The Trump administration has justified its catastrophic war in Iran by insisting that the Islamic Republic was close to securing a nuclear weapon and that a military intervention was necessary to prevent it from ever obtaining one. The initial narrative was untrue: There was no known evidence, according to the U.S. intelligence community, that Iran was building one or that it had reauthorized its suspended nuclear weapons program. And now a new report indicates that the war has failed to deal any damage to Iran’s currently existing nuclear program.
Reuters, citing three sources familiar with the matter, reported that “U.S. intelligence assessments indicate that the time Iran would need to build a nuclear weapon has not changed since last summer, when analysts estimated that a U.S.-Israeli attack had pushed back the timeline to up to a year.” The Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not respond to a request for comment from Reuters.
The sheer pointlessness of the destruction wrought by the war only deepens the tragedy.
That means that despite weeks of aggressive bombing, which has killed at least an estimated 1,700 Iranian civilians, according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency, Iran’s nuclear program is still humming along — and no further away from being able to weaponize its nuclear program than it was before Trump launched his war of aggression.
Eric Brewer, a former senior U.S. intelligence analyst and vice president at the Nuclear Threat Initiative arms control think tank, told Reuters that “Iran still possesses all of its nuclear material, as far as we know” and that that material is “probably located in deeply buried underground sites where U.S. munitions can’t penetrate.”
This makes it all the clearer that in order to make a dent, Trump would likely need to storm Iran’s underground nuclear facilities to seize and destroy its highly enriched uranium. Such a mission would require the deployment of ground troops, could take weeks and would, in the words of Mick Mulroy, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, constitute one of the “most complicated special operations in history.” Given Trump’s stunning ineptitude at every stage of this ill-conceived war, the prospect of the U.S. trying to conduct such a high-risk endeavor — which could easily escalate into an extended ground operation — is downright chilling.
The other way Trump can attempt to control Iran’s nuclear program is through negotiations. But given his limited leverage over Tehran, he’s currently considering the kinds of trade-offs and provisions he slammed for years in Barack Obama’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Ironically, as my colleague Hayes Brown points out, it’s unlikely Trump is able to secure anything as strong as Obama’s agreement because of the political dynamics he has set in motion with the war.
The sheer pointlessness of the destruction wrought by the war only deepens the tragedy. The U.S.-Israeli strikes appear to have caused so many deaths, so much chaos across the region and so much global upheaval — culminating in a bona fide global economic crisis that has no end in sight. On Tuesday, Trump announced that he was pausing “Project Freedom,” a U.S.-led maritime operation aimed at safely escorting commercial ships through the Strait of Hormuz. And the warmakers have achieved precisely zero of the goals that were the supposed justifications for war.
One of those goals expressed by Trump and his administration, often abandoned without explanation, was Iranian regime change. On that front, Trump has done worse than fail. He has helped pave the way for a new generation of leaders who are more hard line than the ones he killed off — and are probably more likely to pursue a nuclear weapon at some point in the future. Ironically, a nuclear-armed Iran some day could wind up being the most significant legacy of Trump and Israel’s war.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He primarily writes about politics and foreign policy.