After War With Israel and U.S., Iran Rests on a Knife Edge

The Islamic Republic limps on after the 12-day conflict. Where will the nation go from here?

In Tehran on Tuesday, the morning of a cease-fire with Israel.Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

By Roger Cohen
Reporting from Dubai
June 29, 2025
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Roxana Saberi felt like she was back behind bars in Tehran. As she watched Israel’s bombing of Evin prison, the notorious detention facility at the core of Iran’s political repression, she shuddered at memories of solitary confinement, relentless interrogation, fabricated espionage charges and a sham trial during her 100-day incarceration in 2009.

Like many Iranians in the diaspora and at home, Ms. Saberi wavered, torn between her dreams of a government collapse that would free the country’s immense potential and her concern for family and friends as the civilian death toll mounted. Longings for liberation and for a cease-fire vied with each other.

“For a moment, I imagined seeing Iran again in my lifetime,” said Ms. Saberi, 48, a dual Iranian and American citizen and author who has taken a break from her journalistic career. “I also thought how ridiculous it was that the Islamic Republic wasted decades accusing thousands of women’s rights advocates, dissidents and others of being spies, when they couldn’t catch the real spies.”

Those spies, mainly from Israel’s Mossad foreign intelligence service, penetrated Iran’s highest political and military echelons. The question now is what a shaken Islamic Republic in dire economic straits will do with what President Masoud Pezeshkian, a moderate, has called “a golden opportunity for change.” That moment is also one of extreme, even existential, risk brought on by the 12-day Israeli-Iranian war that the United States briefly joined.

The military campaign flirted with dislodging the clerical autocracy that has made uranium enrichment the symbol of Iran’s national pride, but stopped short of killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s 86-year-old supreme leader, even though Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel had said that the ayatollah’s death would “end the conflict.” The 46-year-old Islamic Republic limps on.

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Holding photos of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, and his predecessor in Tehran in April.Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

It does so despite the collapse of its “axis of resistance” that was formed through the funding, at vast expense, of anti-Western proxies from Lebanon to Yemen; despite the devastating bombing of its equally exorbitant nuclear facilities that never produced a bomb and scarcely lit a lightbulb; and despite the humiliation of surrendering the skies above Iran to its enemies.

Yet Mr. Khamenei, as the guardian of the theocratic anti-Western revolution that triumphed in 1979, sees himself as the victor. “The Islamic Republic won,” he said in a video broadcast on Thursday from a secret location, laying to rest rumors of his demise.

His is a survival game dosed with prudence that now faces the greatest test of his 36 years in power.

“To understand Iran and Khamenei and the people around him is to understand that the Islamic Republic’s survival is always a victory,” said Sanam Vakil, the director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House, a London think tank.
Revolution at a Crossroads

Already, tensions over how to address the crisis brought on by the war are evident.

President Pezeshkian appears to favor a liberalizing makeover, repairing relations with the West through a possible nuclear deal. He has spoken in recent days of “an opportunity to change our views on governance.”

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President Masoud Pezeshkian at a protest in Tehran this month after U.S. attacks on nuclear sites in Iran.Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

It was not clear what he meant, but many in Iran favor strengthening elected institutions and making the supreme leader more of a figurehead than the ultimate font of authority. They seek an Islamic Republic that is more of a republic, where women are empowered and a younger generation no longer feels oppressed by a gerontocratic theological system.

Mr. Khamenei insisted that the Israeli and American attack on nuclear facilities had failed “to achieve anything significant.” But Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi seemed to question that judgment, saying on Thursday that the country’s nuclear facilities had sustained “significant and serious damage.”

Hardliners see any disunity as a danger signal. They believe concessions presage collapse. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, 69 years after its formation, and the “color revolutions” that brought Western democracy to post-Soviet states, deeply affected Mr. Khamenei and his entourage.
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They are suspicious of any nuclear deal, and adamant that Iran must retain the right to enrich uranium on its soil, which Israel and the United States have said is unacceptable. They are also strongly represented in the country’s single most powerful institution, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

The Guards number 150,000 to 190,000 members, Ms. Vakil said. With control over vast swaths of the economy, they have a deep vested interest in the government’s survival. They are the kind of large institutional buffer that President Bashar al-Assad in Syria lacked before his downfall last year.

Already, as it did in 2009 when a large-scale uprising threatened the toppling of the Islamic Republic, Iran has embarked on a crackdown involving hundreds of arrests, at least three executions, and the deployment of the Revolutionary Guards and Basij militia in Kurdish and other restive areas.
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Members of Basij paramilitary forces marching at a parade in Tehran in January.Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

Iranians have seen this movie before. Some wonder what the war was for if they are to face another bludgeoning. “The people want to know who is to blame for multiple defeats, but there is no leader to take on the regime,” said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a prominent political scientist in the United Arab Emirates. “A weak Islamic Republic could hang on four or five years.”

This weakness appears deep. The “victory” claimed by Mr. Khamenei cannot disguise the fact that Iran is now a nation with near zero deterrence.

“I would imagine that deep in his bunker, Khamenei’s priority must be how to rebuild a deterrence that was based on the nuclear program, the missile program and armed proxies, all now in shreds,” said Jeffrey Feltman, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington and, as United Nations under secretary-general for political affairs in 2012, one of the few Americans to have met the supreme leader.

“Khamenei was obsessed with the mendacity and belligerence of the United States,” Mr. Feltman recalled. “His eyes were benevolent, but his words, expressed in a quiet, dull monotone, were anything but benevolent.”
Paranoia, Institutionalized

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Mr. Khamenei’s predecessor, promised freedom when he came to power in the 1979 revolution that threw out a shah seen as a pawn of the secular and decadent West. It was not to be. Tensions soon erupted between those who had fought for democracy and those for whom theocratic rule was more important.
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Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the current supreme leader's predecessor, blessing a crowd in Tehran in 1979.Credit...Michel Lipchitz/Associated Press

The Islamic Republic’s first president, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, was impeached and ousted after a little more than a year in office, for challenging the rule of the clerics. He fled to France. Thousands were executed as the government consolidated its power.

War engulfed the revolutionary country in 1980, when Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader, ordered an invasion. The fighting would go on for eight years, leaving an estimated 500,000 people dead, most of them on the Iranian side, before Ayatollah Khomeini drank from “the poison chalice,” as he put it, and accepted an end to the war.

The generation that fought that war, now largely forgotten in the West, forms much of the political and military elite in Iran today. They came away from the war convinced of American perfidy in light of U.S. military support for Iraq, persuaded of Iranian resilience and viscerally dedicated to the revolution for which they had seen so many fall.

“The war, in many cases, embedded a paranoid worldview, a sense of victimization that has led the elite, and particularly Khamenei, to be unaware of how the world is evolving around them,” Ms. Vakil said.

All of this has shaped the nazam, or system. It is now thoroughly institutionalized. Change has proved difficult and conflict has festered. In the more than four decades since the revolution, the century-long Iranian quest for some workable compromise between clericalism and secularism, one that denies neither the country’s profound Islamic faith nor its broad attraction to liberal values, has endured.

At times, the tension has flared into violent confrontation, as when more than two million people took to the streets in 2009 to protest what they saw as a stolen election that returned President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power.

The vote had been preceded by weeks of vigorous televised presidential debates, watched by tens of millions of people, and the rapid rise of Mir-Hossein Moussavi’s liberalizing Green Movement. All that evaporated as the Revolutionary Guards and Basij militia clubbed protesters into submission over the days after the vote.

Seldom, if ever, had the two faces of the Islamic Republic been so evident, one vibrant and freedom-seeking, the other harsh and closed, succeeding each other at hallucinogenic speed.

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An image from social media showing a protest in western Iran in 2022 over the death of Mahsa Amini.Credit...via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

More recently, in 2022, a wave of protests erupted after a young woman, Mahsa Amini, died in the custody of Iran’s morality police soon after her arrest for failing to cover her hair with a hijab. The movement reflected deep exasperation at the notion that aging clerics should tell women how to dress, and it led to some change. Many more women now go without hijabs; reprimands have become rarer and milder.

The government’s ability to suppress challenges, through repression and adaptation, reflects its strong survival instincts, and complicates assessments of its possible durability even as a clear majority of Iranians oppose it.

So, too, does popular weariness after a century of upheavals that have left Iranians with little taste for further turmoil and bloodshed.

“The people of Iran are fed up with being pariahs, and some were more saddened by the cease-fire than the war itself,” said Dherar Belhoul al-Falasi, a former member of the United Arab Emirates’ Federal National Council who now heads a consultancy focused on risk management.

“But we here in the Gulf are status quo powers that favor stability,” he added.

A toppling of the Islamic Republic would likely have little support among Gulf States, which include Saudi Arabia, not out of any love for Mr. Khamenei, but out a desire to remain havens of peace and prosperity.

“For now, I don’t see any forces gelling to go up against the regime,” said Mr. Feltman. “But Israel will strike again if it sees any redevelopment of Iran’s nuclear or ballistic programs.”
Iran at an Impasse

Ms. Saberi’s hopes rose and fell during the recent fighting as she sat in her parents’ home in North Dakota. Against her better instincts, she found herself digging out her Iranian passport as the 12 days passed, and considering renewing it.

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Roxana Saberi, a dual Iranian and American citizen, was incarcerated for 100 days in Tehran in 2009.Credit...Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters

She has not visited Iran in the 16 years since her release, knowing that return, as she put it, “would be a one-way ticket.” But the tug of her second home, Iran, where she lived for six years, endures.

“Iran’s in our heart, it’s in our blood, there is nowhere in the world like it, and I know so many Iranians in the diaspora who would go back and contribute if the regime falls,” she said. “My dad, in his 80s, spends his time translating Persian poetry.”


Roger Cohen is the Paris Bureau chief for The Times, covering France and beyond. He has reported on wars in Lebanon, Bosnia and Ukraine, and between Israel and Gaza, in more than four decades as a journalist. At The Times, he has been a correspondent, foreign editor and columnist.

The Ayatollah Has a Master Plan

June 26, 2025, 1:00 a.m. ET

Credit...Hugo Clarence Janody/Hans Lucas, via Redux

By Vali R. Nasr
Dr. Nasr is a scholar of Iranian politics and U.S. policy in the Middle East.

The United States’ attack on Iran’s nuclear sites last weekend, following a weeklong Israeli bombing campaign, has marked a turning point for Iran. Washington’s involvement in the conflict represents one of the biggest challenges to the Islamic Republic since its founding in 1979 and is a moment of truth for the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has maintained Iran’s hostility to the West during his 36 years in power.

Now the future of the country’s nuclear program, and the fate of the tenuous cease-fire with Israel, rests in his hands — and even in the face of grave threat, he is unlikely to back down.

Iran’s rulers are no strangers to war. Many of the country’s top leaders, including its president, foreign minister and key military figures, are veterans of Iran’s long war with Iraq in the 1980s, a grinding struggle that cost Iran billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives. Under Ayatollah Khamenei, who served as president from 1981 to 1988 and became Iran’s supreme leader in 1989, the lessons of that brutal conflict have come to undergird the regime’s worldview — and its national security policy.

As Ayatollah Khamenei sees it, Iran is locked in a struggle for survival with the United States and its allies, including Israel. The policies he has pursued in the decades since he came to power — domestic repression, nuclear expansion and support for proxy militias including Hamas and Hezbollah — have all been in the service of winning that contest. His distrust of Washington has only deepened since Donald Trump’s 2018 withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal Tehran negotiated with the Obama administration.

The Islamic Republic understands its limitations in this struggle. Its military is woefully inadequate in the face of more advanced U.S. weaponry. Its economy has been severely constrained by international sanctions. And in recent years, Iranians have revolted against the regime’s policy of perpetual resistance against the West, as well as against the regime’s repressive domestic policies. The United States has also maintained a robust presence in the region, with tens of thousands of troops stationed across a network of bases.

If this history is anything to go by, Ayatollah Khamenei will not retreat, let alone surrender. He has, for now, accepted a cease-fire with Israel — but only because he is confident that Iran held its ground in the face of U.S. and Israeli strikes. In the past, too, he has made concessions when necessary. Tehran entered both the 2015 nuclear deal and the most recent round of nuclear negotiations with the United States in order to relieve economic pressure.

Ayatollah Khamenei is uninterested in making compromises that could fundamentally change Iran’s trajectory. He is wary of even appearing open to compromise, which he believes the United States would interpret as weakness. “America is like a dog,” he told his advisers in a meeting over a decade ago. “If you back off, it will lunge at you, but if you lunge at it, it will recoil and back off.”

Iran’s supreme leader has instead sought an equilibrium that can be summarized as “no war and no peace.” He wants neither confrontation nor normalization with the United States. What he wants is for Washington to stop containing Iran, unshackle its economy and allow Iran to embrace the status of a regional great power.

Ayatollah Khamenei believes that Iran can achieve this goal in time. If Tehran perseveres, he thinks, it can outlast Washington and Israel’s appetite for a fight. For decades, his regime has built its military strategy on patience and endurance, reflecting its rulers’ takeaways from the Iran-Iraq war. In 1980, Iraq launched a surprise strike against its neighbor, taking over thousands of square miles of southwestern Iran. Two years later, Iran was able to outmaneuver Iraq’s better-armed military through the use of guerrilla forces and so-called human wave attacks, allowing it to recapture much of its lost territory. The lesson, for Ayatollah Khamenei and his peers, was that Iran is capable of wearing down better-equipped foes — even when the odds are stacked against it.

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That lesson guided Iran’s response to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Convinced that Iran was next on Washington’s list, Ayatollah Khamenei charged Gen. Qassem Soleimani — who was killed by a U.S. drone strike in 2020 — to take advantage of the chaos and brewing Iraqi insurgency by bogging the United States down in a quagmire. General Soleimani proceeded to build a network of Iranian influence across Iraq, co-opting Iraqi politicians and mobilizing Shia militias to attack U.S. forces. The strategy worked; by 2011, the United States had withdrawn most of its troops after a prolonged and exhausting insurgency.

In more recent years, Iran has had plenty of time to prepare for an American or Israeli attack. Its deep burial of the Fordo enrichment site, for instance, may have spared the facility from total destruction by U.S. bunker-busting bombs. A larger conflict would pose a bigger threat, especially at a time when the Iranian economy is weak and its population restive. For now, Tehran has probably concluded that it can endure wartime economic hardship and that the population will rally to the flag and direct its anger at foreign attackers.

With this calculus in mind, Ayatollah Khamenei clearly felt compelled to respond to show that he is not defeated. He also seeks to demonstrate that Washington cannot achieve its aims by force, be they regime change or dismantling Iran’s nuclear program. Iran is looking for deterrence, not escalation. The scale and timing of its missile launch targeting Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar appears carefully calibrated, with Iranian officials giving advance notice that the strike was coming.

If the cease-fire collapses and war resumes, Iran may choose to attack U.S. ships or bases in the Persian Gulf or close the Strait of Hormuz. Whether or not it does so, what matters is its ability to keep the world on its toes, using uncertainty to disturb energy prices and global business.

Should Iran attack, its strikes would probably aim to force Israel and the United States to settle for a war of attrition. A long slog, Iran believes, will foil U.S. and Israeli plans for a decisive victory and force them to compromise in the face of mounting costs and domestic backlash. Iran will not see President Trump’s call for peace as a welcome diplomatic off-ramp. Only after it has regained a measure of deterrence, potentially by acquiring a nuclear weapon, might Iran be ready to talk.

Does Ayatollah Khamenei’s regime have the military capacity, domestic strength and political endurance to sustain a war of attrition? That ambiguity is part of the supreme leader’s game plan. What might matter more is not whether Iran has the capacity to fight indefinitely, but that it could do so for longer than Washington or Israel is willing to countenance — especially if it is able to rebuild its nuclear infrastructure in the interim, and even assemble a nuclear arsenal.

Iran’s calculations will greatly depend on its assessment of how much of its nuclear program has survived the U.S. bombing and whether it can turn its existing stockpile of highly enriched uranium into nuclear weapons. It may soon close its nuclear program to outside inspection — and, even if it remains a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, keep the world guessing about its aims. The United States could try to block Iran’s progress, but short of putting boots on the ground, there may be a limit to what it can do.

And that is what Ayatollah Khamenei may very well be banking on: that the prospect of another “forever war” in the Middle East is sufficiently daunting to keep the United States at bay. It already looks to Tehran that it has persuaded Mr. Trump to eagerly embrace a cease-fire. Until now, Iran had hoped its nuclear ambitions might be enough to end American containment and win sanctions relief at the negotiating table. Now Ayatollah Khamenei may well conclude that the only way to achieve his goals is to cross the nuclear line once and for all.

Trump claims he will make a decision "in 2 wks" whether to bomb Iran or continue negotiations.

Just a week ago, the Trump administration was preparing for a sixth round of negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, scheduled to be held in Oman on June 15.

Today, Trump issued a statement through White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, falling back on his usual tactic of promising something “in two weeks.” “Based on the fact that there's a substantial chance of negotiations that may or may not take place with Iran in the near future, I will make my decision whether or not to go within the next two weeks.”

In 2018, President Donald J. Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated in 2015 by President Barack Obama, under which the U.S., China, France, Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom lifted economic sanctions against Iran in exchange for limits to Iran’s nuclear program. With the U.S. withdrawal, the agreement fell apart.

Trump launched a “maximum pressure campaign” of stronger sanctions to pressure Iran to renegotiate the JCPOA, which lasted throughout his first term. Back in office, Trump relaunched that campaign in February 2025. Then, in March 2025, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told Congress that the assessment of the Intelligence Community was that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon.

In the same month, Trump said on the Fox News Channel that he had written a letter to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, urging the Iranians to negotiate “because if we have to go in militarily it’s going to be a terrible thing for them.” Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said Iran would not “enter any direct negotiations with the U.S. so long as they continue their maximum pressure policy and their threats.”

But Iran’s allied militant actors Hamas and Hezbollah in Lebanon have been badly hurt by Israeli strikes since Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and Iran’s major ally in the Middle East, Bashar al-Assad of Syria, fell in December 2024. Discussions began in April of this year, and negotiators met for five rounds by the end of May.

Israel was not included in the negotiations, and on Thursday, June 12, it launched strikes against nuclear and military targets in Iran. The strikes killed a number of nuclear scientists and senior military personnel. Iran retaliated, and the countries have been in conflict ever since.

After the strikes, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also became the acting national security advisor after Trump fired his first national security advisor for inviting a journalist onto a Signal chat about a military strike against the Houthis, issued a statement distancing the U.S. from Israel’s attack on Iran. “Tonight,” he said, “Israel took unilateral action against Iran. We are not involved in strikes against Iran and our top priority is protecting American forces in the region. Israel advised us that they believe this action was necessary for its self-defense. President Trump and the Administration have taken all necessary steps to protect our forces and remain in close contact with our regional partners. Let me be clear: Iran should not target U.S. interests or personnel.”

But by early Friday morning, Trump appeared to be trying to take credit for the strikes and demanded that Iran make a deal. The next day—Saturday, June 14—was the day of No Kings protests in which at least 2% of the U.S. population turned out to oppose his presidency, as well as the sparsely attended military parade in Washington, D.C., an embarrassing contrast for the president.

The U.S. possesses a 30,000-pound bomb that would perhaps be able to penetrate Iran’s underground nuclear sites, which are fortified against attack. According to Alex Horton, Maham Javaid, and Warren P. Strobel, the “Massive Ordnance Penetrator” (MOP) can penetrate the ground up to at least 200 feet. The U.S. B-2 Spirit stealth bomber is the only Air Force aircraft that can deploy the heavy MOP.

On June 16, while at the G7 meeting in Canada, Trump posted that Iran “should have signed the ‘deal’ I told them to sign.” He continued: “What a shame, and waste of human life. Simply stated, IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON. I said it over and over again! Everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran!” More than 9 million people live in Tehran, with more than 16 million in the metropolitan area.

Then Trump abruptly left the G7 and on the trip home told reporters on Air Force One that he didn’t care what Gabbard said, and thought Iran was close to achieving nuclear capabilities. When France’s president Emmanuel Macron suggested Trump left to work on a ceasefire, Trump posted: “Wrong! He has no idea why I am now on my way to Washington, but it certainly has nothing to do with a Cease Fire. Much bigger than that. Whether purposely or not, Emmanuel always gets it wrong. Stay tuned!” Later that day, he posted that “[w]e”—a word suggesting U.S. involvement—“now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran,” and he credited U.S. weaponry with that dominance.

About a half-hour later, he posted: “We know exactly where the so-called “Supreme Leader” is hiding. He is an easy target, but is safe there—We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now. But we don’t want missiles shot at civilians, or American soldiers. Our patience is wearing thin.”

As Trump’s “Stay tuned!” suggested, his hints that he could bring the U.S. into the conflict monopolized the news. It has pushed the No Kings Day protests and the military parade to the background, putting Trump back on the front page.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo interpreted Trump’s shift to back Israel as a typical Trump branding opportunity: “Israel has got a product ready to go to market and they’ve offered Trump the opportunity to slap the Trump name on it.” In the short term, that product offers a quick way to get rid of the Iranian nuclear program, which has long been a U.S. goal.

But Trump’s flirting with joining a Middle East war has badly split his supporters. Led by Steve Bannon, the isolationist wing is strongly opposed to intervention and suggests that the U.S. will once again be stuck in an endless war.

In contrast, the evangelical MAGA wing sees support for Israel as central to the return of Jesus Christ to Earth in the end times. Earlier this month the U.S. ambassador to Israel, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, said the U.S. was abandoning its longstanding support for a Palestinian state. Huckabee is a strong supporter of the expansion of Israel’s settlements. After the Israeli strikes, Huckabee messaged Trump to urge him to listen to the voice of God. In an apparent reference to Truman’s decision to drop a nuclear weapon on Japan at the end of World War II, Huckabee told Trump: “No President in my lifetime has been in a position like yours. Not since Harry Truman in 1945.”

At the unveiling of two 88-foot-tall (30.5 meters) flagpoles at the White House yesterday, Trump told reporters who asked what he planned to do about Iran: “I mean, you don’t know that I’m going to even do it. You don’t know. I may do it, I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I’m going to do.” He added, “Nothing’s finished until it’s finished. You know, war is very complex. A lot of bad things can happen. A lot of turns are made.”

He told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins: “I have ideas as to what to do, but I haven’t made a final—I like to make the final decision one second before it’s due, you know, because things change.”

Meanwhile, in a hearing yesterday at the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) pointed out to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that the $1 billion mission he led against the Houthis—who do not have a navy—has not restored the ability of U.S.-flagged commercial vessels to go through the Red Sea. Instead, it cost the U.S. two F18 Hornets, which cost $60 million apiece, and seven Reaper drones that cost another $200 million. Duckworth accused Hegseth of “blowing through money” and said: “Your failures…since you've taken office, have been staggering. You sent classified operational information over Signal to chest thump in front of your wife, who, by the way, has no security clearance, risking service member lives in the process…. You’ve created such a hostile command environment that no one wants to serve as your chief of staff or work with you in other senior lead [Department of Defense] leadership roles.”

“But what we should all be talking about more than all of this,” she added, “is that you have an unjustified, un-American misuse of the military in American cities, pulling resources and attention away from core missions to the detriment of the country, the war fighters, and, yes, the war fighting that you claim to love.”

Warren P. Strobel, Alex Horton, and Abigail Hauslohner of the Washington Post reported yesterday that Hegseth and Gabbard have been sidelined in discussions of whether the U.S. will get involved in the conflict. The White House is also operating without a full complement of professional staffers at the National Security Council, since Rubio fired many of them when he took over from Waltz, apparently with the goal of replacing the think-tank mentality of past NSCs with a group that would simply implement the president’s ideas.

Talking Points Memo’s Marshall noted Tuesday that “there is really, literally no one in the inner discussion of U.S. foreign policy today who has any level of foreign policy or military crisis experience at all.”

Meanwhile, a bipartisan group of lawmakers is pushing back on the idea that Trump can unilaterally decide to take the United States into a war. On Monday, Democratic senator Tim Kaine of Virginia introduced a measure to reassert Congress’s power over the authority to make war. The Constitution explicitly gives that authority to Congress, not the president, but presidents have chipped away at that power for decades. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) introduced another measure to bar the use of federal funds for military force without authorization by Congress.

New Talks With Iran Planned for Weekend

An anti-American mural in Tehran. Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

By David E. Sanger

I’m a White House correspondent covering national security issues.

Tomorrow, the United States will resume nuclear negotiations with Iran for the first time since Tehran lost most of its proxy forces — including thousands of fighters for Hamas and Hezbollah — and its bet that Donald Trump would not return to the Oval Office. No country has worked harder on a nuclear bomb without actually building one than the Islamic Republic. Nor has any country insisted more loudly that it wouldn’t build a weapon.

Now, despite years of technical setbacks, assassinated scientists and sabotaged nuclear facilities, Iran is almost capable of pulling it off — if it makes the political decision to do so, Western intelligence agencies say. It could produce bomb-grade fuel in weeks and a workable weapon in months to a year or so. Israel is once again threatening military action, and the United States has moved B-2 stealth bombers in range.

Trump insists military action won’t be necessary if Iran makes a deal — but it has to move fast at the point of a gun. So talks begin tomorrow in Oman between Trump’s personal negotiator, Steve Witkoff, and Iran’s foreign minister.

I’ve covered the Iranian nuclear program for more than two decades. Today, I’ll explain what changed in recent years and examine the chances that diplomacy might work.
Washington’s view

After Iran watched the United States oust regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, it stopped developing a nuclear warhead, U.S. intelligence concluded. But Tehran kept options open. It got better at enriching uranium even as it insisted the work was for power plants, medical isotopes and research.

Iran had that right under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. But the past five presidents feared it would be too easy for the theocracy — one that still reaches for chants like “Death to America” and threatens to obliterate Israel — to fabricate a bomb.

So Israel covertly killed a number of Iranian nuclear scientists. (Assassins wove through traffic to attach “sticky bombs” to their car doors.) The U.S. and Israel created a computer virus that seized control of nuclear centrifuges and blew them up.

The sabotage campaign helped bring Iranians to the negotiating table with the Obama administration, China, Russia and some European nations. Iran agreed to ship 97 percent of its nuclear fuel out of the country. But the deal had weaknesses: Iran retained its nuclear-enrichment infrastructure and the deal would expire in 2030. In exchange, the U.S. and other nations lifted economic sanctions. Obama bet that, with time, a younger generation would push Iran to a more Western-leaning posture.

The agreement polarized Congress. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, lobbied against it, arguing the Iranians would cheat. Trump pulled out of the deal in 2018 — over the objections of national security aides who noted it was working. Then, in 2020, Trump ordered the U.S. military to kill a beloved Iranian general who had overseen many of the region’s deadliest strikes on Americans and their allies.

The Iranians vowed revenge, and they tried to hire a hit squad to assassinate Trump on the campaign trail, according to an indictment last year. (Iran denies involvement.) It began enriching uranium to near-bomb-grade quality. The country now has enough for roughly six bombs.
Tehran’s view

The remains of a ballistic missile fired by Iran against Israel. Amir Cohen/Reuters


Iran detests Trump, who says the country will be in “great danger” if it fails to strike a deal. But Trump is clearly more open than President Biden was.

Officials in Tehran feel defenseless, since Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen — all nurtured and supplied by the Islamic Republic — have been pummeled. Iran’s own missile attacks on Israel last year were a failure. And sanctions are still hurting.

I asked Rob Malley, who worked on the 2015 deal and then represented President Biden for talks with Iran that led nowhere, how the Iranians think about the latest two presidents. “Biden was lukewarm about a deal; Trump is eager. Biden fixates on domestic politics; Trump couldn’t care less. Biden was calculating; Trump, impulsive,” Malley told me. “Trump is throwing caution, prudence and logic to the wind. Which is why there is probably a greater chance of some kind of understanding now than there ever was under the prior administration.”

In short, Trump benefits from “madman theory”: The Iranians believe he may give Netanyahu the green light and the weapons to attack — or even join in the operation.
A possible deal

The Iranians clearly hope for an agreement like the one from 2015: Give up some fuel stockpiles but retain fuel-making capability. Trump’s national security adviser says a deal must require “full dismantlement” of the nuclear program, along with the ability to make missiles or support terror groups. Netanyahu says that the Iranians must “blow up” their facilities under American supervision. Of course, after denouncing the 2015 deal, Trump will be under pressure to get a better one that prevents Iran from rebuilding.

The most likely outcome for the weekend is that the two sides define what topics this negotiation is about. Trump refused on Wednesday to say how long talks could take. But American officials say they are determined not to get stuck quibbling over every facility, timeline and verification of compliance.

Of course, as Trump discovered in dealing with the Ukraine war, if this problem were easily solvable, it would have been resolved long ago.

Top Iranian Nuclear Scientist Killed In Attack

NPR 

November 27, 202011:25 AM ET

MATTHEW S. SCHWARTZ

This photo released by the semiofficial Fars News Agency shows the scene where Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was reportedly killed in Absard, a small city just east of Tehran, Iran, on Friday. Fakhrizadeh, an Iranian scientist that Israel alleged led the Islamic Republic's military nuclear program until its disbanding in the early 2000s, was "assassinated" Friday, state TV said.

Fars News Agency via AP

Updated at 6:54 a.m. ET Saturday

A top Iranian scientist believed to be responsible for developing the country's military nuclear program was killed Friday, causing outrage in Iran and raising U.S. concerns over potential retaliation.

Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was in a vehicle that came under attack from "armed terrorists," Iran's Defense Ministry said in a statement. "In the shootout between Fakhrizadeh's bodyguards and the terrorists, the scientist was seriously wounded and taken to hospital," where the medical team was unable to save him and he succumbed to his injuries, it said.

State media said the vehicle was traveling outside the capital, Tehran, when it came under attack.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, but some senior Iranian officials said they believe Israel played a role.

"Terrorists murdered an eminent Iranian scientist today," Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said on Twitter. "This cowardice — with serious indications of Israeli role — shows desperate warmongering of perpetrators."

The Israeli government declined to comment on Fakhrizadeh's killing.

In April 2018, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu mentioned the scientist when discussing Iran's nuclear program.

"Remember that name, Fakhrizadeh," he said, while announcing that the Israeli spy agency Mossad had stolen documents from Iran about its covert nuclear activities.

In remarks Friday following news of the killing, Iranian Defense Minister Gen. Amir Hatami said Fakhrizadeh had a track record of scientific and defense innovations, and led a team that developed one of the country's first kits for coronavirus diagnosis. Fakhrizadeh, a professor of physics at Imam Hussein University in Tehran, was the former head of Iran's Physics Research Center.

It's not the first time Fakhrizadeh faced an attempt on his life. Israeli intelligence affairs journalist Yossi Melman reported that the Iranian scientist escaped an attempted assassination a few years ago.

In addition to Fakhrizadeh's work as a physics professor, "he also led the clandestine Amad plan checking the feasibility of a nuclear bomb" and "led its weaponization efforts," Melman wrote in a tweet retweeted by President Trump. "He was head of Iran's secret military program and wanted for many years by Mossad."

The U.S. Departments of State and Treasury started sanctioning Fakhrizadeh in 2008, blocking him from interacting with the U.S. financial system. The U.S. has publicly stated that Fakhrizadeh was the leader of Iran's nuclear research program.

The U.S. State Department and Pentagon declined to comment on the incident.

But a senior U.S. official speaking on condition of anonymity said the killing has raised concerns of blowback from Iran against U.S. forces in the region, especially in Iraq, where U.S. forces already have faced attacks from Iranian-backed militias.

When President Trump this month raised the possibility of attacking Iran to disable its nuclear program, U.S. military and other senior officials pushed back, warning of potential retaliation against U.S. troops in the region.

Still, Israeli Defense Forces allegedly were instructed in recent weeks to prepare for the possibility that the U.S. would strike Iran before Trump leaves office, Axios reported Wednesday. This belief wasn't based on specific intelligence, but was due to the anticipation of a "very sensitive period" while Trump is still commander in chief, Axios said, citing senior Israeli officials.

Trita Parsi, founder of the National Iranian American Council, said in a series of tweets that Israel is a "prime suspect" in the attack because it has the expertise and motivation to do.

"Conducting attacks in Iran has few down-sides for Israel right now," said Parsi, who has written extensively on the relationship between Iran, Israel and the U.S. "Either Iran lashes out and sparks a broader conflict that sucks in the US, bringing about a US-Iran confrontation that Netanyahu long has sought."

In a letter Friday to the secretary general of the United Nations and the president of the Security Council, Iran's ambassador to the U.N., Majid Takht Ravanchi, made clear he shares those suspicions.

"The cowardly assassination of Martyr Fakhrizadeh — with serious indications of Israeli responsibility in it — is another desperate attempt to wreak havoc on our region as well as to disrupt Iran's scientific and technological development," the ambassador said in the letter, noting that Iranian officials were "warning against any adventuristic measures by the United States and Israel."

"The Islamic Republic of Iran condemns, in the strongest possible terms, the criminal assassination of Martyr Fakhrizadeh," the letter added, "and expects the Secretary-General of the United Nations and the Security Council to strongly condemn this inhumane terrorist act and take necessary measures against its perpetrators."

NATIONAL SECURITY

Trump Shakes Up The Military, But To What End?

The assassination is likely to complicate any Biden administration attempt to revive diplomacy with Iran, Parsi said. Iranian officials have already promised retaliation.

"In the last days of their gambling ally's political life, the Zionists seek to intensify and increase pressure on Iran to wage a full-blown war," said Hossein Dehghan, an adviser to Iran's supreme leader, according to The Associated Press. "We will descend like lightning on the killers of this oppressed martyr and we will make them regret their actions!"

Previous cyberattacks by the U.S. and Israel, and assassinations of scientists haven't stopped Iran's nuclear program. This attack won't either, said Ariane Tabatabai of the German Marshall Fund.

"A single man was not running the entirety of Iran's nuclear program," Tabatabai told All Things Considered. "This has become a much larger endeavor. And yes, he was an important player. But one of the more important parts of his role was to develop that infrastructure, to train others, to be able to continue the program. ... I wouldn't be surprised if you saw a bit more of the push within the system to go in the direction of a nuclear weapon."

NPR's Peter Kenyon, Daniel Estrin, Tom Bowman, Michele Kelemen, Colin Dwyer and James Doubek contributed to this report.

Trump Sought Options for Attacking Iran to Stop Its Growing Nuclear Program

The president was dissuaded from moving ahead with a strike by advisers who warned that it could escalate into a broader conflict in his last weeks in office.

NY TIMES

President Trump asked senior advisers in an Oval Office meeting on Thursday whether he had options to take action against Iran’s main nuclear site in the coming weeks. The meeting occurred a day after international inspectors reported a significant increase in the country’s stockpile of nuclear material, four current and former U.S. officials said on Monday.

A range of senior advisers dissuaded the president from moving ahead with a military strike. The advisers — including Vice President Mike Pence; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; Christopher C. Miller, the acting defense secretary; and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — warned that a strike against Iran’s facilities could easily escalate into a broader conflict in the last weeks of Mr. Trump’s presidency.

Any strike — whether by missile or cyber — would almost certainly be focused on Natanz, where the International Atomic Energy Agency reported on Wednesday that Iran’s uranium stockpile was now 12 times larger than permitted under the nuclear accord that Mr. Trump abandoned in 2018. The agency also noted that Iran had not allowed it access to another suspected site where there was evidence of past nuclear activity.

Mr. Trump asked his top national security aides what options were available and how to respond, officials said.

After Mr. Pompeo and General Milley described the potential risks of military escalation, officials left the meeting believing a missile attack inside Iran was off the table, according to administration officials with knowledge of the meeting.

Mr. Trump might still be looking at ways to strike Iranian assets and allies, including militias in Iraq, officials said. A smaller group of national security aides had met late Wednesday to discuss Iran, the day before the meeting with the president.

White House officials did not respond to requests for comment.

The episode underscored how Mr. Trump still faces an array of global threats in his final weeks in office. A strike on Iran may not play well to his base, which is largely opposed to a deeper American conflict in the Middle East, but it could poison relations with Tehran so that it would be much harder for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear accord, as he has promised to do.

Since Mr. Trump dismissed Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and other top Pentagon aides last week, Defense Department and other national security officials have privately expressed worries that the president might initiate operations, whether overt or secret, against Iran or other adversaries at the end of his term.

WASHINGTON POST DAILY 202

One of the threats Biden will inherit is a nuclear North Korea.

Last month, Kim Jong Un rolled out a massive new road-mobile ICBM during a parade in Pyongyang. This is a larger version of the nuclear-capable North Korean missiles that can already reach the United States. Fortunately, we are making some progress in being able to defend against such threats. “The U.S. military has shot down an intercontinental ballistic missile in a test that demonstrated for the first time that the United States can intercept ICBMs from a warship at sea,” Paul Sonne reports. “The Missile Defense Agency announced the success of the test Tuesday, saying the USS John Finn had struck and destroyed a ‘threat representative’ ICBM using a Standard Missile-3 Block IIA interceptor in the Pacific Ocean northeast of Hawaii. …

 

Trump purges a top DHS official who led the agency's efforts to secure the election.

“In a tweet, Trump fired Christopher Krebs, who headed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) at DHS and led successful efforts to help state and local election offices protect their systems and to rebut misinformation,” Ellen Nakashima and Nick Miroff report. “Earlier Tuesday, Krebs in a tweet refuted allegations that election systems were manipulated, saying that ‘59 election security experts all agree, ‘in every case of which we are aware, these claims either have been unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent.’’ Krebs’s statement amounted to a debunking of Trump’s central claim that the November election was stolen. [Trump] said on Twitter: ‘The recent statement by Chris Krebs on the security of the 2020 Election was highly inaccurate, in that there were massive improprieties and fraud … Therefore, effective immediately, Chris Krebs has been terminated.' … Following Trump’s tweet, acting DHS secretary Chad Wolf called Krebs’s deputy, Matthew Travis, to inform him that the White House had overruled CISA’s succession plan that named him acting director, essentially forcing him to resign, Travis said. … 

"Krebs’s dismissal was not unexpected, as he told associates last week that he was expecting to be fired. His latest tweet about the security of the election, which followed similar earlier assessments by his agency, including on its Rumor Control Web page, angered the president … Krebs’s agency has asserted its independence in recent days … After his firing, Krebs responded from his personal Twitter account: 'Honored to serve. We did it right. Defend Today, Secure Tomorrow. #Protect2020.'

"The news disturbed many current and former officials and cybersecurity professionals who said that under Krebs, DHS significantly boosted the agency’s capabilities to help the private sector, as well as those managing election infrastructure, better defending themselves against foreign and domestic threats. …

"The Trump campaign has faced a string of failures in its beleaguered effort to overturn the result of the election through the courts. In the latest defeat on Tuesday, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court rejected the campaign’s claim that GOP observers did not have sufficient access to the vote count, underscoring how the president’s claims of voting irregularities have repeatedly run aground before judges. Meanwhile, in Nevada, the campaign filed a challenge to the state’s election results, asking a state court in Carson City to declare Trump the winner of Nevada’s six presidential electors or to annul the election entirely … 

"Even as the president’s allies frantically raced to roll out more allegations around the country, multiple people close to the campaign acknowledged there was little evidence to support the assertions and bemoaned the ascension of Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani, who has sidelined other legal advisers. Giuliani, who speaks with Trump several times a day, has convinced him his odds are better than other campaign officials believe … There is a grim sense ‘that this is going to end quickly and badly,’ one official said. During an appearance in federal court in Pennsylvania on Tuesday afternoon, Giuliani made broad unsubstantiated allegations about ‘widespread nationwide voter fraud,’ yet conceded that Trump’s team was not alleging fraud as a matter of law. … Two campaign officials said Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien, attorney Justin Clark and others were barely involved anymore in the legal fight, with it all being ‘Rudy all the time,’ in the words of one.

“Over the weekend, Giuliani and his own team of lawyers, which also includes Trump campaign legal adviser Jenna Ellis, attempted what was described [by insiders] as an internal campaign ‘coup,'" ABC News reports. "Giuliani’s team has taken over office space in the Trump campaign’s Arlington, Virginia, headquarters … Ellis told the remaining campaign staff that they should only follow orders from people named ‘Rudy or Jenna’ … The attempted power grab hit a boiling point on Saturday when [Jason] Miller, who’s been the campaign's chief strategist for months, and Ellis got into what sources said was a ‘screaming match’ in front of other staffers.”

Pfizer completes its vaccine trial.

“The coronavirus vaccine being developed by Pfizer and German biotechnology firm BioNTech is 95 percent effective at preventing disease, according to an analysis after the trial reached its endpoint. The vaccine trial also reached a safety milestone, with two months of follow-up on half of the participants, and Pfizer will submit an application for emergency authorization ‘within days,’” Carolyn Johnson reports. “In the trial, half the nearly 44,000 participants received the experimental vaccine and half received a placebo. As those people went about their normal lives, they were exposed to the virus in the community, and physicians tracked all cases with symptoms to see if the vaccine had a protective effect. The data have not yet been published or peer reviewed, but will be closely scrutinized by the FDA and an independent advisory committee that makes recommendations to the agency. … Among people older than 65, a group at high risk of severe illness, the vaccine was 94 percent effective. … U.S. government officials anticipate having 40 million doses of both vaccines by the end of the year, enough to vaccinate 20 million people.” 

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), 87, tests positive.

“Grassley, the president pro tempore of the Senate, which makes him the third in line of succession to the presidency, revealed Tuesday that he has contracted the coronavirus,” Colby Itkowitz and Mike DeBonis report. “‘I’m feeling good + will keep up on my work for the ppl of Iowa from home.