With the military strike that his predecessors avoided, Trump is placing a big bet that the United States can withstand any Iranian response and that he has destroyed the Iranian regime’s ability to rebuild its nuclear program.
By David SANGER
Over the past two decades, the United States has used sanctions, sabotage, cyberattacks and diplomatic negotiations to slow Iran’s long march toward a nuclear weapon. At around 2:30 a.m. Sunday in Iran, President Trump ordered a show of sheer military power — something his four predecessors had carefully avoided, fearing it would drag America into a new war in the Middle East.
After days of declaring that he could not accept the risk that Tehran’s mullahs and generals—who had survived Israel’s attacks—would take the final step toward nuclear weapons, he ordered a fleet of B-2 bombers to fly halfway around the globe to drop the most powerful conventional bombs on the most important targets in Iran’s nuclear complex. The main target was the underground enrichment center at Fordow, inaccessible to Israel.
For Trump, this decision to attack the nuclear infrastructure of a hostile state represents the biggest — and potentially most dangerous — gamble of his second term. He is betting that the United States can withstand any retaliation that Iran’s leaders might order against the more than 40 American troops stationed in military bases across the Region. All of which are within range of Tehran’s missiles, despite eight days of relentless Israeli attacks. He is also betting that he can deter a weakened Iran from using its usual methods — terrorism, hostage-taking, and cyberattacks — as indirect routes to revenge.
More importantly, he is betting that he has destroyed Iran’s chances of rebuilding its nuclear program. It is an ambitious goal: Iran has made it clear that, if attacked, it would withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and drive its program deep underground. That is why Trump has focused so much on destroying Fordow—a facility that Iran secretly built and that was publicly exposed by President Obama in 2009. It is there that Iran produced most of the near-bomb-grade fuel that has worried the United States and its allies.
Trump aides told allies Saturday night that Washington’s sole mission was to destroy the nuclear program. They described the complex operation as a limited operation, similar to the one that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011.
“They made it clear that this was not a declaration of war,” a senior European diplomat said late Saturday, describing a conversation with a senior administration official. But, the diplomat added, bin Laden had killed 3,000 Americans. Iran had not yet built a bomb. In short, the administration is arguing that it acted preemptively, to eliminate a threat, not to overthrow the Iranian regime. But it is far from certain that the Iranians will perceive it that way. In a brief speech from the White House on Saturday evening, flanked by Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Trump threatened Iran with more destruction if it did not bow to his demands.
“Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace,” he said. “If not, future attacks will be much bigger and much easier to carry out.”
“There will be either peace,” he added, “or there will be a tragedy for Iran far greater than what we have seen in the last eight days. Remember: there are still many targets left.” He promised that if Iran did not withdraw, he would strike them with “precision, speed and mastery.” In essence, Trump was threatening to deepen the military partnership with Israel, which over the past eight days had systematically targeted Iran’s top military and nuclear leaders, killing them in their beds, laboratories and bunkers. Initially, the US distanced itself from the operation. In his first public statement on the attacks, Rubio stressed that Israel acted “unilaterally against Iran,” and that the US “was not involved.”
But a few days ago, Trump made a comment on his social media, suggesting that the US could kill Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 86, whenever it wanted. And on Saturday evening he made it clear that America was fully involved and, contrary to what Rubio said, was deeply committed.
Now that he has damaged Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity, Trump hopes to exploit a moment of extraordinary weakness—the same weakness that allowed American B-2 bombers to fly in and out of Iranian territory with little resistance. After Israel’s fierce response to the October 7, 2023, terrorist attacks that killed over a thousand Israeli civilians, Iran was suddenly left without its proxies: Hamas and Hezbollah. Its closest ally, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, was forced to flee the country. And Russia and China, which had built a partnership of interests with Iran, were wiped out by Israel’s attacks.
This left the nuclear program as Iran’s last line of defense. It has always been more than a science project – it was the symbol of Iranian resistance to the West, and the heart of the leaders’ strategy to maintain power.
Along with the suppression of dissent, the program had become the ultimate protection for the heirs of the 1979 Iranian revolution. If the taking of 52 Americans hostage was Iran’s way of challenging a much larger enemy in 1979, the nuclear program has been the symbol of that challenge for the past two decades. One day, historians will perhaps draw a line between those images of blindfolded Americans held hostage for 444 days and the dropping of GBU-57 bombs on Fordow—the mountainous lair of uranium enrichment. They will perhaps ask whether the United States, its allies, or the Iranians themselves could have acted differently.
And they will surely wonder if Trump’s gamble was worth it.
His critics in Congress are already questioning his approach. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said Trump acted “without consultation with Congress, without a clear strategy, without regard to the continuing conclusions of the intelligence community” that Iran had not made a final decision to build a bomb. If Iran fails to respond effectively, if the ayatollah’s grip on power begins to falter, or if the country gives up on its long-standing nuclear ambitions, Trump will no doubt claim that he alone had the courage to use America’s military might to achieve what four presidents before him had considered too dangerous.
But there is another possibility: Iran could slowly recover, the surviving scientists of its nuclear program could take their knowledge underground, and the country could follow North Korea’s example—a race to build a bomb. Today, North Korea has more than 60 nuclear weapons, according to some intelligence estimates—an arsenal that probably makes it too dangerous to attack. Iran may see this as the only way to ward off hostile major powers and prevent the United States and Israel from carrying out another operation like the one that lit up Iran’s skies on Sunday morning. (NYT)