By bombing three nuclear facilities in Iran, experts say President Donald Trump issued a "dire warning" to the rest of the world.
Trump initially signaled that he had a two-week timeline in which he would decide whether to approve an attack on Iran. However, some experts say that his decision to strike some of the country's nuclear facilities has reinforced the notion that American leadership is extremely temperamental and unpredictable, which could force other countries to rethink their relationship with the country.
Fiona Hill, who worked as a national security advisor in the first Trump administration, told The Guardian that the U.S. strikes in Iran are of particular importance to Russia, a country that Trump is negotiating with to end the war in Ukraine.
“It has some pretty dire warnings for Putin himself about what could happen at a time of weakness,” Hill told the outlet. “It will just convince Putin even more that no matter what the intent of a US president, the capability to destroy is something that has to be taken seriously.”
Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, also told the outlet that Trump's strikes in Iran could undermine a growing axis between Iran, China, and Russia. The attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities showed that Russia "is not a very valuable friend" because they are not "lifting a finger" to help their allies in Iran, Boot argued.
Outside of relationships with foreign countries, other experts say the strikes in Iran may also reinforce the idea that America prefers to use force rather than diplomacy to negotiate with adversaries.
“The fact that it all happened so fast, there wasn’t much multilateral involvement or chance for diplomacy, I think, is something Russians can point to as an indication of, you know, imperialism to the global south,” Aslı Aydıntaşbaş, a fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe at Brookings, told The Guardian.