It’s a staggering turnaround for Trump, who is now making the same mistake that Obama did.
President Trump declared on Wednesday that Iranian development of ballistic missiles didn’t matter, despite previously attacking Barack Obama’s nuclear deal for allowing their development and citing the missile program as one of the main reasons he launched the Iran war.
“What am I gonna do?” Trump asked rhetorically at a press conference at the G7 summit. “We’re going to let Saudi Arabia have missiles, but they can’t have them?” Then, seeming to mock an adviser, he said, “Yes sir!” Then he added: “It doesn’t work that way. Missiles aren’t the problem. Missiles, they hurt a little location, but they don’t blow up the planet.”
In reality, Iranian missiles are a huge problem. And you don’t have to take it from me — you can take it from Donald Trump. In October 2017, in announcing his declining to certify Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, Trump said Iran “develops, deploys, and proliferates missiles that threaten American troops and our allies.” Trump said that, under the Obama deal, Iran “has received massive sanctions relief while continuing to develop its missiles program.” In the same speech, he said that, under his strategy, “We will address the regime’s proliferation of missiles and weapons that threaten its neighbors, global trade, and freedom of navigation.” In formally pulling out of Obama’s deal in 2018, Trump criticized Iran for exporting “dangerous missiles.”
In May 2018, when he formally pulled out of the Obama deal, he once again said that Iran “exports dangerous missiles” and that “not only does the deal fail to halt Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but it also fails to address the regime’s development of ballistic missiles that could deliver nuclear warheads.”
In launching the war in February, Trump told the American people, “They’ve rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions, and we can’t take it anymore. Instead, they attempted to rebuild their nuclear program and to continue developing the long-range missiles that can now threaten our very good friends and allies in Europe, our troops stationed overseas, and could soon reach the American homeland.”
In making the case during his April prime-time speech on the war, he explained that one of his primary rationales for launching it was that “Iran’s strategy was so obvious. They wanted to produce as many missiles as possible, and they did, with the longest range possible, and would soon have had missiles that could reach the American homeland, Europe, and virtually any other place on Earth.”
One of the reasons that Trump claimed the war was such a success was precisely that the U.S. was pounding its missile program. Now, suddenly, that doesn’t matter?
Secretary of State Marco Rubio also argued that the reason the administration viewed the need to attack Iran as being urgent was that their missile production had accelerated so rapidly that it was going to provide a shield of immunity for them to develop nuclear weapons. Rubio said that Iran was producing ballistic missiles at the rate of 100 per month and that missile interceptors could only be produced at a rate of six or seven a month.
In other words, the very rationale that Trump provided for suddenly not caring about missiles — that they do relatively limited damage — only was the case in this war because of the stockpile of interceptors that the U.S. and its allies possessed. But if the Iranians are now given the green light and the money to develop missiles as rapidly as they want to, that mathematical equation would change in the next conflict with Iran — and its missiles would be able to overwhelm air defenses.
It’s a staggering turnaround for Trump, who is now making the same mistake that Obama did — which is to subordinate every other concern about Iran to the nuclear issue, while allowing it to become a more powerful conventional threat and to engage in all sorts of other malign and destabilizing behavior.