President Trump has been presented in recent days with an expanded list of potential military options against Iran aimed at doing further damage to the country’s nuclear and missile facilities or weakening Iran’s supreme leader, according to multiple U.S. officials.
The options go beyond the proposals that Mr. Trump was considering two weeks ago as a means of following through on his promise to stop the killing of protesters by Iranian government security forces and affiliated militias, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss potential military plans.
The current set of options even includes the potential for American forces to carry out raids on sites inside Iran, and it comes in a different context, now that the protests have been brutally quashed, at least for the time being.
Mr. Trump has been demanding that Iran take further steps to end its push to build a nuclear weapon and halt its support for proxies that have long targeted Israel and destabilized the Middle East. He and his top aides are weighing whether to make good on his threats of military action to achieve those goals and possibly bring about a change in government.
Mr. Trump has not yet authorized military action or chosen among the options presented by the Pentagon, officials said. The president remains open to finding a diplomatic solution and some officials acknowledged that telegraphing the threats of military action was intended to drive the Iranians into a negotiation. In recent days, he has mulled over whether regime change would be a viable option.
“As the commander in chief of the world’s most powerful military, President Trump has many options at his disposal with regard to Iran,” Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement. “The president has stated he hopes that no action will be necessary, but the Iranian regime should make a deal before it is too late.”
Amid the protests that swept Iran weeks ago, the Trump administration weighed strikes against Iran’s nuclear program as well as hitting more symbolic targets, like the headquarters of the militia responsible for much of the crackdown on protests. Mr. Trump then abruptly ruled out military action at that point after Iranian authorities said they canceled hundreds of scheduled executions, and Israel and Arab nations asked the president to postpone any strikes.
Mr. Trump, officials say, is taking a similar approach to Iran as he did to Venezuela, where the United States amassed forces just off its coast for months as part of a pressure campaign to oust Nicolás Maduro, the country’s leader. Efforts to convince Mr. Maduro to leave Venezuela failed in that case, leading U.S. forces to attack the country and capture him. He and his wife are now being held for trial in a federal detention center in Brooklyn.
With Iran, officials remain skeptical that Tehran would accept the conditions the United States has outlined. They include a permanent end to all enrichment of uranium and giving up all of its current nuclear stockpiles, starting with the more than 960 pounds of uranium that has been enriched to near-bomb-grade levels. Most of that material, however, remains buried under the rubble created by the strikes in June.
But the demands go further, and include limits on the range and number of ballistic missiles in Iran’s arsenal, and an end to all support for proxy groups in the Middle East, including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis operating in Yemen. Agreeing to the missile limits would essentially make it impossible for Iran to strike Israel.
Mr. Trump warned Iran on Wednesday, in a post on social media, that the military was ready to attack “with speed and violence, if necessary.”
“Hopefully Iran will quickly ‘Come to the Table’ and negotiate a fair and equitable deal — NO NUCLEAR WEAPONS — one that is good for all parties,” Mr. Trump wrote. “Time is running out, it is truly of the essence!”
But one U.S. official said Mr. Trump and his top aides were keenly aware that any follow-on operation in Iran would be far more difficult than what the United States did in Venezuela. The difficulty, and danger, to U.S. forces would be far higher, and Iran is a far more capable adversary than Venezuela is. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the Senate on Wednesday that he imagined “it would be even far more complex” to manage regime change in Iran than in Venezuela.
For that reason, Mr. Trump is still weighing the range of options, which officials said could happen all together or in some combination.
Among the riskiest would involve secretly sending in U.S. commandos to destroy or badly damage parts of the Iranian nuclear program not already damaged in the U.S. bombing last June. American forces have long practiced for specialized missions such as going into countries like Iran to target nuclear sites or other high-value targets.
While Mr. Trump has repeatedly said the nuclear program was “obliterated,” his own national security strategy, published in the fall, took a more measured view, saying that the attack in June “significantly degraded Iran’s nuclear program.”
Mr. Trump has expressed reservations in the past about sending in U.S. forces on the ground and has repeatedly mentioned President Jimmy Carter’s failed operation in 1980, to rescue 52 American hostages held in Iran, as a cause for caution. In a recent interview with The New York Times, Mr. Trump contrasted his successful operation in Venezuela with “Jimmy Carter crashing helicopters all over the place,” but officials who have discussed Iran with him say that the failure of that operation made a deep impression on the president.
Another option would be a series of strikes against military and other leadership targets that would cause such turmoil that it could create the conditions on the ground for Iranian security forces or other forces to remove the 86-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It is unclear in this option who would govern the country if the supreme leader were to be removed or whether any successor would be more open to dealing with the United States.
Mr. Trump is also partly motivated to strike Iranian leaders because of their efforts to try to assassinate him. Federal prosecutors in New York said last year that Iranian plotters had discussed a plan to kill Mr. Trump just before he was re-elected president.
Israel is pressing for a third option: It wants the United States to join it in re-striking Iran’s ballistic missile program, which intelligence officials say Iran has largely rebuilt since Israel devastated the program in the 12-day war last June, the officials said.
Rear Adm. Ali Shamkhani, the head of a newly created body that oversees military operations in Iran, said on Wednesday that any strikes by the United States would be considered an act of war, and that Iran would respond forcefully and target Tel Aviv.
For that reason, Israeli officials are deeply concerned about Iran’s missile program, which can reach civilian and military targets across Israel.
Earlier this week, White House officials met with Maj. Gen. Shlomi Binder, the Israeli military intelligence chief, who briefed the administration on intelligence regarding Iran. The Saudi defense minister, Prince Khalid bin Salman, is also visiting Washington this week to meet with senior Trump administration officials.
U.S. officials emphasized that these and other options were still being refined and debated among Mr. Trump’s inner circle of top aides, and that there was no consensus yet on the ultimate objective of any military action.
There are also serious questions about what legal authority the United States would use to strike at Iran in the absence of any congressional authorization. Modern presidents have regularly ordered limited strikes without congressional approval. But this could be very different.
A more expansive campaign against Iran, particularly if such strikes were aimed at toppling or weakening the government rather than just setting back the nuclear program, could raise more pointed questions about whether the president were committing an act of war.
In response, the Trump administration would most likely cite Iran’s extensive support for terrorism in any legal justification, as it did when Mr. Trump ordered a drone strike on the commander of Iran’s elite Quds force, Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, in January 2020.
While the United States has never directly designated Mr. Khamenei as a terrorist, it has named Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism. Mr. Khamenei is also the leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, which both the United States and Europe have designated as a terror organization.
The Justice Department justified the strike that killed General Suleimani as lawful because he was “actively developing plans for further attacks against U.S. military personnel and diplomats,” according to a heavily redacted memo released after the strike.
It is unclear whether the White House has sought a legal opinion for the Iran options, but the military continues to build up its presence in the region should Mr. Trump authorize action.
The aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, armed with F/A-18 attack planes and stealthy F-35 fighter jets, is on station in the Arabian Sea, and well within striking distance of Iranian targets, Navy officials said this week. The carrier is accompanied by three missile-firing destroyers.
The United States has already sent a dozen additional F-15E attack planes to the region to strengthen strike aircraft numbers, according to U.S. officials. And the Pentagon has dispatched more Patriot and THAAD air defenses to the region to help protect American troops based there from any retaliatory strikes by Iranian short- and medium-range missiles.
Long-range bombers based in the United States that could strike targets in Iran remain on a higher-than-usual alert status. The Pentagon heightened the alert status two weeks ago when Mr. Trump requested options to respond to the bloody crackdown on protests in the country.
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