For five months, U.S. President Donald Trump seemed clearly to want a negotiated settlement to Iran’s nuclear program. Since the start of his second term in January, he sent U.S. negotiators to meet with their Iranian counterparts in either Oman or Italy five times toward this end. Yes, he had given Iran a 60-day deadline in April. But journalists and analysts mostly ignored it, placing it in the category of Trump bombast much like his tariff timelines, which seemed to change daily. The conventional wisdom was and remained that Trump wanted a deal.
The U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan undermined this conventional wisdom—and likely closed off the possibility of negotiations. So what changed? And why now?
There are a number of possible explanations, of course. The most straightforward is one a senior Trump administration official relayed to me at a rubber-chicken dinner during the president’s first term: Trump means what he says and says what he means. Thus, when the 60 days were up, Iran’s nuclear program was in the crosshairs. That seems self-serving, and geopolitics is often more contingent and complicated than the tough guy image the president and his supporters like to portray. Despite Trump’s self-image of resolute decision-making, he often changes his mind—thus, the expression “TACO” recently coined about him: Trump always chickens out.
It seems more reasonable to infer that Trump jumped into the Iran conflict after Israel’s significant military successes, effective Israeli persuasion coming on top of that success, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s misreading of U.S. intentions. In Tehran, they also believed TACO.
One need not be a nuts-and-bolts military analyst to understand just how impressive Israel’s campaign against Iran has been. The Israelis have employed a combination of derring-do, spectacular intelligence, and technological wizardry—complemented with a display of the extraordinary skills of their pilots. Whatever reservations Trump may have had about Israel’s Operation Rising Lion dissipated once it became clear that the Israelis had established control over Iran’s skies and killed important members of the country’s military and scientific leadership. The morning after Israel’s strikes began, the president began taking ownership of the operation, suggesting that he was in on it the whole time, culminating in posts on social media in which he declared “we” control Iran’s skies. Trump likes winners, and, well, the Israelis were kicking ass. So he jumped onboard.
At the same time that the Israelis were demonstrating their martial skills, Israel’s long-term diplomatic effort to convince a U.S. president that it was in the country’s interest to attack Iran’s nuclear program was having an effect. It is important to be careful here. A fair number of people—including those who should know better but apparently do not—have declared that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is dragging the United States into war. These kinds of statements strike fear in the hearts of many American Jews regardless of their views on Israel and the current conflict. That is because they conjure the old antisemitic trope of the Jewish puppet master, a common feature in the disturbing oeuvre of Jewish hate throughout the centuries. Suggesting otherwise is just gaslighting.
Netanyahu and his advisors have done what any other country under threat would do. They sought help from a far larger and powerful patron. Israel takes a lot of criticism, and in the pile-on, journalists, analysts, and elected leaders tend to forget a principle foreign-policy goal of Iran, one on which its leaders have spent billions of dollars to achieve: the destruction of Israel. Lost in the accusation about Netanyahu manipulating Trump is the fact that Iran has a well-developed nuclear program and has stockpiled nuclear material well beyond what a civilian program requires. Tehran has also funded and equipped Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and Iraqi militias, all of which are instruments in Iran’s effort to bring about Israel’s demise. Before October 2023, the Israelis believed they could deter Iran and its proxies, but Hamas’s rampage through southern Israel changed all that. Israel now believes Iran and its friends when they say they want to destroy it.
Given the potential for Iran to do just that should it weaponize its program, which Israel’s intelligence services believed it had begun to do, it seems not manipulative but rather entirely rational for Netanyahu to seek Washington’s help. Any Israeli prime minister would have done the same. Not to let Netanyahu off the hook: For years, he has been telling U.S. leaders that the Iranians were close to weaponization. He began to look like the prime minister who cried wolf. But Iran’s progress appeared to have become urgent enough in recent weeks that he ordered up the airstrikes and made his case to Trump that they were in both the U.S. and Israeli interest. The president of the United States has agency. Like his predecessors, he could have demurred, but he decided otherwise.
It is tempting to say this was Khamenei’s FAFO moment. He defied Trump by refusing to end uranium enrichment. He should have known there would be consequences. But Khamenei and his advisors—like many observers—did not believe Trump would strike. And because of the groupthink that extended from Washington to Tehran, Khamenei was impervious to compromise. Even after a week of Israeli pummeling, Tehran’s basic demands remained what they were before Israel’s operation.
The Iranians must have calculated that Trump would still want negotiations and in time bring the Israelis to heel. They would then proceed to do what they had been doing through previous rounds of negotiations: wear down the U.S. side and come out with an agreement that would allow Iran to enrich uranium all the while it would continue to take steps to weaponize its program. At that point, the dynamics of the agreement would take hold, and the people in Washington who signed it would defend it at all costs. Trump came to a different conclusion, calculating that a U.S. attack would either destroy the Iranian program or give him more leverage in negotiations to come.
To be sure, Trump may have miscalculated. Early reporting suggests that the damage to Iran’s program is less than what the president relayed to the American people on Saturday night. Unless those reports are wrong, Washington may have to confront an Iran that races for a nuclear weapon. That likely means the United States will have to be in the Middle East in significant numbers for a long time, deterring and containing the Iranians. Deterrence and containment are not necessarily a bad outcome, but that is where Trump should have started.
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