Iran Has Three Options Now. Two Are Terrible.

 The US bombing of Iran’s three most important nuclear sites this weekend has set off a range of opinion and emotion. This includes relief that Tehran’s atomic weapons program will be set back significantly; awe at the military efficiency of the US attack; and worries that it will incite a deadly Iranian response. For me, it also conjured up personal history.

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I visited Iran briefly before the 1979 revolution on a Navy destroyer, pulling into the southern Iranian naval port of Bandar Abbas to top off our fuel tanks. That port guards the northern passage of the Strait of Hormuz, through which passes more than a fifth of the world’s oil and gas.

In the few hours I was ashore, working with the shah of Iran’s navy to coordinate the logistics of our visit, I could sense the pride with which the Iranian sailors carried themselves. They had a reason to be pleased: We were about to deliver four guided-missile destroyers newly built in the US, which were to become the centerpieces of their growing naval force. Then came the revolution, and those ships became the US Kidd class destroyers, and had a long and successful career in our Navy.

In the US these days, we tend to think of Iran as an annoying middle-sized power stirring up problems in the Middle East. That is not how the Iranians see themselves.

Iranians today think of themselves as the inheritors of the Persian Empire, which 2,500 years ago was the largest in the world, controlling 40% of the earth’s population across two million square miles. Today’s Persians find themselves far removed from that hegemony, with Israel and the US snipping off or degrading the militaries of their rump empire: Hamas, Hezbollah, Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, the Houthis.

Given the apparent success of US strikes on the heart of the nuclear program in Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan, Iran’s leaders need a new game plan to restore their status as a regional power, if not their former glory. What are their options, and what will they likely choose from a diminished set of choices?

Option one, and what the US and Israel are hoping for, is an epiphany in Tehran — in effect, an unconditional surrender. The idea is that having seen the utter domination of Israel’s military, abetted now by US B-2 bombers and “bunker-buster” bombs, the Iranian leaders will sue for peace, voluntarily give up their nuclear programs and stockpiles and admit they no long have any right to enrich uranium. While not completely impossible, this is highly unlikely, especially given the fragility of the regime and the pride of the leadership.

A second, and far more likely option, is that the regime will salvage whatever it can from the damaged nuclear sites (and they may have moved out materials and machines before the US strikes), and hide it within their vast country. Iran is nearly two and a half times the size of Texas, and one “known unknown” — as my old boss Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld would say — is where else nuclear programs are expanding in secret. In this scenario, in addition to hiding whatever they can salvage, the Iranian leaders would conduct a series of face-saving strikes against the US and Israel.