Donald Trump weighs a devastating strike on Iran
Israel is not trying to reduce Iran to rubble. It’s destroying nuclear and missile programs and making them difficult to reconstruct. But there’s one target yet to be hit: Fordow. This is where Donald Trump comes in.
Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and America’s Donald Trump have completely transformed the Middle East. It may be they were working in much more intimate co-operation than was generally realised.
Now we wait for Trump to decide: will he join Israel and obliterate Iran’s uranium enrichment facility at Fordow? It is Trump’s gravest and most consequential date with history. He has decided to allow Iran a fraction more time. He now says he will decide whether to strike Iran within two weeks, depending on whether Iran offers a deal in which it completely gives up uranium enrichment.
Israel, in a week of war, has degraded Iran’s nuclear programs. It has hit nuclear establishments at Natanz, Isfahan and the heavy-water research reactor at Arak. It has destroyed nuclear archives, and administrative and scientific research facilities. It has killed the entire top cadre of Iran’s military leadership, plus a dozen leading nuclear scientists. It has destroyed 30 to 40 per cent of Iran’s ballistic missiles, as well as hitting missile and drone manufacturing facilities and the infrastructure surrounding missiles – launch sites, even the trucks taking missiles from storage silos to launch pads.
Iran still has a lot of missiles and severely damaged a hospital in Beersheba on Thursday with ballistic missiles, perhaps 30 fired at once, Israel intercepting most but a handful getting through.
The Israeli Air Force, mainly using F-35s, which are also the backbone of the Australian air force, has hit a wide range of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps establishments, as well as police stations, state broadcast facilities, and gas and oil terminals. This is not designed to hurt global supply but to raise prices, and inconvenience, within Iran.
Israel has been careful in its choice of targets. Having suppressed Iran’s air defences, Israel hasn’t gone after most Iranian economic infrastructure. It’s not trying to reduce Iran to rubble. It’s destroying nuclear and missile programs and making them difficult to reconstruct.
But there’s one target yet to be hit: Fordow, Iran’s Mount Doom. This is where Trump comes in, with the most important moment in his presidency. Fordow is buried in the side of a mountain, deep below limestone and concrete, built to survive Israeli bombardment. The nuclear facilities are 90m underground. No bomb that Israel has can reach that deep.
Trump does have such a bomb. This bomb, the world’s most famous, travels under various glamorous names: the bunker buster, the GBU-57, the Massive Ordnance Penetrator. It has never been used in battle and was constructed precisely with Fordow in mind. It weighs a prodigious 13,600kg. Only the advanced American B-2, a stealth bomber, can carry it. It’s encased in tough metal skin and will burrow 60m into the earth before it explodes. Then its 2700kg warhead makes the biggest mess.
Fordow is where Iran primarily engages in enriching uranium to near weapons grade. It has 3000 centrifuges. Iran has 400kg of uranium enriched to 60 per cent, far higher than any domestic energy purpose would require. Weapons-grade uranium is enriched to 90 per cent. To move from 60 to 90 per cent is a short, fast process.
Israel will not finish its operation until Fordow is degraded and if possible destroyed. This is almost infinitely more difficult for Israel than for Washington to accomplish. However, if Trump takes too long to decide or it looks like he won’t attack Fordow, Israel will attempt to destroy Fordow itself.
As Trump says, no one knows what he’ll do. The regional US military command, CENTCOM, has been working hand in glove with the Israeli Defence Forces. CENTCOM and the IDF both concluded the Iranians were making serious moves towards nuclear weapons.
Ehud Yaari, Israel’s pre-eminent strategic analyst, with a wealth of experience regarding Iran, tells Inquirer that Iran probably made the decision for nuclear weapons after Israel destroyed the military effectiveness of the Lebanese terror group and Tehran proxy Hezbollah and killed its leader, Hassan Nasrallah: “After Nasrallah (was killed), the Iranians had to make a decision: do they try to re-create Hezbollah, Hamas etc, or do they not send good money after bad. Hezbollah had been their ultimate insurance policy, with their huge arsenal of missiles.”
With Hezbollah gone, Yaari suggests, Iran turned to accelerated nuclear weapons development. The Iranians weren’t yet physically building nuclear weapons. It’s not exactly clear where they were with each bit of the relevant technology.
But they increased their uranium enrichment tempo, took more aggressive efforts to hide what they were doing and were working actively on the stages necessary to make a weapon.
Yosi Kuperwasser, a former Israeli military intelligence leader, now head of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, tells Inquirer that in recent months the Iranians dramatically increased production of highly enriched uranium: “Israel really had a reason to do something now.”
Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, told a congressional hearing in March that Iran was not producing nuclear weapons. That may have been before the latest intelligence or it may have reflected her ideology.
Those parts of the Trump MAGA coalition most paranoid about “the deep state”, most committed to an isolationism harking back to the famous Know-Nothing Party of the 19th century, are determined the US should never intervene militarily anywhere unless the US itself is directly attacked.
They want America to retreat, to build a fortress behind its “big beautiful oceans”. In any event, Trump clearly now prefers the testimony and assessment of his military to that of Gabbard. She was not invited to a key security planning meeting at Camp David. When her congressional testimony was quoted to Trump, he replied: “I don’t care what she says.”
Trump may still decide, within his new two-week window, either way, to attack Fordow or not. If the Iranians were smarter they would offer to give up uranium enrichment and then, as talks dragged on, try to revive it secretly. The Iranians were working directly on weaponising their nuclear program until 2003 when George W. Bush invaded Iraq. They were scared of Bush, really scared of him. So for a time they suspended that program. It’s always good when America’s enemies are scared of the president.
Some critics of Israel argue that Jerusalem has been warning of Iranian nuclear weapons for 20 years, but still no Iranian nuke has emerged. Therefore the Israelis must have been mistaken. In fact the Israelis and the Americans have taken extensive, highly interventionist and effective measures to disturb, delay, destabilise and derail Iran’s program.
One such was the Stuxnet computer virus, which for a time destroyed Iran’s centrifuges that enrich uranium. Israeli intelligence and special forces periodically sabotaged Iran’s program.
Israel’s military performance in this campaign has been dazzling. Even more so its intelligence performance. Yaari draws the contrast with Israel’s failure over the October 7 terror attacks: “They (Israeli authorities) were so confident that Hamas was deterred, they did not even have a plan in the bottom drawer for how to take over Gaza if they had to. But Iran, like Hezbollah, they’ve been working on for 40 years. For 40 years Mossad has been building its network inside Iran, for 40 years polishing and refining.”
Trump certainly looks like he means business. However, a cynical interpretation might hold that this has been typical Trump bluster. The more publicly he threatens, often the less likely he is to take action. Nonetheless, it’s very unlikely Iran can meaningfully commit to ending uranium enrichment. Trump had told senior administration and military figures he had approved a plan of attack but not yet decided whether to put it into action. The US military has moved two huge aircraft carrier battle groups to the Arabian Sea and three big destroyers. It has deployed squadrons of F-35s and the air superiority fighter, the F-22. The Pentagon has moved in-air refuelling tankers to the region, which means they could fly the mission to Fordow and back, as well as extensive counter-drone capabilities. This is more than the US needs for Fordow. Yaari thinks its main purpose is to deter Iran’s IRGC from any aggressive action against its Arab neighbours in response to a US strike on Fordow.
The British are actively considering supporting an American action launched from the joint US-British base at Diego Garcia. It’s hard to imagine they’d refuse the Americans.
It’s difficult to see Iran agreeing to any deal that would satisfy Americans and Israelis. The Iranians have a long history of lying about their nuclear activities. They are the chief state sponsor of terrorism worldwide. They’ve sponsored an utterly murderous set of destabilising terrorist forces around the Middle East – the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Shi’ite militias in Iraq – and until recently were in close alliance with the genocidal Assad government in Syria that collapsed in December 2024.
Iran has been responsible for the torture, kidnap and murder of many Americans. As soon as it came to power, the ayatollahs’ regime took US embassy personnel in Tehran hostage. In 1983 a terrorist bombing in Beirut killed 241 US service men and women. It was carried out at Iran’s behest by a terror group linked to Hezbollah. Iran was also implicated in a failed assassination attempt on Trump himself during the presidential election campaign.
Tehran follows an extreme Islamist ideology. Although Shi’ite, the ayatollahs’ government was profoundly influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood and the writings of its chief ideologist, Sayyid Qutb, who had a passionate hatred of America and the West generally. Iran labels the US the “Great Satan” and Israel the “little Satan”.
Washington and Jerusalem will want more than bland assurances from Tehran. Kuperwasser outlines some of what he sees as essential for a deal to be acceptable: an end to uranium enrichment; nuclear inspections must be any time and any place; there must be American as well as International Atomic Energy Association inspectors; stockpiles of enriched uranium given up; no time limit on restrictions on the Iranian program; no more centrifuges built; the converter facility that changes uranium into nuclear weapons grade material given up; missiles big enough to carry nuclear warheads given up.
It is, as I say, extremely difficult to imagine Tehran agreeing to that. Anything much less will not do the job. That brings us back to Trump’s decision. The idea of striking Fordow has uniquely divided Trump’s base. Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon are particularly opposed. Carlson and Republican senator Ted Cruz, who supports action against Iran, especially Fordow, had an unholy screaming match. They looked two deeply uncivil men. Trump posted on his Truth Social: “Somebody please explain to kooky Tucker Carlson that IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!”
Bannon claimed it was disillusionment over the Iraq war under Bush, and then the 2008 financial crisis, that led to the populism that drove Trump to the White House. Bannon, like Carlson though a bit more historically literate, seems seldom to meet a conspiracy theory he doesn’t smile at.
He’s over-intellectualising the ideology of populism. It’s certainly true, though, that Trump campaigned against the idea of the US spending blood and treasure to provide for other countries’ security. At the end of the week Bannon had lunch with Trump. Make of that what you will. But Trump has been remarkably consistent on Iran. It’s like tariffs, one of very few issues he has had a serious fixed view on for many years. He has always been determined Iran mustn’t be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons.
Trump almost never defies his base, which may be why he is hesitating over Iran. Yaari thinks it likely Trump is concerned that Iran could retaliate against Saudi oil infrastructure. Trump is infinitely more influential with his base than Carlson, Bannon, Gabbard or any of the hangers-on. If US military action is swift and successful, Trump will have no trouble keeping his base. The Americans need only do the Fordow operation. The Israelis have done, or can do, everything else. Even with the bunker buster, the Fordow operation is not a piece of cake, not assured of success. The B-2s would probably need to make several runs over Fordow and drop a series of bunker busters, one after another, on the same spot.
Neither Trump nor anyone in his orbit is suggesting a sustained US military campaign. No one envisages deploying US ground troops under any circumstances. If the raids on Fordow go well, they could be completed in one night. Far from creating an endless war, this would be the most effective action in shortening the war, which probably has another 10 to 14 days to run. For if the US doesn’t do Fordow, then Israel, with far less effective weapons, will do it anyhow. Indeed, Israel probably cannot wait two weeks. Netanyahu has now said Israel will attack all Iran’s nuclear facilities.
It might do this with many repetitions of the big bombs it has itself. Though much smaller than bunker busters, if repeatedly dropped on Fordow they could destabilise the mountain. Israel could attack the electricity, water and air supply to the nuclear facility. Riskiest of all, it could insert commandos to bomb the facility from close range.
One of Trump’s most influential supporters, strategist and historian Victor Davis Hanson, thinks Trump’s decision on Fordow immensely important to the entire world. He says: “Never have we been closer to complete normalcy in the Middle East, and never have we been closer to seeing the entire region blow up.
“If the war ends with the (Iran) regime intact and a recoverable nuclear program, it won’t be back to square one, it’ll be a disaster.”
If Trump takes out Fordow, the Iranian regime will be discredited with its people, with its proxies, regionally and internationally.
If it survives with a nuclear program it can put back together quickly, it may instead look indestructible, having defied Israel and Washington.
As always in the Middle East, there is of course a doomsday scenario. Iran survives, reconstructs its nuclear program, leaves the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, receives technical assistance from China or North Korea, keeps its new weapons program underground and entirely secret and emerges, North Korea-like, with nuclear weapons in a few years.
That’s pretty unlikely, not least because the Israelis, with their brilliant intelligence penetrations, will hit Iran again if they have to, although that would depend on having a supportive president in the White House.
Liberal senator Dave Sharma, for several years Australia’s ambassador in Israel, answers without hesitation that Israel was justified in taking action against Iran. He sees substantial upside.
These days no nation other than Iran wants to destroy Israel. If Iran is weakened and can apply less pressure throughout the region, that benefits Middle East stability. The US and others have long opposed Iran’s nuclear program, missile program, material support and sponsorship of terrorism and imperialist interference in other nations. A weakened Iran that can do less of all that has to be good news. Sharma judges, surely accurately, that the Iranian regime probably carries on in much the same form as today but less able to ignore its public’s dissatisfaction, therefore needing to make big adjustments.
Yaari thinks the one possibly consequential institutional fissure in Iran is the alienation of the regular army from the IRCG. Neither Washington nor Jerusalem has designed a military campaign to force regime change.
Provided Fordow is destroyed, Sharma believes Israel will set back Iran’s nuclear program by five to 10 years. Israeli sources suggest seven to 10 years, with the caveat that Iran would find it hard to reconstruct elements of its program unless it receives assistance from China or North Korea.
No recent president except Trump would have allowed Israel to take this action. Notwithstanding Trump’s dislike of foreign military entanglements, probably no other president would undertake the Fordow operation.
Being against foreign entanglements is different from holding dogmatically that there are no circumstances, ever, under which Washington should intervene militarily. Trump and Netanyahu are shaping history. Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is enduring history. The next two weeks are critical, for Trump, for Israel, for the world.
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