It’s a big decision, but one where the outcomes get slowly better, either way, every day.
President Donald Trump has yet to determine whether to militarily involve the United States on Israel’s side in its six-day old conflict with Iran. But there is only so much further that the fight can escalate. There is a very palpable – and growing – limit on what Tehran can do.
Israel has already crossed every red line imaginable in Iran’s diplomatic lexicon. It has bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities, killed so many military leaders the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is on its third commander in a week, and claimed air supremacy over the country. Short of killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and convincing the US to bomb the Fordow fuel enrichment plant, it is running out of taboos to break.
Iran, for its part, has launched barrages of ballistic missiles at Israel, terrifying civilians, causing some extensive damage, killing nearly 30 people and wounding hundreds more. Yet this is not the existential catastrophe many feared Tehran could unleash. Iran lost nearly 10 times as many civilians as Israel did in the opening 48 hours of the conflict, according to its ministry of health. Tehran is already having to temper its punches – the volleys of missiles it fires vacillating wildly night by night – as it struggles with a depleting inventory of the medium-range ballistic missiles that can hit Israel.
Daily, the list of targets Israel is steadily hitting – at will, largely unopposed – grows. And with that, Iran’s ability to threaten the region shrinks. This must be key to Trump’s impenetrable calculations. And it echoes lessons perhaps learned after his decision – unprecedented and rash as it seemed at the time – to kill the most prominent figure in Iran’s military, Qassem Soleimani, in 2020.
At the time, the assassination, in response to rocket attacks that killed an American soldier in Iraq, seemed a fantastical “gloves off” moment, in which Tehran’s great military might could be unleashed. But that failed to transpire – Iran responded by hitting another American base, where the injuries were mostly concussion. It just did not have the muscle to risk an all-out war with the United States, and that was five years ago. Things have since got a lot worse for the Iranians.
Their main strategic ally, Russia, has come unstuck in an attritional three-year war of choice with Ukraine, meaning Tehran will likely have heard little back from Moscow if it asked for serious military support.
Iran’s nearby proxies – Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Assad regime in Syria – have been removed as effective fighting forces. Hezbollah was undone in a staggeringly brief, brutal but effective Israeli campaign last fall, revealing the militant group to be a hollow threat wildly outdone by the superior technology and intelligence of its southern adversary. The Assad regime suddenly collapsed in December – following years of diplomatic isolation over its horrific abuses in a savage civil war – after Syria’s northern neighbor, Turkey, helped rebels overwhelm Damascus.
Iran has found itself outmatched locally. It has known for years it cannot take on the US.
Those two facts considered, the risk of conflagration ebbs, and Trump’s choices look easier. He could simply hit Fordow, and other relevant nuclear sites, in a single wave of stealth B-2 bomber strikes, inform the Iranians that the US seeks no further confrontation, and anticipate a muted, acceptable retaliation. Iran lacks the inventory to seriously bombard Israel, let alone another, better equipped adversary’s military bases in the region.
Trump could continue to let the Israelis hit targets at will for weeks, while permitting European foreign ministers, who will meet their Iranian counterpart Abbas Araghchi in Geneva on Friday, to present Tehran with slowly worsening terms for a diplomatic settlement. Or Trump could do nothing, and permit Iran’s broad powerlessness to come more clearly into view as its missile stocks dwindle.
But inaction might make Trump look weak and ponderous. Resolving the issue of Iran and the prospect of it developing nuclear weapons would be a much-needed foreign policy win for a White House mired in bratty spats with allies, a stop-start trade war with China, and erratic diplomacy with Moscow over Ukraine. Even Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said Israel was doing the Western world’s “dirty work” by taking out the Iranian nuclear threat. Barely anybody apart from Iranian hardliners thinks an Iranian nuclear bomb is a good idea.
The one remaining, huge risk Trump faces is that Iran, which has always insisted its program is peaceful, has a more advanced and secretive nuclear program than his bunker-busters can disable – perhaps now removed from Fordow or other publicly known sites after days of speculation they might be hit.
Such fears seem to fit with the Israeli intelligence assessments they claim expedited their recent campaign. But they would also seem to clash with the idea that further strikes can end any Iranian ambition for an atomic bomb indefinitely.
Secondly, one might argue that, by now, with its Supreme Leader directly threatened and capital’s skies wide open, Iran would have decided to race for nuclear weapons already, if it could. What else would Iran need to have happen to it?
The “known unknowns” – the things we know we do not know, as Donald Rumsfeld would have put it before Iran’s neighbor, Iraq, was invaded by the US in 2003 – are plentiful. And they more or less point in a direction where Iran is weakened, and whatever choice Trump makes is met with a muted or manageable response from Tehran, which will soon need a diplomatic solution to ensure the survival of what remains of its government and military.
The “unknown unknowns” are what mired the US in Iraq. They probably abound, although by definition we don’t know what they are. But they are overshadowed by the simple fact that neither Israel nor the US intends to occupy Iran. And Iran is increasingly too weak to strike back meaningfully, as it watches its decades-old red lines vanish fast from view.