How expanding global wars may be fought amid persistent weapons shortages

(Originally published July 3 in “What in the World“) So begins the forever war in Iran.

Tehran has suspended cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, shutting out the UN body’s inspectors and thus eliminating the ability of the U.S. and Israel to get a no-BS appraisal of its nuclear capabilities.

So what? You might say. U.S. B-2s with bunker-busting bombs and Tomahawk missiles put an end to Iran’s nuclear capabilities on June 21. But did they? No one still seems to know whether or not the attacks destroyed Iran’s 408kg stockpile of bomb-making uranium. Was it buried at one of the three sites hit by the U.S. attack? Or did Iran disperse it as soon as Israeli jets appeared in its airspace June 13?

Iran has figured out that it’s in its best interest to keep the West guessing. Maybe they have the makings of a bomb. Maybe they don’t. And the great gaffe that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to have pulled on Trump was convincing him that with a single attack he could end the war and eliminate the threat of Iran building a nuclear bomb.

Now, we may never know how close Iran is to building one. And the remedy for that? More bombing. Netanyahu thus has carte blanche to bomb wherever the threat may re-appear. If his actions in Gaza are any indication, his strategy to such threats has shifted well past deterrence to complete elimination.

Trump’s avenue forward is less clear-cut. He has vehemently denied Iran moved the uranium before the attack, sticking to his line that it lies buried beneath the rubble. But he has vowed to keep bombing any credible evidence that Iran might still have enriched uranium, try to produce more, or turn that enriched stockpile into a bomb. That, however, would prove him wrong. To prove himself right, he needs to ignore any such evidence.

Iran’s best hope may be the West simply get distracted by other conflicts, at home and abroad. Yale history professor Sunil Amrith reminds us right away in his review of Univ. of Chicago political science professor Michael Albertus’s new book Land Power that “conflicts over land and territory will likely proliferate as the accelerating climate crisis collides with rising geopolitical tensions.”

As the war in Iran unfolds, however, it is worsening a global shortage of lethal artillery and missiles. Trump earlier this week responded to Pentagon concerns about shrinking stockpiles by suspending arms shipments to Ukraine. Longtime readers will recall that many of the arms promised to Kyiv by former President Joe Biden were being pulled straight from the existing U.S. arsenal, with the Pentagon then free to replace them with shiny new ones.

Problem is that the defense industry is still in the process of building out the capacity needed to meet the surge in global defense spending. There is still a widespread shortage of old-fashioned artillery shells. There’s also a shortage of rocket motors for the fancy missiles being fired and the missiles that knock them out of the sky.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has responded by asking the White House for permission to use U.S. weapons bought by Europe. Several governments in Europe, already expanding its own military spending, are considering buying American weapons to give to Ukraine. But re-gifting U.S. weapons isn’t as easy as it might look: whenever the U.S. sells arms to an “ally” (a term that often extends to authoritarian allies of convenience), it stipulates how they can be used, where they can be used, and that they can’t be passed on or sold without explicit permission from Washington. This goes even for U.S. weapons parts, which is why London and Paris needed Biden’s approval to let Ukraine fire their Storm Shadow cruise missiles into Russia.

Even if Trump gives Europe permission to buy U.S. weaponry on behalf of Ukraine, it would only put Europe in the same position as the Pentagon—drawing down its own stockpiles to supply Ukraine until U.S. weapons factories can fill backlogged orders. And with Europe racing to beef up its own defenses against the supposed Russian peril, running down its own arsenals to shore up the Ukrainian front may prove a Faustian bargain.