Let’s be clear: Even if President Donald Trump does not succeed in forcing Iran to capitulate at the negotiating table, the world is safer today because of his decision to strike the regime. The question is whether the massive military setbacks Iran has suffered will be temporary or permanent.
Today, thanks to 38 days of relentless bombing, the Iranian regime is a shell of its former self — its leadership, command and control, military stockpiles, defense production capacity and ability to project military power have all been devastated. Adm. Brad Cooper, head of U.S. Central Command, told Congress this month that the more than 13,500 U.S. airstrikes demolished more than 85 percent of Iran’s military industrial base, taking out the factories and degrading the technical workforce that produced the regime’s missiles, drones and ships. They destroyed or buried Iran’s stockpile of ballistic missiles, launch vehicles and long-range attack drones; knocked out 82 percent of its air defense missile systems, radar and command architecture; destroyed or rendered inoperable most of its airfields, hangars, fuel storage and munitions stockpiles; sank 161 naval vessels; and smashed more than 90 percent of its inventory of naval mines.
According to an assessment by an Israeli research group, the Israel Defense Forces struck over 8,500 additional targets, including at least 1,500 Iranian missiles that were in the production process, as well as over 700 missiles in storage facilities. In addition, Israel destroyed the Iranian Space Research Center, which served as a central platform for the development of advanced propulsion technologies for ICBMs intended to reach Europe and the United States. As the failed attempt to strike U.S. forces at Diego Garcia — some 2,000 miles away — showed, Iran was much further along in these efforts than previously reported.
Iran was racing to build an arsenal of 8,000 ballistic missiles by 2027 — enough to overwhelm U.S. and Israeli defenses, which would have made it far harder to strike the country again and stop its pursuit of nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. That effort has been decisively disrupted.
Instead, Cooper declared, the remnants of the Iranian regime now possess only a “nuisance capability” to carry out “harassment, low-end drone and rocket attacks.” Its supply chain to regional proxies has been “broken,” its “air and air defense forces are functionally and operationally irrelevant,” and Tehran is incapable of carrying out “major regional operations.”
Those military achievements, Cooper testified, have created an “opportunity for a generational shift in the regional balance of power.”
The question is: Will the U.S. seize that historic opportunity or squander it?
Right now, Trump is pursuing a negotiated end to the conflict. He has set a firm demand: Iran must irrevocably give up its pursuit of nuclear weapons. I am told that the U.S. is insisting that Iran hand over not just its 60 percent highly enriched uranium (what Trump calls the nuclear “dust”) but all of its enriched uranium and centrifuges. He will not give Iran any frozen assets, sanctions relief or respite from the blockade that is strangling its economy until it does so.
Trump is also smartly using the reluctance of America’s Gulf allies to resume combat operations as leverage to get them to normalize relations with Israel, going so far as to say that he might not make a deal with Iran if the Arab states don’t join the Abraham Accords. “I think they owe it to us,” he said. If he can get Iran to hand over its nuclear materials, and get more of the Arab world to join the Abraham Accords, that would be a significant achievement.
But even if Iran agrees to Trump’s terms, such a deal would come at a major cost. Iran’s regime would survive. The U.S. and Israeli air campaign killed dozens of Iranian leaders — including its supreme leader, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, chief of staff of the armed forces, minister of defense, minister of intelligence, secretary of the Defense Council, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, the heads of Iran’s paramilitary Basij force, Basij intelligence and Iranian police intelligence (the instruments of internal repression), and many other high officials. That has left the regime weakened and vulnerable.
A deal — even a good one — would let it off the mat, giving it a financial lifeline, and thus a pathway to ultimately reconstitute what Trump has destroyed. Because while Iran may comply with any agreement it makes while Trump is in office, it will begin cheating the second he is replaced by a weak American president. Everything Trump has achieved with Operation Epic Fury would be reversible. Moreover, the regime now knows that any time it doesn’t want to comply with its agreements, it can simply close the Strait of Hormuz. So, even if Iran gives up, for the moment, its path to a nuclear weapon, it will have acquired a new weapon — the strait — that it can use to take the global economy hostage.
Trump would be better off destroying Iran’s remaining military capabilities, opening the Strait of Hormuz by force, keeping the U.S. blockade in place to strangle the remnants of the regime economically, and then directing the CIA to launch a covert operation to arm and train the Iranian opposition so it can liberate its country. A free Iran will hand over its nuclear program and make permanent peace with America and Israel.
Perhaps Iran’s leaders will miscalculate. The regime senses that Trump does not want to resume military combat, which may make Tehran think it has more leverage than it does. That would be a mistake. Trump is not President Barack Obama. He is not desperate for a deal. I don’t believe he will agree to a bad one. The risk is that he will cut a deal that secures a temporary victory rather than a permanent one.
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