President Donald Trump wants to declare “Mission Accomplished” after U.S. airstrikes on Iran were followed by a fragile ceasefire between Israel and Iran. But as the smoke clears, we have no clear evidence that Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip strategy achieved its goal of preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. And there’s even reason to think his abrupt decision to blow up talks over a new nuclear deal and then drop bombs on the country could backfire by convincing Iran it needs to secure nuclear deterrence more than ever.
Trump has repeatedly said that the U.S. has destroyed “all” of Iran’s nuclear facilities and capabilities, and trumpeted his ability to just as quickly make “peace” abroad, as he helped negotiate a delicate ceasefire between Israel and Iran. (Both countries accused each other of violating the ceasefire immediately after it was scheduled to go into effect; IDF Chief of General Staff Eyal Zamir said “the campaign against Iran is not over” but entering a “new phase.”) In an apparent bid to instantly commemorate the attacks on Iran, Trump proposed deeming the episode “THE 12 DAY WAR.”
What’s worse is that Iran now has more incentive than ever to pursue a nuclear weapon.
But what exactly did Trump accomplish? He claims to have “completely obliterated” Iran’s key nuclear capabilities, a claim echoed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. But as my colleague Steve Benen pointed out, some top players within the Trump administration have offered more cautious appraisals of the damage done:
Gen. Dan Caine, the Trump-appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said [on Sunday] it was “way too early” to offer a meaningful assessment of the damage done by U.S. strikes. Soon after, JD Vance appeared on NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” and when host Kristen Welker asked if the Iran nuclear sites had, in fact, been completely and totally obliterated, the vice president hedged, saying only that the U.S. offensive “substantially delayed [Iranians’] development of a nuclear weapon.”
Expert observers of nuclear programs have cast doubt on Trump’s claims as well. Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey who tracks Iran’s nuclear facilities, said, “Israel and the U.S. have failed to target significant elements of Iran’s nuclear materials and production infrastructure.” Among other things, he pointed out that it appears that locations in which Iran has stored highly enriched uranium have apparently gone unscathed and that other facilities where Iran can manufacture more centrifuges weren’t targeted.
Rafael Mariano Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told The New York Times that he believes the Iranians’ claims that they have moved a stockpile of 60% enriched fuel to protect it. (The Times said Grossi’s claim might explain why Vance has said, “We are going to work in the coming weeks to ensure that we do something with that fuel and that’s one of the things that we’re going to have conversations with the Iranians about.”) The Times, citing two Israeli officials familiar with the intelligence, also reports that the Israeli military’s initial analysis estimated that Iran had moved equipment and uranium to protect them from airstrikes, after Trump’s repeated threats to take military action.
David Albright, the president of the Institute for Science and International Security, which tracks Iran’s nuclear program, has said of Iran’s nuclear capability after the strikes, “I think you have to assume that significant amounts of this enriched uranium still exist, so this is not over by any means.”
NBC News, citing three people with knowledge of an initial assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency, reported Tuesday that the agency concluded that "the U.S. airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear enrichment sites over the weekend were not as effective as President Donald Trump said and that they set the country’s nuclear program back by only three to six months." CNN, which first reported on the intelligence assessment, noted that “the analysis of the damage to the sites and the impact of the strikes on Iran’s nuclear ambitions is ongoing and could change as more intelligence becomes available.” The White House acknowledged the existence of the assessment but denied the accuracy of its findings. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement, “This alleged assessment is flat-out wrong and was classified as ‘top secret’ but was still leaked to CNN by an anonymous, low-level loser in the intelligence community. The leaking of this alleged assessment is a clear attempt to demean President Trump.”
A number of experts, including Middlebury’s Lewis, also believe Iran likely retains the capability to pursue nuclear bombs if it wishes to. And some point out that even extremely effective airstrikes by the U.S. forces would not prevent Iran from rebuilding destroyed infrastructure: Darya Dolzikova, a senior research fellow at the London-based Royal United Services Institute think tank, said that “Iran retains extensive expertise that will allow it to eventually reconstitute what aspects of the programme have been damaged or destroyed.”
What’s worse is that Iran now has more incentive than ever to pursue a nuclear weapon. Consider the bigger picture: During his first term, Trump unilaterally withdrew from the nuclear deal with Iran brokered by President Barack Obama’s administration and reimposed aggressive sanctions on the country in one of the most senseless diplomatic blunders in living memory. Then President Joe Biden, who was vice president during the Obama administration, foolishly refused to re-enter the deal and instead insisted on more stringent conditions than under the original deal — even though it was the U.S. that had unilaterally torpedoed the deal in the first place.
Then, during negotiations with Iran in his second term, Trump abruptly shifted the goal posts on enrichment standards, supported Israel’s surprise attack on Iran and then carried out his own strikes. It makes sense that recent events would strengthen the voice of factions in Iran who believe that negotiating with the U.S. is a fool's errand and that a nuclear deterrent is the only way to achieve Iranian security. “Politically, there’s greater impetus now to weaponize,” Kelsey Davenport, the director for nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association, told NBC News.
Lewis said the U.S. and Israeli air strikes on Iran “have not slowed the Iranian program nearly as much as” Obama’s long-defunct Iran deal did. In other words, Trump has exerted tremendous resources, backed attacks on Iran that have killed hundreds of civilians, and risked a sustained international war only to end up in a position that may have increased Iran’s appetite for nuclear weapons without destroying its capabilities. That doesn’t sound like a mission accomplished. It sounds like a mission that has been set back.