ROSS DOUTHAT2026年3月25日 Illustration by The New York Times; source imagery by NAEL CHAHINE and Restu Ariyadi, via Getty ImagesThere are two obvious reasons to have a nuclear weapon. The first is to dominate or overawe your nonnuclear-armed neighbors, to make them submit to you because they fear incineration at your hands. The second is defensive — to deter a more powerful enemy from attacking you, to persuade them that the price of their victory will be too awful to be borne.拥核的理由显而易见，主要有两点。其一是为了支配或震慑无核邻国，让它们因惧怕被你毁灭，从而俯首称臣。其二则是出于防御目的——威慑更强大的敌人不敢发动攻击，让对方明白，胜利的代价将惨烈到无法承受。The American and Israeli war against Iran is motivated by a fear of the first scenario — a Middle East remade by Iranian nuclear blackmail. But the conflict to date has made the second scenario more relevant, by demonstrating that Iran already possesses a kind of nuclear-esque deterrent, a credible threat of mass destruction that may place limits on what its opponents can reasonably risk.美国与以色列对伊朗发动的战争，正是出于担忧第一种局面出现：一个被伊朗核讹诈重塑的中东。但迄今为止的冲突反而让第二种情景更具现实意义，它表明伊朗已然拥有一种类核威慑力，一种足以造成大规模毁灭的可信威胁，这可能会限制其对手所能承担的合理风险。Unlike North Korea, the Iranian regime does not have a brace of nuclear warheads with which to keep America at bay. But it has an escalatory power that was unavailable to Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi in their fateful conflicts with the United States. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and the resulting damage to global energy markets, is the first great escalatory move. The threat to go all out to destroy the larger infrastructure of the Persian Gulf, from refineries to desalinization plants, is the second — usable only in extremis, as an act of murder-suicide, but still a potent threat from a regime facing existential defeat.与朝鲜不同，伊朗政权并未拥有足以让美国不敢轻举妄动的核弹头储备。但它拥有萨达姆·侯赛因与穆阿迈尔·卡扎菲在与美国的决定性冲突中所不具备的升级能力。封锁霍尔木兹海峡，并由此重创全球能源市场，这是伊朗第一个重大升级举措。威胁全力摧毁波斯湾地区从炼油厂到海水淡化厂的大型基础设施则是第二个——这一手段仅会在绝境中使用，近乎同归于尽的自杀式行为，但对于一个面临存亡危机的政权而言，仍是极具威力的威胁。The central problem with our strategy is that it has placed the Iranian government in exactly that kind of existentially threatened position, through a decapitation campaign designed to create regime change, without yet delivering the desired political revolution. So long as the regime survives and the war continues, the Iranian government can make unusually credible apocalyptic threats, because we ourselves have put them in a position in which apocalyptic moves are rational.我们当前战略的核心问题在于，它已将伊朗政府置于这种生死存亡的境地。我们旨在实现政权更迭的斩首行动未能达成预期的政治革命。只要伊朗政权存续、战争仍在持续，伊朗政府就能发出异常可信的末日式威胁，因为正是我们自己，将他们逼到了即使采取此类极端行动也显得合乎理性的地步。This was not the case with earlier U.S. strikes against Iran’s nuclear program. It wouldn’t be the case if we were merely striking its military infrastructure. But it is an inevitable consequence of leading with decapitation efforts, which leaves the targeted regime with every incentive to make extreme, even nuclear-scale moves that would be irrational in other contexts.美国此前针对伊朗核计划的打击并非如此，若我们仅打击其军事基础设施，也不会出现这种局面。但以斩首行动为先导，必然会导致这一结果——它让被打击的政权有充分动机采取极端行动，甚至堪比核规模的行动，而这样的行动在其他情境下本是不理性的。There are limits, of course, to the nuclear analogy. Iran’s ability to wreak havoc does not depend upon a single weapon used for instantaneous destruction but on a set of distributed capacities with compounding effects, from the missile launchers required to target its gulf neighbors to the physical control of territory around the Strait of Hormuz.当然，这种类核类比存在局限。伊朗制造大混乱的能力并非依赖单一武器实现瞬间毁灭，而是依托一系列分散部署、效果叠加的能力，从可打击海湾邻国的导弹发射装置，到对霍尔木兹海峡周边领土的实际控制。The Hormuz weapon takes time to make itself felt, the missile launchers are vulnerable to air power, and so the potency of the Iranian deterrent can be reduced by attrition. Weaponry can be destroyed and territory can be captured, and at some point a combination of nonexistential military moves could theoretically make the existential threat more manageable, mitigate the potential economic damage and reduce Iran’s escalatory power. (All while leaving open the hope that regime change could come to fruition along the way.)霍尔木兹这一武器的威力需要时间显现，导弹发射装置也易受空中打击，因此伊朗的威慑力可以通过消耗战来削弱。武器准备可被摧毁，领土可被占领。理论上，通过一系列非致命性军事行动的组合或许能在某一节点让这种生存威胁变得更可控，减轻潜在经济损失，并削弱伊朗的升级能力。（同时，仍可寄望于政权更迭能在此过程中实现。）This is the kind of war some hawks want the Trump administration to fight, with ground troops and expeditionary forces achieving by degrees what can’t be achieved immediately. And, interestingly, there’s a convergence between these hawks and some of the war’s critics, who argue that if the United States doesn’t choose to fight this way — if we don’t have U.S. Marines capturing territory around the strait, if we don’t permanently eliminate the Iranian threat to set the Persian Gulf ablaze — then we will have to accept an epochal defeat, in which Iran emerges as a new regional hegemon, like Paul Atreides in “Dune” becoming emperor after he threatened to destroy the spice of Arrakis and wreck galactic civilization.这正是部分鹰派人士希望特朗普政府打的那种战争：动用地面部队与远征军，逐步达成无法一蹴而就的目标。耐人寻味的是，这些鹰派与部分战争批评者的观点不谋而合。后者认为，如果美国不选择这种作战方式——不派海军陆战队夺取海峡周边领土，不彻底消除伊朗点燃波斯湾的威胁——那么我们就将不得不接受一场划时代的失败：届时伊朗将崛起为新的地区霸主，就像《沙丘》中的保罗·阿崔迪，在威胁摧毁厄拉科斯星球的香料、破坏银河文明后登基称帝。I am somewhat skeptical that Iran is about to have its Paul Atreides moment. No Iranian leader is a psychic messiah figure (to my knowledge), Iran’s conventional forces are hardly an all-conquering army, and geopolitics doesn’t usually work like a science fiction plot device. Everyone knows that Kim Jong-un has the power to set his region ablaze, but that hasn’t made Kim a potential god-emperor of Asia; it just makes the North Korean regime unusually hard to attack.我对伊朗即将迎来“保罗·阿崔迪时刻”持怀疑态度。据我所知，没有任何伊朗领导人是具有超能力的救世主；伊朗的常规部队远非战无不胜的铁军；地缘政治的运作逻辑通常也不像科幻小说的情节设定。众所周知，金正恩有能力让所在地区陷入火海，但这并未让他成为亚洲的潜在神帝，只是让朝鲜政权变得异常难以攻克。Similarly, if the United States backs off from the decapitation campaign and returns to diplomacy, Iran’s threats against the region and the global economy will become less credible than they are when it has its back against the wall. America’s conventional military advantage will endure, meaning that we will be able to inflict renewed pain on Iran if it tries to make economic blackmail permanent. And Tehran’s willingness to threaten doomsday against its neighbors is more likely to increase its own long-term isolation than it is to encourage those neighbors to bandwagon with the Islamic republic.同理，如果美国放弃斩首行动、重返外交轨道，伊朗对地区与全球经济的威胁将不再像其被逼入绝境时那般可行。美国的常规军事优势将持续存在，这意味着若伊朗试图将经济讹诈常态化，我们仍能对其实施新一轮打击。而且，德黑兰动辄以末日威胁邻国的做法更可能加剧其自身的长期孤立，而非促使邻国倒向这个伊斯兰共和国。Which is not to say the de-escalation will be costless for the United States, or that an armistice short of regime change won’t represent a limited defeat for American power. But contrary to some doomsayers, America is strong enough and insulated enough to absorb a strategic disappointment. And letting President Trump spin that kind of disappointment as a grand success might be acceptable if the alternative isn’t the coup de main he plainly hoped for, but a land war in Asia conducted in the shadow of a global economic rout.这并非意味着缓和局势对美国来说毫无代价，也并非意味着不导致政权更迭的停战协议不会对美国实力造成有限的打击。。但与一些末日预言者的论调相反，美国足够强大、也具备足够缓冲能力，足以承受一次战略上的失望。而且，如果摆在面前的选项并不是特朗普原本期望的速战速决，而是全球经济崩溃的阴影下的亚洲地面战争，那么，哪怕让特朗普将这种失望包装成巨大的成功或许也未尝不可接受。Ross Douthat自2009年起一直在时报担任观点版面的专栏作者，也是观点版播客节目《有趣的时代》的主持人。他的最新著作是《Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious》。欢迎在Facebook和Twitter上关注他。翻译：纽约时报中文网点击查看本文英文版。