Jun 26th 2025
DONALD TRUMP gambled. But has he won? He has bombed Iran’s nuclear programme and immediately imposed a ceasefire on Israel and the Islamic Republic, and without a single American casualty. That is vindication over those who, like this newspaper, feared that Iran would lash out.
But the risks were only half the calculus: the other factor was whether America would be able to use a strike to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon. The best way to accomplish that would now be for Mr Trump to reach a full nuclear agreement with the regime. He can bolster it by pressing the Middle East to solve its problems through trade and investment, rather than preparing for wars. Those are daunting tasks, but if Mr Trump even partially accomplished them, he would have secured a prize that has eluded his predecessors.
His efforts should begin with an assessment of how much his 14 bunker-busting bombs and 30 or so cruise missiles damaged three facilities in Iran. Characteristically, Mr Trump claimed to have “obliterated” the Iranian programme. Within days he was contradicted by a leaked assessment from the Defence Intelligence Agency that warned that Iran had been set back by only a few months. But it was preliminary and “low-confidence”. It, in turn, has been contradicted.
The furious row now unfolding must not obscure the central truth. Bombing alone was unlikely to verifiably destroy all Iran’s facilities and was never going to eliminate Iran’s nuclear know-how. Its purpose was to set back the programme or, better, persuade Iran that a nuclear weapon was not worth pursuing at all. Regardless of how much damage has been done, Mr Trump now needs to accept that this insight must be formalised in a nuclear agreement.
The president has more than American bombers to help him. His raid was the culmination of a stunning 20-month Israeli campaign that has broken Iran’s two-decade strategy to extend its malign influence over the Middle East. Its nuclear programme cost tens of billions of dollars but, far from deterring a foreign attack, it provoked one. Iran spent tens of billions more on a network of militias and clients across the Middle East. One purpose was also to deter Israel from attacking Iran, but after being struck by Hamas on October 7th 2023 Israel took Iran’s proxy network apart.
Having been humiliated, Iran’s regime is at a fork in the road. It could chase a bomb, but if this was discovered the country would be isolated and face another round of attacks. It could also infuriate ordinary Iranians, who have endured hardship and repression even as their taxes have been frittered away by a regime that proved unable to defend them. The alternative is for the military officers who have increasingly elbowed aside the mullahs to conclude that waging a revolutionary struggle against Israel and America is a fight the republic cannot win—and that their own prosperity and survival would be better served by peaceful engagement.
Mr Trump can influence the regime’s choices by offering a nuclear deal in everyone’s interests. America should demand that Iran give up its stocks of highly enriched uranium and submit to intrusive international inspections. Iran should be able to enrich uranium to reactor grade, but under tough terms that require it to be part of a consortium of countries working offshore. In exchange, the negotiations should be about lifting European and American sanctions, as well as threats.
Do not imagine this will be easy. The urgent question is what became of Iran’s 400kg of highly enriched uranium, which was targeted in the American strikes. Nobody trusts Iran to tell the truth, but it will be very hard for the regime to prove what it doesn’t have, or for international inspectors to account for every kilogram after such extensive bombing. For its part, Iran trusts nobody, including the inspectors. The negotiations risk getting bogged down in recriminations.
That is why Mr Trump should also change Iran’s incentives to go nuclear by trying to set a new direction for the Middle East. Israel is now the region’s dominant military power. After October 7th, many Israelis have concluded that survival in a dangerous neighbourhood demands the relentless application of violence. Its armed forces strike targets in Lebanon and Syria at the first sign of an emerging threat. Far-right factions in its government want to use this dominance to annex Palestinian territory in Gaza and the West Bank.
After its victory over Iran, Israel should turn the page instead, as it did with Egypt after the war in 1973 and as it began to in 2020, when it normalised ties with several Arab states in the Abraham accords. The aim should now be a similar deal with Saudi Arabia. But that will require a ceasefire in Gaza, Israeli acknowledgment of the principle of two states and a move away from a permanent state of war.
To bring about a nuclear deal and normalisation will be very hard—especially for a president with a short attention span and a tendency to improvise. And yet Mr Trump has strengths. He dominates the Republican Party, so Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, will struggle to outflank him in Congress. Having helped Israel, Mr Trump has earned the authority to bang heads together—as he did on the White House lawn on June 24th when he furiously demanded that Israel observe his ceasefire.
Putting the F into diplomacy
If Mr Trump loses interest, as is all too possible, the alternative will be bleak. If Iran’s nuclear programme looms once more, Israel will bomb Iran again. But a second or third campaign would be technically and diplomatically harder than the first. Iran would have learned lessons and the world would lose patience at the repeated use of war as a temporary fix. America, obliged to support Israel even if it did not fight alongside it, would find that the Middle East sucked in military resources and political focus that it wanted to direct towards Asia. Eventually, bombing could come to seem futile, driving a wedge between America and Israel. Mr Trump has gambled. If he is to win, much hard work lies ahead. ■
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