President Trump has told advisers that if diplomacy or any initial targeted U.S. attack does not lead Iran to give in to his demands that it give up its nuclear program, he will consider a much bigger attack in coming months intended to drive that country’s leaders from power, people briefed on internal administration deliberations said.
Negotiators from the United States and Iran are scheduled to meet in Geneva on Thursday for what appears to be last-ditch negotiations to avoid a military conflict. But Mr. Trump has been weighing options for U.S. action if the negotiations fail.
Though no final decisions have been made, advisers said, Mr. Trump has been leaning toward conducting an initial strike in coming days intended to demonstrate to Iran’s leaders that they must be willing to agree to give up the ability to make a nuclear weapon.
Should those steps fail to convince Tehran to meet his demands, Mr. Trump told advisers, he would leave open the possibility of a military assault later this year intended to help topple Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader.
There are doubts even inside the administration about whether that goal can be accomplished with airstrikes alone. And behind the scenes, a new proposal is being considered by both sides that could create an off-ramp to military conflict: a very limited nuclear enrichment program that Iran could carry out solely for purposes of medical research and treatments.
It is unclear whether either side would agree. But the last-minute proposal comes as two aircraft carrier groups and dozens of fighter jets, bombers and refueling aircraft are now massing within striking distance of Iran.
Mr. Trump discussed plans for strikes on Iran in the White House Situation Room on Wednesday. The meeting included Vice President JD Vance; Secretary of State Marco Rubio; Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe; and Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff.
This article is based on conversations with multiple American officials with knowledge of the meeting — including officials with different views of the best course of action. None of them would allow their names to be used, citing the sensitivity of the discussions involving military operations and intelligence assessments.
During the meeting, Mr. Trump pressed General Caine and Mr. Ratcliffe to weigh in on the broader strategy in Iran, but neither official generally advocates a certain policy position. General Caine discussed what the military could do from an operational standpoint, and Mr. Ratcliffe preferred to discuss the current situation on the ground and possible outcomes of proposed operations.
During the discussions of the operation last month to seize President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, General Caine told Mr. Trump there was a high likelihood of success. But General Caine has not been able to deliver the same reassurances to Mr. Trump during the Iran discussions, in large measure because it is a far more difficult target.
Mr. Vance, who has long called for more restraint in overseas military action, did not oppose a strike, but he intensely questioned General Caine and Mr. Ratcliffe in the meeting. He pressed them to share their opinions of the options and wanted more of a discussion of the risks and complexity of carrying out a strike against Iran.
Earlier, the United States had been considering options that included putting teams of special operations forces on the ground that could carry out raids to destroy Iranian nuclear or missile facilities. That included manufacturing and enrichment operations buried far below the surface, outside the range of American conventional munitions.
But any such raid would be highly dangerous, requiring special operations forces to be on the ground far longer than they were for the raid to capture Mr. Maduro. Multiple U.S. officials said that for now, the plans for a commando raid had been shelved.
The White House declined to comment on Mr. Trump’s decision making.
“The media may continue to speculate on the President’s thinking all they want, but only President Trump knows what he may or may not do,” Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement.
Even before the Iranians submit what appears likely to be their last proposal — officials said they expected it to be transmitted to the Trump administration on Monday or Tuesday — the two sides appeared to be hardening their positions. Steve Witkoff, the president’s special envoy, said on Fox News that Mr. Trump’s “clear direction” to him and Jared Kushner, his co-negotiator and the president’s son-in-law, was that the only acceptable outcome for an agreement was that Iran would move to “zero enrichment” of nuclear material.
But Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, insisted anew in an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday that the country was not ready to give up what he said was its “right” to make nuclear fuel under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. With that statement, the decision about whether the United States was about to attack targets in Iran — with the apparent goal of further weakening the government of Mr. Khamenei — seemed to come down to whether both sides could agree to a face-saving compromise about nuclear production that Washington and Tehran could each describe as a total victory.
One such proposal is being debated by both the Trump administration and the Iranian leadership. According to several officials, it emanated from Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, a United Nations organization that inspects Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Under the proposal, Iran would be permitted to produce very small amounts of nuclear fuel for medical purposes. Iran has been producing medical isotopes for years at the Tehran Research Reactor, a nearly 60-year-old facility outside the country’s capital that was, in one of the strange twists of modern nuclear history, first supplied to the pro-American shah of Iran by the United States under the “Atoms for Peace” program.
If adapted, Iran could claim that it was still enriching uranium. Mr. Trump could make the case that Iran is shuttering all the facilities that would enable it to build a weapon — most of which were left open, operating at low levels, under the 2015 agreement between Iran and the Obama administration. Mr. Trump exited that agreement in 2018, leading the Iranians to eventually bar inspectors and produce near-bomb-grade uranium and setting the stage for the current crisis.
But it is far from clear whether the Iranians are willing to shrink what is now a vast, industrial-production nuclear program, on which they have spent billions of dollars, to a tiny effort of such limited scope.
And it is also unclear whether Mr. Trump would allow nuclear production limited to cancer treatment studies and other medical purposes, given his public “zero enrichment” declarations.
Mr. Araghchi made no direct mention of the proposal when he spoke from Tehran. But he said, “I believe that still there is a good chance to have a diplomatic solution,” adding, “So there is no need for any military buildup, and military buildup cannot help it and cannot pressurize us.”
In fact, pressure is the key to these negotiations. What Mr. Trump calls the “vast armada” that the United States has built up in the seas around Iran is the largest military force it has concentrated in the region since it prepared for the invasion of Iraq, nearly 23 years ago.
Two aircraft carrier groups, scores of fighter jets, bombers and refueling planes, and antimissile batteries have poured into the region, a demonstration of gunboat diplomacy even larger than the one that preceded the forced extraction of Mr. Maduro from Venezuela in early January.
The second carrier, the Gerald R. Ford, was steaming south of Italy in the Mediterranean Sea on Sunday, and will soon be off the coast of Israel, military officials said.
Further complicating any final decision on military strikes, Arab leaders have been calling counterparts in Washington to complain about comments from Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel. In an interview with Tucker Carlson, the conservative commentator, that aired on Friday, Mr. Huckabee said Israel had a right to much of the Middle East, outraging Arab diplomats in countries that the United States is hoping will support, or at least not openly oppose, an American attack on Iran.
Administration officials have been unclear what their objectives are as they confront Iran, a country of more than 90 million people. While Mr. Trump often talks about preventing Iran from ever being able to produce a weapon, Mr. Rubio and other aides have described a range of other rationales for military action: protecting the protesters whom Iranian forces killed by the thousands last month, wiping out the arsenal of missiles that Iran can use to strike Israel, and ending Tehran’s support for Hamas and Hezbollah.
But American military action could also result in a nationalistic response, even among Iranians eager to see the end of Ayatollah Khamenei’s brutal hold on power.
European officials attending the Munich Security Conference last weekend said they doubted that the military pressure would force the Iranian leadership to give up a program that has become a symbol of resistance to the United States.
Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades.
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