Trump, Iran near brink of a war that would likely devastate both sides

Tensions between the US and Iran have reached historic heights in recent weeks, prompting fears of a military confrontation that could escalate into all-out war.

Here’s a breakdown of what’s going on, how we got here, and what the stakes are.

What’s going on with Iran?

On May 5, national security adviser John Bolton issued a statement announcing the US was sending an aircraft-carrier strike group and B-52 bombers to the Middle East to counter unspecified threats from Iran.

Bolton said the US was not seeking war with Iran but that the deployment was meant to send “a clear and unmistakable message to the Iranian regime that any attack” on the US or its allies “will be met with unrelenting force.”

The US has since repositioned or sent other military assets to the region.

Read more: The US is sending a ton of firepower to take on Iran — here’s everything headed its way

The exact nature of the threats the US is responding to remains unclear, but officials have said there have been indications of a “possible attack” against US forces in the region by Iran or its proxies.

Some reports have also suggested the Trump administration has discussed sending an additional 120,000 troops to the Middle East amid the tensions with Iran. The president on May 14 denied this but said he’d be willing to send “a hell of a lot more” troops than 120,000 if necessary. Other reports have suggested the US is considering sending 10,000 troops to the region.

Amid all of this, Trump has fluctuated between urging Tehran, Iran’s capital, to sit down and hold talks with the US and issuing threats via Twitter.

And in comments on Iran on Monday the president reversed course somewhat when he told reporters, “We have no indication that anything’s happened or will happen, but if it does, it will be met, obviously with great force.”

On Tuesday, Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan said the threat from Iran was “on hold” as he emphasized that the US does not want a military conflict with the Middle Eastern country.

But Shanahan on Thursday signaled the US might be sending more troops to the Middle East in response to the rising tensions, though he didn’t offer a specific number.

In short, the Trump administration is sending mixed messages on the Iran situation — and it’s unclear what happens next.

Iranian leaders in response to these developments have signaled they don’t want war with the US but are prepared to respond if attacked, while issuing veiled threats about their ability to quickly enrich uranium to weapons-grade levels. Iran has also stopped complying to portions of the Iran nuclear deal.

Read more: Sen. Chris Murphy says Trump is blindly risking conflict with Iran and could spark a war even if he doesn’t want one

Meanwhile, Democratic lawmakers have raised alarm bells about the White House inching toward war with Iran, and they’ve made it clear they would oppose any military action without congressional approval.

Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut on Wednesday told INSIDER that he doesn’t believe the Trump administration wants war with Iran, but said the president is still taking the US down a dangerous path.

“Just because you don’t want war doesn’t mean you won’t get war,” Murphy said, adding that the administration does not seem to be “behaving in a way that would avoid conflict.”

At the same time, Republicans in Congress are placing the blame on Iran for the confrontation and urging Trump to “stand firm.”

How did we get here?

The US and Iran have a complicated history and have been adversaries for decades, encapsulated in the oft-repeated “Death to America” chants from Iranian leaders.

In many ways, the modern US-Iran relationship began via a CIA-orchestrated coup in the 1950s that placed a pro-American monarch — Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi — in charge of the Middle Eastern country. The shah was overthrown in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, an uprising that shook the foundations of the Muslim world and led to the infamous hostage crisis at the US embassy in Tehran that continues to be a touchy subject in Washington.

Read more: Trump says ‘I hope not’ when asked if the US is going to war with Iran

After years of animosity, former President Barack Obama sought to improve relations with Iran via diplomacy. Obama’s administration orchestrated the landmark pact known as the Iran nuclear deal, which was finalized in July 2015 and hoped to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons in exchange for the easing of economic sanctions.

Critics of the deal said it didn’t go far enough to bar Iran from building nuclear weapons and that Tehran could not be trusted. Along these lines, Trump withdrew the US from the deal in May 2018 despite having no evidence Iran was violating its terms. This move put Washington at odds with key allies, and the already contentious US-Iran relationship took a turn for the worse.

The situation was hardly improved after Trump in April designated Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terror organization. This prompted Iranian leaders to warn that any action taken against the country would lead to “a reciprocal action.”

The US and Iran have also been working against one another in the ongoing war in Yemen, where the US-backed Saudi-led coalition is fighting against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels. And in the ongoing Syria conflict, Iran and its proxies have supported Syrian President Bashar Assad, whose forces Trump has launched military strikes against.

Many Democratic lawmakers and some experts feel Trump’s Iran policy is being driven by Bolton, who has long been hawkish toward Tehran. Bolton, one of the architects of the Iraq War, has expressed support for a military strike against Iran a number of times in the past.

What are the stakes?

A war with Iran would potentially be more calamitous than the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, which led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, bogged the US down in a costly and lengthy war, and helped catalyze the rise of the Islamic State group.

Iran has a population of about 82 million people, and its military is ranked as the 14th most powerful. According to recent estimates, Iran has 523,000 active military personnel in addition to 250,000 reserve personnel.

Comparatively, Iraq had a population of about 25 million people, and the Iraqi military had fewer than 450,000 personnel when the US invaded over a decade ago.

Iran is also much bigger than Iraq geographically. It has 591,000 square miles of land versus Iraq’s 168,000 square miles, and its influence has grown as the power of its rival Iraq collapsed in the wake of the US war there.

If the US launched an attack against Iran, it would also reverberate across the Middle East. Iran has proxies throughout the region and is allied with militant groups, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon. A revised Pentagon estimate released in April found Iranian proxy forces killed at least 608 US troops in Iraq between 2003 and 2011.

Read more: How the Trump administration got into a showdown with Iran that could lead to war

Moreover, Iran shares a border with a number of countries the US considers allies and has a military presence in — including Turkey, Iraq, and Afghanistan. None of these countries are especially stable at the moment, as they all continue to deal with ongoing conflicts and their consequences (including millions of displaced people).

In terms of other geopolitical blowback, Iran is allied with Russia and China, and it’s unclear how these major powers might react if conflict breaks out. Key US allies such as Israel and Saudi Arabia, which are adversaries of Iran and just a stone’s throw away from it, would also likely get sucked into a US-Iran war.

A war with Iran could also be extraordinarily disruptive economically, given it borders the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow route that roughly one-third of the world’s oil-tanker traffic travels through. Experts have predicted that if the route were blocked, it would quickly lead to a 30% drop in daily global oil exports, and prices would rapidly go up, The Washington Post reported.

Iran’s forces would likely be defeated by the US but could exact a heavy toll with cruise missiles, naval mines, and fighter jets. Any troops that survive could blend into the population and lead a brutal insurgency against the US occupation force. That was the scenario that unfolded for the US in Iraq, a country one-third the size of Iran, and proved to be an insurmountable challenge.

In short, though the US has a military that is consistently ranked the most powerful, evidence suggests a war with Iran would be devastating in myriad ways.