Did Israel and the U.S. Accomplish Their Goals in the Bombing of Iran?

By Bret Stephens

I think the Israelis feel that they have accomplished if not all then many of their strategic military goals in substantially degrading Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities. Although we still don’t yet know how substantial the damage is to Iran’s nuclear endeavors. And then, finally, bringing in the United States to bomb and presumably massively degrade Iran’s facilities underground at Fordo. So I think the Israelis feel like, if they haven’t accomplished 100 percent of their goals, they’ve accomplished 80 percent of them.

President Trump, I think, feels very much like he’s accomplished a goal. He said Iran would not get nuclear weapons. He took action that appeared to be decisive. So far, the blowback from Iran appears to be really minimal, although it’s still the early days, so this could unfold over a long period of time.
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I’m always reminded of that wonderful line attributed to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, that intelligence must never be mistaken for intelligence.

Look, the Israelis had a very different assessment of the state of Iran’s nuclear program, owing partly, I think, to superior collection methods, which they’ve demonstrated again and again that they have the state of Iran’s nuclear program. Their assessments were that Iran was much closer, that they had been, in fact, working on elements of bomb designs. But I think there’s also a kind of a confusion about the way in which bombs get made and the timetable. It’s not like you pass a finish line, so to speak, like a trinity test in the New Mexico desert.

What happens really is that countries enter into a kind of a nuclear gray zone as they’re developing weapons. They’ve acquired sufficient amounts of highly enriched uranium. That’s Part 1 of it. They have developed ballistic missiles, which can deploy or field miniaturized nuclear warheads. And what Iran was doing was sort of very systematically putting together all of those components in a way that didn’t quite provide a clear line, which would say to Western intelligence officials: OK, this is the point of no return. But it was getting incredibly close — uncomfortably close.
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Of course Israel has a dog in the fight, because the Islamic Republic of Iran has been threatening its annihilation, and has been threatening a second Holocaust since it came into power in 1979. So I think it’s quite natural if you’re any Israeli leader, of the left or of the right, that you’re going to take this threat with the utmost seriousness, because this is a regime that states its intentions and then amasses capabilities in order to carry them out. I don’t think we can fault the Israelis for taking this threat seriously.

The reason that we have not had to deal with this previously is because high-quality Israeli intelligence has been succeeding in postponing, delaying or retarding Iran’s nuclear bids for decades. The reason these warnings have not come to fruition is because covert action by Israelis succeeded for a remarkable period of time to consistently postpone Iran’s nuclear bids. Now, it is true that intelligence is sometimes wrong, but I think that the Israelis have demonstrated a capacity for close, remarkable intelligence that I am guessing their counterparts at the C.I.A. could only dream of, in terms of the granularity with which they’ve been able to track down Iranian capabilities and figures that system and harm them.

But the larger point, which Friedrich Merz, the German Chancellor made just the other day, is you don’t build a uranium enrichment facility, 300, 200, 300 meters underground if your intentions are peaceful. You just don’t.
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Iran — a nuclear Iran — is a direct threat to the United States. First of all, if you can lob a missile, say, 1,200 miles, you’re going to sooner or later master the technology to lob a missile 7,000 miles, or whatever it is — whatever the range is of an intercontinental ballistic missile.

Iran is a country that is busy trying to carry out assassinations on American soil, including my friend Masih Alinejad, including our sometimes contributor John Bolton, the former national security adviser of the United States. The Iranians have demonstrated time and again that they’re up for playing dirty tricks at a great distance. But the more important threat, the thing that really should keep American decision makers up at night, is what an Iranian bomb would mean for proliferation in the Middle East. Because if Iran were to acquire a bomb tomorrow, then the Saudis would surely get a bomb either by buying it from the Pakistanis or developing an indigenous capability. The Turks would do it, the Egyptians would do it. Perhaps the Algerians would do it.

And then you have to ask yourself, as a decision maker in Washington: Do you really want five or six nuclear weapon states in the world’s most volatile region, each of them at daggers drawn with one another? All of a sudden, figuring out the kind of nature of deterrence in a region like that becomes really terrifying for American decision makers. So the interest in the United States and preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon isn’t simply that this is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism in possession of the world’s worst weapons. It’s the chain reaction that it sets off throughout the region.

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I think the choice that confronted the Trump administration wasn’t between Iran with a bomb and Iran with no bomb. It was Iran with a bomb and Iran with hopefully no bomb. And the Iranians were moving into a gray zone where it would’ve become almost impossible to stop them through military means. But we’ve probably retarded their program by some substantial period of time. It’s not easy to reassemble all of the industrial equipment that goes into making nuclear weapons. It’s not easy to find ways to do so in secret now that the Iranian regime knows that it’s been so deeply penetrated by Israeli intelligence, and it’s not easy to do so in the teeth of a president who has now demonstrated that he really is willing to use force if necessary. So my guess is that it’ll actually be many years before Iran can reassemble what it had on the eve of its war with Israel just 12 or whatever, 13, 14 days ago.

Now, does that mean Iran will see the light and realize it needs to invest in economic development rather than squander resources on nuclear capability? I don’t know. But I actually think there’s a better chance of that than people assume. Of course the lesson the Iranians might draw is we should have gotten a nuclear weapon much sooner, and now they’ll be hellbent on acquiring one. It’s possible that all of their national efforts will shift toward that goal, especially if the current leadership is replaced by an I.R.G.C. figure even more extreme and less cautious. That’s totally within the realm of possibility.

But it’s also possible they’ll see that they have invested $500 billion into a wasted effort that brought them nothing but humiliation, and loss of hardware and prestige — and decide to change course. Strategically, they’re in a much worse position now, thanks to Israeli actions in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria. Out of national interest — and the interest of preserving the regime — they may choose to recalibrate and seek a different path. And by the way, it’s also possible that six months or a year from now, when the next morality policeman beats and murders an Iranian woman in the streets, setting off demonstrations, the regime, now weaker and more uncertain, may have a harder time suppressing dissent with the same engines of repression it’s relied on in the past. Over time, I think the regime becomes more vulnerable to internal change — and hopefully to positive change.

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When I think of the parade of horribles that we were hearing from people like Tucker Carlson, thousands of Americans dead if the United States were to bomb Fordo, it seems that this — as we’re speaking now — has been an astonishing success: the massive degradation of Iran’s nuclear capabilities in a swift period of time, at no cost so far to American lives and with the Iranians very swiftly signaling that they want to back down both vis-à-vis the United States and also with the Israelis. I’m a great believer in Winston Churchill’s phrase “in victory, magnanimity.” And I think a lot will depend on how the United States proceeds diplomatically from here.

One of the things I’ve suggested for the Trump administration — I wrote this in a column just last week — is essentially to first bomb Fordo, and of course Natanz and Isfahan. But then offer the following deal, which I think would be very useful, even if the Iranians reject it: In exchange for Iran verifiably abandoning its enrichment programs and its nuclear programs, and ending support for proxies like Hezbollah, the Houthis and Hamas, that the United States would lift all economic sanctions. We should find ways to entice the Iranian regime with proverbial offers that no sane country can refuse — to see if we can turn a new leaf.

But, you know, as Niels Bohr or Yogi Berra or someone said: Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. So I don’t want to discount anything of how this might affect the regime going forward. It’s an open and interesting — and in many ways, of course, terrifying question.

I think for the Israelis, the sense was that they had to strike before Iran had acquired sufficient quantities of uranium enriched to a 90 percent level, which is what’s broadly considered weapons-grade uranium. They’d gotten to 60 percent, which is very, very close. So from that point of view, it seemed that the urgency — at least from the Israeli perspective — was there.

There was also an opportunity for the Israelis because they had previously substantially degraded Iran’s anti-air capability. So they had a moment of opportunity — an opening. And the question that ultimately needs to be raised isn’t whether Israel waited until the last possible minute or the next to last possible minute. The real question about urgency is just how serious a threat should we see an Iran with a nuclear capability. Not only to Israel’s interest or Middle Eastern interest, but to core American interest. I think the answer is it was an urgent, pressing threat, and there was an opportunity to do something about it. And Israel sees that opportunity, and Donald Trump followed up with what I hope was a decisive blow.

Trump’s Courageous and Correct Decision

June 22, 2025, 2:29 p.m. ET

Credit...Pool photo by Carlos Barria

By Bret Stephens

For decades, a succession of American presidents pledged that they were willing to use force to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. But it was President Trump who, by bombing three of Iran’s key nuclear sites on Sunday morning, was willing to demonstrate that those pledges were not hollow and that Tehran could not simply tunnel its way to a bomb because no country other than Israel dared confront it.

That’s a courageous and correct decision that deserves respect, no matter how one feels about this president and the rest of his policies. Politically, the easier course would have been to delay a strike to appease his party’s isolationist voices, whose views about the Middle East (and antipathies toward the Jewish state) increasingly resemble those of the progressive left. In the meantime, Trump could have continued to outsource the dirty work of hitting Iran’s nuclear capabilities to Israel, hoping that it could at least buy the West some diplomatic leverage and breathing room.

Trump chose otherwise, despite obvious risks. Those include Iranian strikes on U.S. military assets and diplomatic facilities in the region and terrorist attacks against American targets worldwide, possibly through proxies and possibly over a long period. One grim model is the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which was carried out by Muammar el-Qaddafi’s regime most likely in retaliation for President Ronald Reagan’s 1986 bombing of Libya. In the Lockerbie atrocity, 270 people lost their lives.

But one set of risks must be weighed against another, and there are few greater risks to American security than a nuclear Iran.

The regime is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. It is ideologically committed to the annihilation of Israel and is currently attacking it with indiscriminate missile fire on civilian targets. It is an ally of North Korea, China and Russia — and supplies many of the drones Russia uses to attack Ukraine. It is developing and fielding thousands of ballistic missiles of increasingly greater reach. Its acquisition of a bomb would set off an arms race in the Middle East. And it has sought to assassinate American citizens on American soil. If all this is not intolerable, what is?

Critics fault the administration for its refusal to seek congressional authorization for attacking Iran. But there’s a long, bipartisan history of American presidents taking swift military action to stop a perceived threat without asking Congress’s permission, including George H.W. Bush’s invasion of Panama in 1989 and Bill Clinton’s four-day bombing campaign against Iraq in 1998.

Critics of the strike also point to an American intelligence estimate from this year that claimed Iran’s leaders had not yet decided to build a bomb. But that was a judgment about intent, which can be fickle. Trump’s responsibility was to deny Iran’s leaders the capabilities that would have allowed them to change their minds at will, to devastating effect. Amid uncertainty, the president acted before it was too late. It is the essence of statesmanship.

We’ll find out in the coming days and weeks how Iran will react. In his White House address, Trump noted that there are many other targets in Iran that the United States could easily destroy if Iran doesn’t agree to dismantle its nuclear program once and for all. Iran may disregard that warning, but if it does, it is choosing further destruction for the sake of a nuclear fantasy. As in 1988, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini chose to end the Iran-Iraq war for the sake of regime survival — he said it was like “drinking from a chalice of poison” — my guess is that the current supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, will stand down and seek a negotiated settlement. In my column last week, I suggested the outlines of a potential deal, in which the United States could promise Iran relief from economic sanctions in exchange for its complete nuclear disarmament and an end to its support for foreign proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis.

Whether or not that happens, Iran’s hopes of acquiring a nuclear weapon have probably been seriously degraded. And adversaries everywhere, including in Moscow and Beijing, must now know that they are not dealing with a paper tiger in the White House. The world is safer for it.

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Bret Stephens is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about foreign policy, domestic politics and cultural issues.

AMERICA BOMBS IRAN NUCLEAR SITE AT FORDO

At the White House. Pool photo by Carlos Barria

by Lauren Jackson and Evan Gorelick

Last night, the U.S. entered the war with Iran.

President Trump upended decades of diplomacy when he sent American warplanes and submarines to strike three of Iran’s nuclear facilities — including Fordo, its top-secret site buried deep inside a mountain. The bombs fell at about 2:30 a.m. local time.

In an address from the White House, Trump said the goal of the strikes was to keep Iran from building a nuclear weapon. He claimed the facilities had been “completely and totally obliterated,” but the extent of the damage is not yet clear.

Trump also called for the war to end. “Iran, the bully of the Mideast, must now make peace,” he said. He threatened “far greater” attacks if it did not.

Still, the war continues: Iran said today that it wasn’t open to diplomacy right now. It launched missiles into Israel early this morning, wounding at least 16. Israel responded with its own strikes on Iran. More than 40,000 American troops are stationed in the region, and the U.S. is expecting retaliation. (See American bases that Iran could strike.)

The U.S. attack was an “extraordinary turn for a military that was supposed to be moving on from two decades of forever wars in the Middle East,” our colleagues Helene Cooper, Eric Schmitt and Julian Barnes wrote.

Below, we explain the strikes and what could happen next.
What were the targets?

The New York Times


America targeted three Iranian sites, including the buried facility at Fordo, the crown jewel in the country’s nuclear program. The U.S. is the only country believed to have bombs big enough to reach it. Israel has been asking Trump to strike the site since its offensive began. Now he has.

Here’s what we know about each target:

Fordo: Iran built this site — where centrifuges concentrate uranium to a form used in nuclear weapons — inside a mountain to shield it from attacks. The U.S. military concluded that one “bunker-buster” bomb would not destroy it. So six B-2 bombers dropped a dozen of these 30,000-pound weapons, a U.S. official said. The attack was the first time the military had used the weapon in combat. See how the powerful bombs work.

Natanz: This is the largest uranium enrichment site in Iran. Its centrifuge halls are also buried deep underground, but experts say this site is less secretive and less heavily fortified. Israel struck the site recently with warplanes; the U.S. struck it with cruise missiles launched from submarines.

Isfahan: The U.S. also hit a site that holds Iran’s largest nuclear fuel stockpiles near the ancient city of Isfahan. Israel hit parts of the facility last week but avoided the fuel.

Why did the U.S. strike?

The U.S. says it is joining Israel in its war to keep Iran from creating a nuclear bomb.

Trump pledged as a presidential candidate to keep America out of “stupid endless wars.” But he also vowed to prevent the Islamic Republic from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

Israel and Iran, sworn enemies for decades, have been striking each other for more than a week. Israelis launched a surprise assault that targeted Iranian infrastructure, including nuclear installations, and military leaders. Israel wanted U.S. help, but Trump was noncommittal.

When Israel began its attacks, the U.S. secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said, “We are not involved in strikes against Iran.” Trump said that he would decide “within the next two weeks” whether to help. He took two days.

What’s next?

It’s not clear. But experts at The Times, including our Cairo bureau chief Vivian Yee, outlined a few scenarios:

Iran could retaliate: The U.S. has troops on bases and warships across the Middle East. Iran might attack them. It might also create havoc in international shipping: It could move to shut the Strait of Hormuz, a critical transit hub for the world’s oil and natural gas. All the options carry risks for Iran’s clerical rulers. Read more about their dilemma.

Iran could negotiate: The strikes could give the U.S. leverage in its negotiations to limit Iran’s nuclear capacity. They may also force Iran to the table. Still, the prospects for a diplomatic solution don’t seem promising, our colleague Michael Shear writes.

The war could get messier: Iran’s allied militias in the region, including the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah, although weakened by Israeli bombing, in Lebanon and armed groups in Iraq, have not fully joined the fight.

The U.N. nuclear watchdog said it had not detected any increase in off-site radiation levels at the nuclear sites the U.S. attacked. Read the latest news.

Benjamin Netanyahu said that the U.S. strikes had been carried out “in full coordination” between the American and Israeli militaries.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been in a bunker, with limited communication, to protect him from possible assassination.

Responses

Israel: The Israeli foreign minister said that Trump “wrote his name tonight in golden letters in the history books.” Netanyahu also praised the attack.

Iran: The Iranian foreign minister said that the attacks would have “everlasting consequences.”
United Nations: António Guterres, the head of the U.N., called the U.S. attacks a “dangerous escalation” and “a direct threat to international peace and security.”

Republicans, including Mike Johnson and John Thune, rallied behind Trump, calling the strikes a necessary check on Iran’s nuclear efforts. Democrats condemned the attack as unconstitutional and warned that it could drag the U.S. into a long war.