Will the bombing of Iran end the war for America, or start it?
| London
The United States struck three key nuclear sites in Iran overnight, leaping into Israel’s eight-day military campaign against Iran with bunker-buster bombs, in a dramatic American attack that could reshape the Middle East for decades to come.
President Donald Trump said the U.S. attack “totally and completely obliterated” what remained of Iran’s nuclear program, after more than a week of pummeling by Israeli airstrikes.
An Iranian official said that the strikes had done no irreversible damage to the country’s nuclear program, which it insists is designed for peaceful purposes.
Why We Wrote This
President Trump cast the U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities as a move to force peace. But Tehran has already retaliated against Israel and shows no sign yet of acceding.
Mr. Trump said Iran “must make peace” – underscoring his previous demand of “unconditional surrender” by Iran – and said that, “If they do not, future attacks will be far greater.”
The White House portrayed the strikes as a one-off action alongside Israel, meant to avoid drawing the U.S. into a long and costly “forever war” like Iraq and Afghanistan.
Iran immediately on Sunday launched waves of missiles at Israel in retaliation, and described the American attack as the beginning of a new, much broader escalation of conflict.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi wrote on X that the American strikes “will have everlasting consequences,” and that Iran “reserves all options” to retaliate.
The U.S. attack is the latest high-stakes episode in the acrimonious, often covert and sometimes violent strategic tug-of-war that has defined relations between arch-foes Washington and Tehran since Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution.
While President Trump responded positively to Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu’s plea for help in destroying Iran’s nuclear installations, the two appear to differ over the current war’s ultimate aim, which – for Israel – is regime change. That appears to go beyond Mr. Trump’s goal of reducing the military threat Iran poses.
“We’re in the middle of the unknown. Trump has taken a gamble, but it might not pay off,” says Vali Nasr, a professor of international affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
“He wants to just declare victory with hitting Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, the infrastructure,” says Prof. Nasr, author of the recent book Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History. “But if he genuinely wanted to make sure Iran had no nuclear capability, then this won’t do it,” he says, noting that troops on the ground would be required for that.
“If Iran becomes a quagmire, I think the U.S. is going to regret it, because it will also take resources and eyes off of China, Russia, and everything else,” says Prof. Nasr. “It can become far larger than Trump bargained for.”
Bombs trump – or encourage – diplomacy?
Iran has said it would respond to any American attack on its nuclear sites by targeting U.S. bases and 40,000 personnel in the region, using allied militias in Iraq and Yemen, and with its missile arsenal.
The Islamic Republic could also close the Strait of Hormuz, the channel for 20% of the world’s oil, analysts say, or even attempt to dash for a nuclear weapon – which it has forsworn until now – in the belief that such a step may be its only way to deter future attack.
Iranian state media quoted a senior official saying that the “majority” of Iran’s highly enriched uranium was “transferred to an undisclosed location” before the U.S. attack. The claims could not be independently verified.
Mr. Araghchi had been negotiating a nuclear deal with Washington until Israel launched a military attack on June 13, which upended diplomacy by striking a swath of targets across Iran in hundreds of airstrikes, and assassinating the top echelons of Iran’s military leadership and nuclear scientists.
European efforts to reach a diplomatic solution on Friday made no progress due to the absence of support from Washington.
Israel says it struck Iran “pre-emptively,” to remove what it called an “existential” threat from Iran’s swiftly advancing nuclear program, which it claims was on the verge of weaponizing. Tehran insists its program is for peaceful civilian purposes.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has sought to bring Mr. Trump into the conflict alongside Israel from the start.
He said Mr. Trump’s “bold decision to target Iran’s nuclear facilities, with the awesome and righteous might of the United States, will change history.” Only the U.S. had the military capability, with its largest bunker-buster bombs, to credibly strike Fordow.
Yet a mismatch of expectations between the United States and Israel appeared evident.
“From the president’s perspective, the targeted strike was intended to swiftly bring the military campaign to an end through a diplomatic agreement,” write Eldad Shavit and Chuck Freilich, in an analysis for Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies.
“It’s clear that the United States remains committed to avoiding entanglement in a prolonged war. The dilemma over continued military involvement will intensify if Iran persists in its defiance and fails to comply with [U.S.] demands.”
A dangerous and uncertain future
But the strikes also present a newly dangerous moment in a region already reeling from dramatic changes – most wrought by Israeli military force – since Hamas militants allied to Iran attacked Israel from Gaza in October 2023, killing 1,250 Israelis and taking 250 hostages.
Iran’s so-called “Axis of Resistance” regional allies, such as Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, have been eviscerated.
Oman, which had been mediating nuclear talks between the United States and Iran, said the American action threatened to “widen the war.” Qatar warned “that these dangerous tensions … will lead to disastrous repercussions at the regional and international levels.”
Mr. Trump said B-2 stealth bombers dropped 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs on Iran’s most heavily protected uranium enrichment facility at Fordow, which is buried a half mile under mountainous rock.
Another 30 Tomahawk cruise missiles were fired by U.S. submarines at Iran’s Natanz and Isfahan nuclear facilities.
Still, analysts say that destroying Iran’s nuclear program is an exceedingly complicated military process that airstrikes alone – even with bunker-buster bombs – may not accomplish.
“Some stuff will be destroyed, but a lot of it won’t be,” says David Des Roches, professor at National Defense University’s Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies in Washington, D.C.
That will depend in part on whether the rubble has effectively entombed the facilities or not. For this reason, there may be a need for follow-up sorties of attack aircraft to “shoot anything that you see going in or coming out of these facilities for the next few days,” he says.
Such concerns might prompt Mr. Trump to decide that military prudence requires “inserting U.S. ground forces and getting involved in some kind of regime change operation,” says Rosemary Kelanic, director of the Middle East program at Defense Priorities think tank.
That would increase the risk of “a broader and deeper pulling in of American military forces into a conflict that involves U.S. troops on the ground,” she says.
“The thinking is that an Iran so beset by internal problems – a basket case like Libya is today – wouldn’t be able to go back and race for a bomb after all this,” adds Dr. Kelanic.
Meanwhile, Middle East governments braced themselves for retaliatory Iranian attacks on U.S. interests and allies. None had been launched by midday on Sunday.
A presenter on Iran’s IRIB state broadcaster declared all U.S. citizens and soldiers in the region to be “legitimate targets” in the wake of the U.S. strike, airing a map of American military bases in the Middle East.
Those bases, spread around the Persian Gulf, Iraq, and Jordan, were put on high alert on Sunday in expectation of attacks either by Iranian forces or by Tehran’s proxy forces in Iraq and Yemen.
In Yemen, the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels – who last week vowed to strike U.S. flagged vessels in the Red Sea as retaliation for any US military strikes on Iran— declared an end to their recent ceasefire with the United States and vowed to attack “soon.”
Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a member of the Houthi movement’s political bureau, told Al Jazeera on Sunday that the group’s response was “only a matter of time.”
The U.S. strikes are the culmination of more than two decades of nuclear advances by Iran, diplomacy to limit that program, and threats and brinksmanship by all sides.
Analysts noted that, after these U.S. strikes, it will no longer be possible to verify the condition or progress of Iran’s nuclear efforts.
“This has enormous repercussions for the broader nonproliferation regime,” wrote Kelsey Davenport, the director for nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association, on X. “The U.S. killed an effective deal [in 2018], failed to negotiate a new one & Trump’s use of military force is likely to push Iran toward the bomb.”
