Trump puts ayatollahs on notice

Iran’s ayatollahs should not ignore the clear message sent by Donald Trump’s timely deployment of six B-2 Spirit stealth bombers to the Anglo-American military base on the strategic Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia. The deployment of the bombers – each carrying a pair of the US Air Force’s biggest conventional bombs, the 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator, designed to burrow deep into the earth before detonating – coincided with the first meeting in Muscat between US and Iranian officials to discuss Tehran’s nuclear threat.

As The Times reported, the B-2s were “lined up on the (Diego Garcia runway apron) for every passing civilian satellite to see”. The message the US President was signalling was unequivocal: “Even your deeply buried nuclear sites are not safe from me … Ditch your ambition to make an atomic bomb, once and for all, or else.”

Mr Trump’s display of firepower, just as his Middle East troubleshooter, Steve Witkoff, was negotiating indirectly with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, should leave Tehran in no doubt that Mr Trump is determined to ensure it does not get the bomb. The 2½ hours of awkward, indirect shuttle diplomacy in Muscat was the highest-level contact between the two sides since Mr Trump, in 2018, pulled the US out of Barack Obama’s flawed, ingratiating 2015 deal with the ayatollahs.

A second round of contact in Muscat is expected on Saturday. That will be all to the good if it leads Tehran’s terrorist regime to grasp what it faces if it fails to curb its nuclear ambitions.

Tehran has been weakened and humiliated over the past year in a way not seen since the 1979 overthrow of shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The ayatollahs’ principal ally, the Assad regime in Syria, was toppled and their main terrorist proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas, have been crippled by Israel. Their economy has been devastated and Iranians are fed up with the regime. Mr Araghchi maintained after Muscat that the US wanted a nuclear deal done “as soon as possible, but that will not be easy”. Yet hopes of a deal will be improved if the regime in Tehran understands the message signalled by Mr Trump with his deployment of the B-2 stealth bombers.