US President Donald Trump’s decision on whether or not to join Israel’s attack on Iran is beset with unhelpful and contradictory sets of facts.
His own intelligence community has assessed Iran could be up to three years away from making a viable nuclear weapon. Israel has claimed, without providing evidence, that Tehran was engaged in a rush to a bomb with a much shorter timeframe. Both cannot be right.
Israel has shown in the past five days it has a precise grasp of the Iranian security establishment’s whereabouts and infrastructure — which it has exploited to lethal and brutal effect. But the United States’ intelligence-gathering machine is unparalleled.
And so Trump’s decision will be swayed by conflicting information and rationale. Why strike a country that your own spies have evaluated — even before this conflict — as far from a nuclear bomb, and likely is further away now? Why get dragged into a conflict with the singular aim of stopping something your intelligence community has assessed isn’t about to happen?
Joining the Israeli effort presents its own challenges, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asserts Iran is secretly racing toward a viable device. If that is the case, then Iran is engaged in a clandestine effort that most likely will not be upended by one singular definitive strike on the widely publicized “mountain lair” fortress enrichment plant of Fordow. It will involve multiple strikes on multiple, hidden targets.
The possible US use of a bunker-buster GBU-57 bomb on the Fordow nuclear site is also not guaranteed to penetrate the structure. Tests have suggested it might, according to a 2019 New York Times report, but Trump might be reluctant to get into another conflict on a “maybe.”
A nightmare scenario for the US president would involve joining an Israeli effort, destroying Fordow, and then discovering Iran’s nuclear program somehow survives. Iran’s leadership could then take the headlong plunge at a nuclear weapon to maintain its survival.
Israeli intelligence has proven remarkably accurate in the past 18 months, but as recently as October 2023 failed to spot Hamas’ unprecedented attack. Nothing is perfect. And that should haunt Trump’s current thought process.
