Bombing Iran was Trump’s only reasonable choice | Opinion
Short and sweet. That’s the best way to describe President Trump’s several-minute-long update on U.S. military action in Iran. Short and sweet is also what Trump hopes U.S. military involvement will be in Iran. In fact, Trump says if Iran doesn’t retaliate, the U.S. involvement is already over.
That is far from clear. While Trump said that the strikes were successful, one of the targets was a large cave and tunnel complex called Fordow that is buried under a mountain.
Determining what happened several hundred meters under ground takes more time than the hours that have passed since U.S. B-2 bombers struck the mullahs’ regime with precision bunker-buster bombs never before used in combat. Trump said tonight that the targets were “totally obliterated.” That will only become clear in the coming days.
Beyond the fog of war which prevents us from knowing clearly how successful our attacks were, Iran gets a vote in determining whether the United States is pulled in deeper. There are more than 40,000 U.S. troops within range of the Iranian missiles that have already done so much damage targeting Israel. More than half of those troops are within targeting distance of the short- and medium-range missiles fielded by Iran that have yet to be used in the Iran-Israel conflict of which the U.S. just became a part.
U.S. allies Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia could be targeted beyond the U.S. military presence there – including such a large percentage of the world’s oil and gas production that the world economy could face a significant blow from wider Iranian retaliation. Iran could seek to close the straights of Hormuz choking off commerce for all those nations as well as Iraq.
CNN has reported that the Iranian proxy army in Lebanon has been ordered to unleash its significant rocket forces on Israel. We don’t yet know what Hamas in Gaza and the Houthis in Yemen will do as well.
As Trump mentioned Saturday night, Iran is the world’s number one backer of terrorism. U.S. intelligence has warned for decades of evidence that there are Iranian “sleeper cells” throughout Europe and the Middle East that could launch terror attacks on civilians in countries so far totally uninvolved in the violence. There is some evidence to suggest that Iran might have such capabilities in the U.S. as well.
Trump’s matter-of-fact presentation and promises of more information to come at a Pentagon press conference Sunday morning mask a haze of uncertainty that will not clear for days or weeks.
What is clear is that Trump has decided an Iranian nuclear weapon threatened a new Jewish holocaust if unleashed against Israel, a nation Iranian leaders have promised to destroy for decades. Such a motive for U.S. involvement reflects a bipartisan consensus that predates Trump and has survived his wholesale disruption of American politics as usual. Oddly, bombing Iran is one of the most normal things Trump has done in the five months since he has taken office.
That the United States and Iran would come to blows over nukes was always inevitable. Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran was always a house of cards on a foundation of sand facing a typhoon. No clear-eyed American president could allow the world’s premier purveyor of terror to wield the planet’s most powerful weapon.
But as the George W. Bush administration’s misadventure in Iraq, the failed reset of relations with Russia under Bush and Obama, and Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from the “forever war” in Afghanistan all show, normal foreign policy and military engagement even when launched with the most noble of goals frequently don’t go according to plan.
Trump is just the latest president to order the “magnificent machines” of the U.S. military into action with the hope that things will go as planned despite decades of experience since World War II that they do not. This may go badly, but America’s most abnormal president made the only choice he could.
This story was originally published June 21, 2025 at 10:15 PM.
