An Iran Strategy

June 18, 2025

Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

By Bret Stephens


Nobody, perhaps not even President Trump himself, knows for sure whether the United States will wind up joining Israel in launching military strikes on Iran. “I may do it, I may not do it,” he said on Wednesday. But with a third U.S. aircraft carrier on its way to the region and the president calling for Iran’s “unconditional surrender,” the chance of war seems higher than ever — particularly now that Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, has gruffly rebuffed Trump’s demand.

If the U.S. does attack, the most obvious target will be the Fordo nuclear site, a deeply buried facility where Iran enriches uranium and which, by most reports, can be knocked out only by a 15-ton bomb known as a Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or MOP. Less well known but surely on the U.S. target list is a new, still unfinished subterranean facility south of Iran’s main (and now largely destroyed) enrichment plant at Natanz. American pilots would also almost certainly join their Israeli counterparts in attacking Iranian ballistic missile launchers and bases.

And then what? Nobody doubts the U.S. can do a lot of damage to Iran’s nuclear capabilities, at least in the short term. What comes afterward is harder to predict.

Proponents of an American strike believe that we have no realistic choice other than to help Israel do as thorough a job as possible in setting back Iran’s nuclear ambitions not just for months but years — more than enough time to allow benign forces to shape events, including the possibility of Iranians overthrowing their widely detested rulers.

By contrast, skeptics fear that the lesson Iran’s leaders will draw from an American attack is that they should have gotten a bomb much sooner — and that the appropriate response to such an attack is to be more repressive at home and less receptive to diplomatic overtures from abroad. Skeptics also expect that Iran will respond to an attack by ramping up its malign regional activities, not least to embroil the U.S. in another Middle East war that the Trump administration desperately wants to avoid.
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I’m with the proponents. A nuclear-armed Iran, fielding missiles of ever-growing reach, is both an unacceptable threat to U.S. security and a consequential failure of U.S. deterrence. After years of Iran’s prevarications, which led even the Biden administration to give up on diplomacy, to say nothing of Iran’s cheating on its legal commitments — detailed last month in a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency — the world had run out of plausible nonmilitary options to prevent the regime from going nuclear.

But it’s also foolish to dismiss the skeptics’ case. Unintended consequences are a fact of life. An American strike could well drive Iran to double down on its nuclear bid as insurance against future strikes, especially if the regime believes it can safely resume the effort once the attacks stop. The key to making the effects of airstrikes stick is to give the regime reason to think otherwise.

Here, then, is what Trump should do: First, drop bunker busters on Fordo and other hardened nuclear sites to ensure that Iran has no fast route to a bomb. That would need to be followed up by dropping a diplomatic bunker buster on Tehran — the proverbial offer Iran can’t refuse.

It would look like this. As an inducement, the United States could offer immediate relief from most economic sanctions, along with a pledge that neither the United States nor Israel would attack Iran’s critical energy infrastructure and other economic assets. The United States could also persuade Israel to end its bombing campaign.

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The price? The regime would have to agree to two things: First, permanent, verifiable, comprehensive and immediate denuclearization, including a system of intrusive inspections and an end to its enrichment programs. Second, an end to its financial and military support for Hezbollah, Hamas and other foreign proxies. Trump could also threaten to lease stealth bombers and MOPs to Israel if Iran refuses the terms of the deal.

The supreme leader might well reject the deal out of rage or pride. But he would have to think carefully about the consequences. The regime, including its apparatus of repression, now looks weak and vulnerable to its people; they might well revolt against leaders who would choose uranium centrifuges over sanctions relief. As for Hezbollah and Hamas, they are now spent forces, yielding dwindling strategic benefits for Iran at an unaffordable financial and political cost. And if the regime thinks it can still do anything in secret, it should ask itself how Israel was able to track down and assassinate so many of its top military commanders and intelligence officials as they slept in their beds.

Israel Had the Courage to Do What Needed to Be Done

June 13, 2025

Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

By Bret Stephens

It may be months or years before we’ll know the full results of Israel’s attack on Iranian nuclear and military targets, which began early Friday morning and could last for days or weeks. But critics of the strike — and already they are vocal — might at least ask themselves whether Israel had any realistic alternative against an adversary that has repeatedly vowed to wipe it off the map.

Barely a day before the strike, the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency, representing 35 nations, declared that Iran was in violation of its nuclear nonproliferation obligations. The agency’s technical report points to “rapid accumulation of highly enriched uranium,” a failure by Iran to provide “technically credible answers regarding the nuclear material at three locations” and Iran’s “insistence on a unique and unilateral approach to its legally binding obligation.”

In plain English, Iran has been deceiving the world for years while gathering the means to build multiple nuclear weapons. In a better world, diplomacy would have forestalled and perhaps eliminated the need for Israeli military action.

But President Trump, who tried to dissuade Israel from striking, failed to get a deal after five rounds of negotiations and noted this week that Tehran had become “much more aggressive” in the talks. Make of his testimony what you will, but it’s worth recalling that a much more pliant and patient Biden administration spent years trying to reach an agreement, and also gave up in frustration with Iran’s repeated prevarications.

As for other alternatives, the clandestine means of sabotage and targeted assassinations that Israel had long used, and which probably delayed Iran’s nuclear breakout moment by years, had plainly run their course — otherwise, Israel would have continued to use them rather than risk Iranian retaliatory strikes using drones and missiles that could overwhelm Israel’s defenses.

Those strikes have begun. But they underscore, from an Israeli point of view, how crucial it is that Iran be prevented from being able to mount any of those missiles with a nuclear warhead. Academic theorists in, say, Chicago may be convinced that an Iran armed with nuclear weapons would merely help create a stable balance against a nuclear-armed Israel.

Yet that fails to take into account the millenarian mind-set of some of Iran’s theocratic leaders, for whom the ideological objective of destroying Israel may be worth the price of mass martyrdom in a nuclear exchange. It also ignores the prospect that an Iranian nuclear bomb would lead Saudi Arabia, and perhaps Turkey and Egypt, to seek nukes of their own. How stable is a balance of terror if there are three, four or five nuclear powers in the world’s most volatile region, operating in uncertain diplomatic combinations, each at daggers drawn with the others?

Still, even if Israel had no better options against Iran, it’s no guarantee that the strikes will succeed, either in the short or long term. Besides a direct retaliatory strike on Israel, Iran will be tempted to hit back at other targets: ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz, Jewish sites in faraway places, U.S. diplomatic or military installations in the region. The Israeli strike may also drive Iran’s nuclear programs further underground, figuratively and literally, accelerating its effort to get nukes while making future attacks more difficult to carry off.

Those risks can’t be ignored. But it’s worth noting that Iran was doing many of those things without the pretext of an Israeli strike, sometimes directly and sometimes through proxies, such as the Houthis and Hezbollah.

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Also worth noting is that Hezbollah has been quiet since Israel’s attack. That could always change, but it’s a result of its swift decimation at Israeli hands last September. That, too, was denounced by Israel’s critics as dangerously escalatory. But now it’s paying dividends in the form of constricted Iranian retaliatory options, the end of the pro-Iranian regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and the first possibility in two generations for the Lebanese people finally to govern themselves.

Sometimes military strikes end with blowback. But sometimes they accomplish their goals — as Israel showed when it took out Syria’s nuclear reactor in 2007 and Iraq’s in 1981. Neither regime, thankfully, ever acquired nuclear weapons.

As for the prospect of Iran now racing toward a bomb, evidence suggests it was already doing so anyway. It will take time, probably years, for Iran to regain its former pace, and it will do so in a severely weakened military, technical and economic state. And it can always be hit again.

It also matters that Iran’s leadership has again been bested on its home turf, not by the “Great Satan” of the United States but, much more humiliatingly, by the “Little Satan” of Israel. The weaker and more uncertain the regime looks in the eyes of ordinary Iranians, the likelier it will spark the kinds of mass protests that nearly brought it down in 2022. An end to the regime that has inflicted so much misery on so many people for so many years offers the only sure route to ending the nuclear crisis for good.

I’m writing in the first hours of a conflict that surely still has many surprises in store. It’s far too soon to say how it will end. But for those who worry about a future in which one of the world’s most awful regimes takes advantage of international irresolution to gain possession of the most dangerous weapons, Israel’s strike is a display of clarity and courage for which we may all one day be grateful.