Analysts say Trump's operation against Iran, which his four predecessors did not dare to undertake, is risky but ambitious.
US President Donald Trump is betting that the United States can counter any Iranian response to the destruction of its nuclear facilities, and he believes the attack has ruined the regime's chances of rebuilding its nuclear program.
The New York Times writes about this.
Trump's main bet
Over the past two decades, the United States has used sanctions, sabotage, cyberattacks and diplomatic negotiations to try to slow Iran's long path to nuclear weapons.
At about 2:30 a.m. today, President Trump unleashed a show of brute military power that each of his recent predecessors had deliberately avoided for fear of dragging the United States into war in the Middle East.
“For Mr. Trump, the decision to attack a hostile country’s nuclear infrastructure is the biggest — and potentially most dangerous — gamble of his second term,” the NYT writes.
Trump is likely convinced that the United States can fend off any response Iran's leadership orders against the more than 40,000 American troops scattered across bases across the region. Iran is significantly weakened from using its usual methods – terrorism, hostage-taking and cyber-attacks – as more indirect avenging tactics.
Trump’s main gamble is that the United States has destroyed Iran’s chances of ever restarting its nuclear program. It’s an ambitious goal: Iran has made clear that if attacked, it would withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and move its massive program underground. That’s why Trump has focused so much attention on destroying Fordow, the site Iran secretly built in the mid-2000s and which President Barack Obama publicly talked about in 2009. There, Iran produced nearly all of the fuel that could possibly be used in bombs, something that has most alarmed the United States and its allies.
Mr. Trump’s aides told those allies on Saturday night that Washington’s sole mission was to destroy the nuclear program. They described the sophisticated strike as a limited, low-key undertaking, like the operation that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011.
“They said outright that it was not a declaration of war,” said one senior European diplomat. But Laden killed 3,000 Americans, and Iran has yet to build a bomb.
“The administration says it was engaged in an act of preemption, seeking to eliminate a threat rather than the Iranian regime. But it is far from clear that the Iranians will see it that way,” the NYT writes.
In a short address 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 great destruction if it did not comply with his demands.
“Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace. If they do not, future attacks will be much bigger.
He promised that if Iran did not give in, he would pursue the Iranians “with precision, speed and skill.”
In essence, Mr. Trump was threatening to expand his military partnership with Israel, which has spent eight days systematically attacking Iran's top military and nuclear leaders, killing them “in their beds, labs and bunkers.”
But then, a few days ago, Mr. Trump mused on his social media about the United States’ ability to kill Iran’s 86-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, “someday, whenever he wants.” And on Saturday night, he made clear that the United States was all for it, and that, contrary to Mr. Rubio’s claim, the country was now deeply involved.
Now, having stopped Iran's uranium enrichment capabilities, Trump clearly hopes to seize a golden opportunity – a weakness that has allowed American B-2 bombers to fly in and out of Iranian territory with little resistance.
Following Israel’s brutal response to the October 7, 2023, terrorist attacks that killed over a thousand Israeli civilians, Iran suddenly lost its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah. Its closest ally, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, was forced to flee the country. Russia and China, which had forged a partnership of convenience with Iran, were nowhere to be seen after Israel’s attack on the country.
Only the nuclear program remains as Iran's main defense. It has always been more than just a scientific project – a symbol of Iranian resistance to the West and the basis of the leadership's plan to retain power.
Along with suppressing dissent, the program has become a key defense for the heirs of the Iranian revolution that began in 1979. If the seizure of 52 American hostages was Iran's way of confronting a much larger, much more powerful adversary in 1979, the nuclear program has been a symbol of resistance for the past two decades.
There are two scenarios
As the authors of the article suggest, historians may one day draw a line between the images of blindfolded Americans held for 444 days and the dropping of bunker-busting GBU-57 bombs on a mountain redoubt called Fordow.
“They will likely ask whether the United States, its allies, or the Iranians themselves could have played it differently. And they will almost certainly ask whether Trump's gamble paid off,” analysts say.
Some of Mr. Trump’s critics in Congress have already questioned his approach. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said Mr. Trump had acted “without consultation with Congress, without a clear strategy, without taking into account the consistent conclusions of the intelligence community” that Iran had made no decision on the final steps to build a bomb.
“If Iran proves unable to respond effectively, if the ayatollah's power is now weakened, or if the country abandons its long-standing nuclear ambitions, Trump will no doubt argue that he alone was willing to use America's military influence to achieve an objective that his last four predecessors considered too risky,” it says.
But there is another scenario: Iran could gradually recover, its surviving nuclear scientists could take their skills underground, and the country could follow the path blazed by North Korea, racing to build a bomb. Today, by some intelligence estimates, North Korea has 60 or more nuclear weapons, an arsenal that probably makes it too powerful to attack.
Iran may conclude that this is the only way to deter large, hostile states and prevent the United States and Israel from carrying out an operation similar to the June 22 attack.
Recall that on Sunday, June 22, the US military struck three Iranian nuclear facilities. According to President Donald Trump, the US military successfully attacked the Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan facilities.
But Iran did not have to wait for a response – it attacked Israel with missiles immediately after the US night strike on nuclear facilities.
Yemen has declared that it will join the war in the Middle East after the US attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. The day before, it warned that if the US intervenes in the attack and aggression against Iran with the Israeli enemy, the armed forces will target it and military ships in the Red Sea.
