.”
“What happens if negotiations go by the wayside?” Paul asked rhetorically. “I think that’s what we’re facing right now.”
There are no “easy” and certain answers to that question, Paul suggested. Iran “could say, ‘Well, alright, we hear you … We’re going to submit to your will.’” The other scenario is much more concerning: “Or they might respond by saying, ‘We’re going to commit the final steps to go ahead and have a weapon because the only thing that’ll keep you guys out of our country is to let you know we have a nuclear weapon.’”
The missile salvos between Tel-Aviv and Tehran continue, and America has repositioned military assets from all over the world—the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group was brought in from the Indo-Pacific and aerial fuel tankers have flown over from U.S. bases—gearing up for a potential response.
Those advocating for America’s involvement to denuclearize Iran, however, have not answered other questions. Questions such as how far is the U.S. willing to go to deny the Ayatollah the bomb? Regime change?
“Militarily, I think we can defeat Iran probably in a matter of weeks,” Paul said. “It’s what comes afterwards” that gives him pause.
“The unintended consequences in Afghanistan took 20 years,” he noted. “When we finally left, it reverted back to the stone ages within six months. We wasted a trillion dollars there. And I’m not saying we shouldn’t have gone after our enemies there. We should have, but we should have come home three months later.”
“Just the whole nation-building enterprise in Afghanistan was a huge mistake,” Paul explained. “In Iraq, we take out the main opposition to Iran. So by anybody’s estimate, Iran is more of a problem, regionally, because Saddam Hussein is gone.”
The question every American policymaker needs to ask themselves right now, Paul said, is, “What are the unintended consequences of this? Do they rush to the bomb?”
Paul’s hope is that the president ”will resist the calls of people wanting to bomb Tehran,” and get everyone back to the negotiating table. “Donald Trump, while I don’t think he’s a libertarian—although he tells me all the time ‘I’m more libertarian than you are,’ I don’t believe that’s probably true, Mr. President—but he does have some libertarian instincts.”
“My hope is still that there’s a route for diplomacy,” Paul told The Daily Signal. Such an agreement, he said, “has to be not just about nuclear weapons, it needs to be about ballistic weapons and … quit committing war and proxy wars throughout the Middle East.”
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