Depending on who you ask, the US bombing operation against Iran’s nuclear facilities in Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan was either a smashing success that severely crippled Tehran’s nuclear programme or a flashy show whose results were less than advertised.
President Trump and his top advisers are adamant that Iran’s nuclear capacity was dealt a significant blow. Trump has used the word “obliterated” multiple times in the last few days. True to form, JD Vance, the vice-president, has jumped on TV to burnish the administration’s narrative: Trump took decisive action to bring Iran to heel. “The bottom line is, [the Iranians] are much further away from a nuclear weapon today than they were before the president took this bold action,” Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, proclaimed in a June 25 interview.
The problem: the administration’s public stance doesn’t match up with what the US intelligence community is actually saying. According to a preliminary report by the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), the strikes did not wipe out Iran’s nuclear infrastructure – if anything, significant components remain intact, including centrifuges and Iran’s stockpile of 60 per cent enriched uranium. While the DIA is only one agency in America’s massive intelligence apparatus – and others will likely have different opinions —the assessment was concerning enough for Trump and his allies to furiously attempt to discredit it. We are now in the strange situation where the president of the United States, the US intelligence community’s most important customer, is essentially warring with his own analysts.
In the grand scheme of things, all of this is just drama. The US intelligence community, including the DIA, will continue working to provide a fuller assessment as more technical information comes in. The simple fact is that none of us, not even Trump, has enough information to go on yet.
But the extent of the damage is just one piece of the puzzle. The other is whether Trump’s decision to bomb Tehran’s nuclear sites will help or hinder efforts to stop Iran from ever seeking a nuclear weapon again. Trump clearly thinks it will bring Iran to the negotiating table, and there’s some logic to the idea that kicking the Iranians in the teeth will compel them to take the US position more seriously. Trump’s announcement at Wednesday’s Nato summit that US and Iranian officials will be sitting down next week suggests that Tehran isn’t adverse to exploring whether there’s a second bite of the diplomatic apple, either.
If only it were that easy.
There are several obstacles standing in the way of a new deal. The most significant is that none of the bottom-line positions have changed after the so-called “12-Day War”. Washington is still pressing Tehran to rip up its entire nuclear programme as if it was a tomato plant in the dead of winter. Tehran, in turn, insists that its nuclear work will continue no matter what circumstances the Americans throw up.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian Supreme Leader’s, red-line remains clear: nobody – and certainly not the United States – can deprive the Iranian nation of its right to nuclear energy. Iran is as committed to maintaining an indigenous enrichment capability now as it was before Israel dropped its first payload of bombs. If anything, Khamenei’s resistance to zero enrichment is likely to be even stronger, if only because caving to US pressure after Washington took military action would paint him as feckless at best, and impotent at worst.
The Iranians also have a bad history of negotiating with Trump. In 2018, he pulled the United States out of a nuclear deal that Tehran spent three years negotiating with the Obama administration. Sanctions were then re-imposed on the Iranian economy. On June 19 this year, meanwhile, Trump said he would give Iran another two weeks to come to its senses, only to authorise US airstrikes less than two days later in what administration officials have described as an elaborate ruse to keep the Iranians off-balance. Trump, of course, didn’t do much to stop Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, from attacking Iran in the first place – this despite the fact that Steve Witkoff, his chief envoy, was scheduled to talk to the Iranian foreign minister two days later (the meeting was cancelled).
All of this is to say that Iran has more than enough reason to keep the United States at arm’s length and view US calls for renewed diplomacy with deep scepticism. While past behaviour isn’t necessarily predictive of future results, it’s hard to envision Khamenei looking at US diplomatic entreaties as a serious endeavour on the part of Washington. Tehran may still test the waters, but the Iranians will be on guard and extremely suspicious about whatever proposal Washington puts on the table.
Finally, there’s always the possibility that the Iranians refuse to negotiate. Even before the US and Israeli bombing campaign, hardliners within the Iranian establishment were making the case that a nuclear warhead was the only thing standing between regime survival and collapse. Khamenei, a relatively cautious man on the nuclear issue, seems to have been reluctant to move in this direction for fear of how the United States and Israel would react. Well, the two countries have reacted forcefully regardless, so it’s plausible that the Supreme Leader will take the views of the hardliners more fully into account.
There’s still a chance the 12-day war will lead to a new nuclear arrangement. We better hope so, because the alternative is Iran concluding definitively that its survival depends on urgently acquiring a nuclear weapon – and a “mowing the grass” strategy, whereby the United States and Israel attack Iran in perpetuity to stop it, with all the risks that follow.
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