Last night, President Donald Trump announced a “total and complete” cease-fire between Israel and Iran. Iran’s nuclear program, Trump said, had been “obliterated” and “totally destroyed” by the U.S. strikes, and Iran’s retaliation was “very weak” and resulted in “hardly any damage.”
If the cease-fire holds, this episode would appear to mark a major foreign-policy victory for the president. But Trump may have made a crucial mistake that could bring about the very outcome that successive American presidents have sought to prevent: an Iranian nuclear weapon.
The problem is that the cease-fire is not linked to a diplomatic agreement with Iran on the future of its nuclear program. Trump apparently sees no need for further negotiation, because the military strikes were, to him, an unqualified success. But as the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said on Sunday morning, assessing the damage to the sites will take some time. A preliminary assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency found that the strikes had failed to destroy some core components of the nuclear program, CNN reported today.
If parts of the program survived, or if Iran stockpiled and hid enriched uranium in advance of the strikes, then Tehran’s next steps seem clear. It will end cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency and withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Without eyes and ears on the ground, the international community will lose the ability to monitor Iran’s program. Iran could then choose to build a bomb covertly.
There is a worrisome parallel here to North Korea, which ended cooperation with the IAEA, pulled out of the NPT, and slowly resumed production of highly enriched uranium. A few years later, Pyongyang tested a nuclear device, much to everyone’s surprise.
The Iranian regime may conclude that withdrawing from the NPT is its most effective form of retaliation. At the start of the Trump administration, the Islamic Republic was in its weakest position since coming to power in 1979, because of its own catastrophic choices. On October 8, 2023—the day after Hamas attacked Israel—Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy force in Lebanon, joined the war against Israel at a low level. Within a year, Israel had decimated the Lebanese militia. Since then, Israel has significantly weakened Hamas, and another Iranian ally, Syria’s leader, Bashar al-Assad, was toppled by local militias. Iran launched two massive air attacks on Israel in 2024—in April and October—with the clear intent of killing hundreds, if not thousands, of Israelis. The United States led a regional coalition to shoot down practically all of Iran’s missiles, and Israeli counterstrikes destroyed much of Iran’s air defenses.
Tehran has been left with no good options for retaliating against the Israeli and American strikes that just took place. If it seeks to kill large numbers of Americans, either in assaults on U.S. bases or by carrying out a terrorist attack in the United States, it will risk enraging Trump and drawing the U.S. into a prolonged conflict that could threaten the regime. Iran could try to close the Strait of Hormuz, but sustaining that would be difficult given Tehran’s shortage of missile launchers and vessels, and the likelihood of a significant international response. And if it expands the war to Saudi Arabia, Iran will just be bringing more enemies into the fray.
Hunkering down, buying time, and perhaps building a nuclear weapon is a much more viable option by comparison.
So long as Iran is a member of the NPT, it has a commitment to allow the IAEA access to its nuclear sites for inspections and a framework under which to accept strict limits on its uranium-enrichment program. If it withdraws, none of that will be enforceable. A robust diplomatic deal was preferable to a military strike because it would have provided a verifiable way of permanently preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon rather than a temporary reprieve.
Iran’s weak position before the air assault gave the United States enormous diplomatic leverage, and Trump had been pursuing such a deal. Exactly why that fell apart isn’t known. Perhaps Israel acted militarily because it feared that a U.S.-Iran deal wouldn’t fully dismantle Iran’s nuclear program, or perhaps new intelligence about Iran’s program came to light.
Regardless of the reason, once Israel acted, Trump was in a tough position. If he didn’t follow suit, Iran’s deeply buried Fordo facility could survive largely intact, and Iran might make a dash for the bomb. If he did act, the United States could get dragged into a protracted war without a clearly defined end goal.
Trump sought to address these dangers by ordering precise strikes on Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan and then almost immediately leaning on Israel to accept a cease-fire so that the United States would not get drawn into a forever war. But the primary risk of the military option remains: If it was not completely successful, Iran could withdraw from the NPT and make the decision to build nuclear weapons.
Trump could have managed that risk by telling the public that although the strikes appeared to have been successful, fully ascertaining their results would take time. He could then have insisted on a week-long cease-fire for the purpose of concluding a diplomatic agreement with Iran—one that would have insisted on limits to Iran’s nuclear program and continued access for the IAEA, whose inspectors remain in Iran but have not been admitted into nuclear sites. Given the likely damage done to the program, he could have afforded to stop short of demanding full dismantlement and settled instead for strict limits on enrichment, as well as round-the-clock inspections with no expiration date.
But Trump took a very different path by declaring the problem fully solved and not using the moment of leverage to extract commitments from Tehran.
Tensions between Washington and Jerusalem seem all but inevitable in the aftermath of this choice. Trump has made abundantly clear that he expects only one answer from the U.S. intelligence agencies now poring over the evidence to assess the extent of damage to Iran’s nuclear program. Congressional intelligence committees may need to step up to get at the truth. Israel, meanwhile, has a pressing interest in finding out whether or not the strikes succeeded. If they didn’t, and Iran is able to rebuild its program within a year or two, the Israeli government will presumably want to deal with that and not pretend that the strikes ended the threat for good.
Trump does have one means at his disposal for tacking back to diplomacy without fully reversing his position. The Obama-era nuclear deal had a provision, called “snapback,” that allowed its signatories to reimpose United Nations Security Council sanctions on Iran without a Russian or Chinese veto should Tehran be found acting in violation of the agreement’s constraints. The United States withdrew from that agreement in 2018, so it can’t activate snapback—but France, Germany, and Britain are still signatories, and they have until October to make use of the clause.
The United States could continue to insist that Iran’s nuclear program was completely destroyed and is no longer operable. This would make snapback more difficult to activate. But if Trump still wants a diplomatic deal, he can work with the Europeans to present Iran with a clear choice: If it agrees to inspections and strict limits on its program, it can have sanctions relief. If it doesn’t, snapback will take effect. This may not be enough to persuade Iran to stay in the NPT. But without it or something like it, Trump may find himself confronted with a new Iranian nuclear crisis later in his term.
The post The Problem With Trump’s Cease-Fire appeared first on The Atlantic.
