On Saturday evening, President Donald Trump shared on Truth Social that the U.S. had attacked three Iranian nuclear sites, using a “full payload of bombs.”
A weakened Iranian military and a decisive set of Israeli strikes on Iran’s nuclear capabilities opened the door to directly attack the Fordo site deep in Iran, which Trump said in his post was bombed along with Natanz and Isfahan nuclear facilities.
This is bad. Trump is taking the bet that sending in the U.S. Air Force with “bunker buster” bombs will once and for all end Iran’s nuclear threat. But anticipating U.S. military capabilities is very different from dealing with what the volatile leaders of Iran or Israel will choose next.
Netanyahu is poised to open hostilities on a third front, adding to the conflicts Israel is engaged in in Gaza and Lebanon, and his bravado is dragging the United States along.
After launching missile strikes inside Iran and killing key leaders of Iran’s nuclear program and the Revolutionary Guard, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made it clear he sees an opportunity to topple the government in Iran, telling Fox News that Israel is “geared to do whatever is necessary to achieve our dual aim, to remove … two existential threats” and that killing the leader of Iran “could certainly be the result because the Iran regime is weak.”
Iran has also arrayed its missile systems towards U.S. military assets in the region, which include the 5th fleet based in Bahrain and military bases in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
While world leaders agree that Iran is a hostile regime and that, in Netanyahu’s words, “we can’t have the world’s most dangerous regime have the world’s most dangerous weapons,” the ongoing military escalation and retaliation were not the only path toward security and stability in the Middle East.
Diplomacy worked before. Ten years ago, in 2015, Iran agreed to dismantle its nuclear program and allow United Nations weapons inspectors inside the country for regular monitoring and review. By all accounts, this worked to halt weapons-grade uranium enrichment, if not Iran’s other hostile activities. But despite fashioning himself as the dealmaker-in-chief, President Donald Trump pulled out of the original deal in 2018 and has yet to secure a new one. In the first go-around, the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council — China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom an the United States — plus Germany were involved in a deeply deliberative process. This time, Iran is asking the United States to calm the waters and Russia is offering to secure Iran’s uranium, while Trump leaves a meeting with G-7 leaders warning “everyone should evacuate Tehran.” So yes, you should be worried — because cooler heads are not prevailing. Netanyahu is poised to open hostilities on a third front, adding to the conflicts Israel is engaged in in Gaza and Lebanon, and his bravado is dragging the United States along: As the primary supplier and funder of the Israeli military, the United States is by default considered complicit in Israel’s actions, the conceit being that Israel would never dare move beyond the comfort zone of U.S. geopolitics. What makes this moment even more worrisome is that Trump never laid down any consistent theory of when and how the United States will engage militarily other than the America First pablum of eliminating dependency, aka humanitarian aid, and withdrawing from foreign wars. Trump’s reluctance to support regime change in Iran created a rift with his first-term national security adviser John Bolton, who is now surely salivating at the idea of this current opportunity. But MAGA allies such as Tucker Carlson are breaking with Trump over this moment, saying continued military support of Israel would be a betrayal of the commitment to let other countries “fight their own wars.” Trump, like presidents before him, has promised to come to the defense of Israel; how far does that commitment go when facing a capable Iranian military and a population nine times the size of Israel? What happens if a U.S. military installation in an Arab country is attacked? What happens if U.S. citizens are killed? Trump could soon find himself and the American public dragged into a very high-stakes choice between keeping an ally happy or investing in another doomed, boots-on-the-ground war of regime change.
Nayyera Haq is a global affairs journalist. 
