Over the past two decades, the US has used sanctions, sabotage, cyberattacks and diplomatic negotiations to try to slow Iran’s long march to a nuclear weapon.
At roughly 2.30am on Sunday in Iran, President Donald Trump unleashed a show of raw military might that each of his last four predecessors had deliberately avoided, for fear of plunging the US into war in West Asia.
After days of declaring that he could not take the risk that the mullahs and generals of Tehran who had survived Israel’s strikes would make a final leap to a nuclear weapon, he ordered a fleet of B-2 bombers halfway around the world to drop the most powerful conventional bombs on the most critical sites in Iran’s vast nuclear complexes.
The prime target was the deeply buried enrichment centre at Fordo, which Israel was incapable of reaching.
For Trump, the decision to attack the nuclear infrastructure of a hostile nation represents the biggest — and potentially most dangerous — gamble of his second term.
He is betting that the US can repel whatever retaliation Iran’s leadership orders against more than 40,000 American troops spread over bases throughout the region. All are within range of Tehran’s missile fleet, even after eight days of relentless attacks by Israel. And he is betting that he can deter a vastly debilitated Iran from using its familiar techniques — terrorism, hostage-taking and cyberattacks — as a more indirect line of attack to wreak revenge.
Most importantly, he is betting that he has destroyed Iran’s chances of ever reconstituting its nuclear programme. That is an ambitious goal: Iran has made clear that, if attacked, it would exit the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and take its vast programme underground. That is why Trump focused so much attention on destroying Fordo, the facility Iran built in secret in the mid-2000s that was publicly exposed by President Barack Obama in 2009. That is where Iran was producing almost all of the near-bomb-grade fuel that most alarmed the US and its allies.
Trump’s aides were telling those allies on Saturday night that Washington’s sole mission was to destroy the nuclear programme. They described the complex strike as a limited, contained operation akin to the special operation that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011.
“They explicitly said this was not a declaration of war,” a senior European diplomat said late on Saturday, describing his conversation with a high-ranking administration official.
But, the European diplomat added, bin Laden had killed 3,000 Americans. Iran had yet to build a bomb.
In short, the administration is arguing that it was engaged in an act of pre-emption, seeking to terminate a threat, not the Iranian regime. But it is far from clear that the Iranians will perceive it that way. In a brief address from the White House on Saturday night, flanked by Vice-President J.D. Vance, secretary of state Marco Rubio and defence secretary Pete Hegseth, Trump threatened Iran with more destruction if it does not bend to his demands.
“Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace,” he said. “If they do not, future attacks will be far greater and a lot easier.”
“There will be either peace,” he added, “or there will be tragedy for Iran far greater than we have witnessed over the last eight days. Remember, there are many targets left.” He promised that if Iran did not relent, he would go after them “with precision, speed and skill”.
In essence, Trump was threatening to broaden his military partnership with Israel, which has spent the last eight days systematically targeting Iran’s top military and nuclear leadership, killing them in their beds, their laboratories and their bunkers. The US initially separated itself from that operation. In the Trump administration’s first public statement about those strikes, Rubio emphasised that Israel took “unilateral action against Iran”, adding that the US was “not involved”.
But then, a few days ago, Trump mused on his social media platform about the ability of the US to kill Iran’s 86-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,anytime he wanted. And Saturday night, he made clear that the US was all in, andthat contrary to Rubio’s statement, the country was now deeply involved.
Now, having set back Iran’s enrichment capability, Trump is clearly hoping that he can seize on a remarkable moment of weakness — the weakness that allowed the American B-2 bombers to fly in andout of Iranian territory with little resistance.
After Israel’s fierce retaliation for the October 7, 2023, terror attacks that killed over a thousand Israeli civilians, Iran is suddenly bereft of its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah. Its closest ally, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, had to flee the country. And Russia and China, which formed a partnership of convenience with Iran, were nowhere to be seen after Israel attacked the country.
That left only the nuclear programme as Iran’s ultimate defence. It was always more than just a scientific project — it was the symbol of Iranian resistance to the West, and the core of the leadership’s plan to hold on to power.
Along with the repression of dissent, the programme had become the ultimate means of defence for the inheritors of the Iranian revolution that began in 1979. If the taking of 52 American hostages was Iran’s way of standing up to a far larger, far more powerful adversary in 1979, the nuclear programme has been the symbol of resistance for the last two decades.
One day historians may well draw a line from those images of blindfolded Americans, who were held for 444 days, to the dropping of GBU-57 bunker-busting bombs on the mountainous redoubt called Fordo. They will likely ask whether the US, its allies or the Iranians themselves could have played this differently.
And they will almost certainly ask whether Trump’s gamble paid off.
If Iran finds itself unable to respond effectively, if the Ayatollah’s hold on power is now loosened, or if the country gives up its long-running nuclear ambitions, Trump will doubtless claim that only he was willing to use America’s military reach to achieve a goal his last four predecessors deemed too risky.
But there is another possibility. Iran could slowly recover, its surviving nuclear scientists could take their skills underground and the country could follow the pathway lit by North Korea, with a race to build a bomb. Today, North Korea has 60 or more nuclear weapons by some intelligence estimates, an arsenal that likely makes it too powerfulto attack.
That, Iran may conclude, is the only pathway to keep larger, hostile powers at bay, and to prevent the US and Israel from carrying out an operation like the one that lit up the Iranian skies on Sunday morning.
New York Times News Service