Trump has opened Pandora’s box, but there’s no hope inside.

It was a little past dinnertime on the East Coast when the news came across the wire: the bombs were falling on Iran.

The President of the United States, alongside the Prime Minister of Israel, had made his decision. And with that decision, a great and terrible machine of state was set in motion, a machine that deals in thunder and steel, and whose final bill always comes due in flesh and blood.

Now, you don’t have to be a scholar of history to feel a chill at the sight of this particular road being traveled again.

The path we’re on has a familiar, rutted look to it, paved with the same slick gravel we’ve slipped on before. Just the other day, a high-ranking envoy was on the television telling us that Iran was a mere seven days away from having the makings of a industrial-grade atomic bomb. A week. That’s a neat, tidy, terrifying little number, isn’t it?

The trouble is, just a few months back, the President himself told us that last summer’s big bang had completely obliterated their nuclear program—scattered it to the four winds.

Now, a program that’s been utterly destroyed can’t be seven days from anything except maybe a good cleaning of the rubble.

It’s a contradiction that would make a straight-talking man’s head spin, but in the fog of war, I suppose even the truth can get lost.

And so we find ourselves here, with the sky over Tehran lit up, and no one can rightly say what sort of creature will crawl out from under the wreckage if this works the way the planners hope.

The last time the West got serious about rearranging the furniture in that part of the world, it was in the early 1950s. The CIA helped sweep out a democratically elected prime minister and polished up the Peacock Throne for the Shah.

That move was so popular it planted the seeds for the revolution that brought the current government to power a generation later.

So, Trump might be trying to solve a problem by creating the exact conditions that caused it in the first place. It’s like trying to put out a fire with a bucket of kerosene.

And what of the day after tomorrow?

The remnants of the Islamic Republic might have a long memory and a long reach, even when they’re on their heels. They believe they are on a mission from God, a condition that has been associated with horrors many times before.

They’ve got friends in places you wouldn’t expect, and a fondness for asymmetrical warfare—the kind that doesn’t come with a formal declaration but shows up as a ghost in your computer networks or a bad day at a embassy annex.

We live in a world that’s already wound tighter than a drum, and a move like this sends a jolt through the whole system.

You have to wonder who’s watching this display of American power and taking notes. You have to wonder if the folks in Moscow, or Beijing, or Pyongyang see vulnerability in our display of strength.

Now, let’s talk plainly about the law of it.

Under the UN charter that was signed in San Francisco with such high hopes after the last big one, this kind of thing is illegal.

The rules are simple: you don’t go around bombing another sovereign nation unless they’ve either attacked you or are about to, right that very second.

Neither was true of Iran. They weren’t coming over the hill with bayonets fixed when their negotiation team was left behind at the table like a jilted bride.

And here at home, the Constitution, that old document we carry around in our pockets, is pretty specific and it says Congress gets to send the nation into war.

Now, presidents have been skirting that rule for generations, from the frozen hills of Korea to the jungles of Vietnam, and on into the deserts of Iraq. But in every one of those cases, there was a great debate in the people’s house.

There were hearings, there were votes, there were speeches for the C-SPAN cameras. This time, there was nothing. Just the announcement. As the Democrats in the Senate were trying to have their say, the President had already made his move.

So, will it work? Will this big stick finally teach the lesson it’s meant to teach?

Let’s look at the pieces.

First, the nuclear business.

The President stood before the Congress the other night and said he hadn’t heard Iran utter the secret words: “We will never have a nuclear weapon.”

That’s a curious thing to say, because they’ve been saying it for years.

They signed their name to a treaty promising just that. The old nuclear deal, the one the President tore up in his first term, had them promising it again.

The argument was never about their words; it was about their capabilities.

After last summer’s raid, those capabilities took a serious hit. The uranium enrichment plants—the heart of the matter—were all hit hard. Satellite pictures show some men rebuilding a few sheds, but nothing like the industrial effort it would take to get back in the game.

This brings us back to that envoy and his “one week” claim. It’s a puzzler.

The Jerusalem Post, not a paper known for its fondness for Tehran, dryly pointed out that the envoy forgot to mention that after the last attack, Iran didn’t have any working machines left to do the enriching. But here’s the rub: nobody outside a small, windowless room in Langley knows what happened to the radioactive material they did have.

The highly enriched uranium, the good stuff, the thousand pounds of it that was enriched to a point where a clever fellow might be able to jury-rig something.

Before the bombs flew last summer, a lot of trucks were seen coming and going from the known sites. Could that material be hidden away in some new, deeper hole?

The administration’s recent demands that Iran ship this stuff out of the country suggests they think it’s still there, tucked away in some new, deeper hole—maybe under that mountain the spies call “Pickaxe,” a place too deep for even our biggest bunker-busters.

Finding and destroying that might require sending boys in on the ground, a risky proposition no one’s talking about.

Then there are the missiles.

President Trump says they’re a threat to our shores. Our own intelligence agencies say that’s a stretch.

They’re a real and present danger to Israel, to our bases in the Gulf, to our friends in the neighborhood.

To the Iranians, those missiles are their only real bargaining chip, the only thing that makes a big power think twice. They will build them in holes, they will hide them in tunnels, and as I speak, they are launching them back at us. Hitting a missile on its launcher is one thing; killing the idea of the missile is another.

And for what? To topple the government? The history of trying to change a regime from 30,000 feet is a graveyard of good intentions.

You might get the top fellow, but what’s underneath?

In Iran, the most powerful institution is the Revolutionary Guard. They could easily be the ones left standing in the rubble, and they would make the current crew look like a debating society.

We saw what happened in Libya. We got rid of Qaddafi, and the country turned into a shooting gallery.

You can’t bomb a country into a liberal democracy. It just doesn’t work that way.

The long and short of it is, Pandora’s not just peeking; she’s thrown the lid wide open.

We’ve shown the world, again, that international law is whatever we say it is on a given day. That is not a standard that will serve our interests, but the planet is full of copycats.

Consider China’s desire to reunite with Taiwan. What lessons might Jinping be taking from the Supreme Leader who is Bored with Peace?

Will this help Vladimir Putin understand that violence doesn’t solve anything?

We’ve probably convinced any future government in Tehran that the only thing that protects you from the American eagle is your own nuclear umbrella. And we’ve poisoned the well for any kind of international inspection or diplomacy for a generation.

This is the second time this administration has talked, and then bombed.

It’s a heck of a way to run a negotiation, and it teaches a clear lesson to anyone watching: don’t bother coming to the table, because the only thing waiting for you there is the thing you were trying to avoid.

Maybe the President will get lucky.

Maybe the bombs will fall in just the right pattern and this will all work out. But looking at the history, looking at the contradictions, looking at the human cost that’s already mounting, it’s hard to see how this makes the world any safer for anyone—least of all for the sons and daughters who will be asked to clean up the mess.