It appears increasingly likely that in the coming days, the United States will once again launch airstrikes against Iran.
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that a “massive Armada is heading to Iran,” referring to the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and several other naval ships that have recently taken positions in the region, along with rapid build-ups in aircraft and air defense systems. Should he order an attack, Trump warned the damage would be “far worse” than “Operation Midnight Hammer,” the bombing operation targeting Iran’s nuclear sites carried out by the US last June.
It’s a shockingly quick pivot from just weeks earlier, when Trump appeared to back down from his “locked and loaded” threat to intervene over the state’s brutal crackdown on protesters. Despite reports of horrific casualties, the president indicated that he was satisfied that the killing of protesters had stopped and that Iran had halted hundreds of planned executions. It’s too late for an intervention to rescue the protesters — the movement has been effectively crushed for now, with estimates of the number killed ranging from 3,000 to 6,000, or potentially much higher.
But the stated motives for the new military standoff are different this time. Trump is publicly calling for Iran to negotiate a deal for “no nuclear weapons,” escalating a longstanding demand at a time when the regime looks especially weak. The New York Times has reported that US officials have given the Iranians three demands: a permanent end to all uranium enrichment and the destruction of its current stockpiles, limits on its ballistic missile program, and an end to support for proxy groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis.
This is not unlike the build-up in Venezuela before the raid that captured Nicolás Maduro, during which the administration seemed to alternate between primary motivations — “narcoterrorism,” recovering US oil assets — before taking action.
“This seems to be a military intervention in search of an objective,” said Ali Vaez, Iran director at the International Crisis Group.
To the extent the protesters fit into the equation now, it may be an additional source of tactical advantage. According to Reuters, Trump is also weighing targets for strikes that could help foment regime change by giving Iran’s protesters “the confidence that they could overrun government and security buildings,” betting that a show of force might renew the now-suppressed opposition.
Trump was reportedly urged earlier this month to refrain from attacks by US allies in the Gulf and Israel, but the Venezuela experience may have convinced the president that there are few limits to his ability to use military force overseas.
With his latest Iran escalation, however, he may be pushing his luck. The administration appears to be faced with an Iranian regime unlikely to agree to its demands, but with few military options that don’t involve risk of significant regional blowback or a destabilizing collapse.
What is actually going on with Iran’s nukes?
The conflict over Iran’s nuclear program isn’t resolved, but there’s no sign they’ve moved significantly closer to acquiring nuclear weapons since the last US bombing campaign.
Trump confidently asserted that the 12-day war in June had left Iran’s nuclear program “obliterated.” That claim was almost certainly exaggerated: Even the administration’s recently released National Security Strategy described it more cautiously as “significantly degraded. And while assessments differ as to the extent of the damage and the time it would take to rebuild, the general consensus on Iran’s nuclear program is that the US/Israel operation last June, which targeted key nuclear facilities along with important scientists and officials, seriously set back Iran’s nuclear program but did not eliminate it entirely.
Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN nuclear watchdog, say they’ve been denied access to the three nuclear facilities that were bombed in June: Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan. Most critically, the IAEA says it cannot account for the location and condition of Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium. Estimates suggest Iran may have 440.9 kg of uranium enriched to 60 percent purity, just a short technical step from the 90 percent purity needed to build a weapon. In theory, this could be enough for around 10 nuclear bombs, though Iran is not believed to currently be building those bombs, and given the extent of the Israeli intelligence penetration of Iran’s power structure revealed in the lead-up to the war, it would likely be very cautious about doing so.
If an Iranian nuke is still a theoretical threat, its ballistic missile problem is a current and growing one to the US allies in the region who would bear the brunt of Iran’s retaliation.
If Iran appears to have made little progress on reconstituting its nuclear program, the same cannot be said for its missiles. Nicole Grajewski, an expert on Iranian missile warfare at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote recently that the regime has embarked on “what can only be described as a concerted campaign to reconstitute and dramatically expand its ballistic missile capabilities” since the US and Israeli strikes in June.
This has included active reconstruction and reinforcement efforts at missile sites damaged during the war —confirmed by satellite imagery — and new production sites coming online. In December, a US special operations team intercepted a ship carrying Chinese missile components to Iran, and there was speculation that month that Israel was considering a new strike on Iran’s missile capabilities.
As for the “axis of resistance,” Iran’s network of armed proxy groups throughout the Middle East that Trump is also demanding be cut loose, it was badly degraded by Israeli attacks following the October 7 attacks, particularly Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia/political movement that was once the most prominent member of the network.
But it’s not eliminated entirely either. The Houthis, the Yemeni group that emerged as the most surprisingly dangerous Iran-aligned group during the post-October 7 war, has warned that it will resume its attacks on shipping through the Red Sea in the event of new strikes in Iran, and the Iran-backed Iraqi Shiite militant Kataib Hezbollah has vowed to launch “total war.”
How dangerous could an Iranian counterattack be?
In June, Iranian retaliation against the United States was limited and seemingly performative: it launched missiles against Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, but only after giving the Qataris advanced notice, allowing them to intercept all of the missiles.
During that conflict, Iran’s leaders appeared to be looking for a way to maintain credibility without escalating the war further. This time around, the dynamics are likely to be different. Amid its recent military setbacks, economic turmoil, and mass protests, the regime appears more vulnerable than it has been in decades.
“They may be reading this as an existential fight,” Grajewski told Vox. “They may be more escalatory and not as rational as they were during the 12-day war.”
Iranian officials have reportedly reached out to counterparts in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey, warning that US bases in those countries could be targets and these governments have very publicly stated they will not take part in any strikes.
After the operations in Iran in June and in Venezuela this month, Trump is clearly gaining confidence in his use of military force. Both operations delivered quick results with minimal US casualties and without leading to the quagmires that critics warned of.
But Trump is also confronting the reality that even a military as powerful as America’s has limits on its ability to conduct complex military operations on multiple consequences in quick succession.
Only about a third of the 11 US aircraft carriers are at sea at any given time. When the USS Gerald Ford was moved from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean in the Venezuela build-up, it left the Middle East without a nearby carrier strike group, which may have partly limited US options to strike Iran during the protests in early January.
Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, notes that the purpose of these strike groups is as much defensive as it is offensive. The US doesn’t need an “armada” of surface ships to attack Iran: Operation Midnight Hammer was carried out by submarines launching ballistic missiles and B-2 bombers that took off from Missouri. But the two carrier strike groups at the time played a key role in intercepting the hundreds of missiles and drones Iran launched at Israel in retaliation.
The operation took a toll. The US used around a quarter of its total stock of Terminal High-Altitude Air Defense (THAAD) interceptors — at least 100 missiles, only 11 or 12 of which are produced each year. And while Israel had remarkable success at intercepting Iranian missiles during the war, it was running dangerously low on its defensive Arrow interceptors by the end of the conflict.
Officials say the US has been working to replenish the supply of interceptors in the region, though supplies are not unlimited, particularly given the ongoing demand for systems to protect Ukrainian cities from Russian bombardment. A recent CSIS analysis described air defenses and interceptors as the “table stakes for modern conflict”. A new conflict with Iran may test just how much the US is able to bring to the table.
Crisis Group’s Vaez said the Iranian government is unlikely to agree to anything close to the maximalist demands from the US side described in media reports.
“This is now a regime that is hanging on by a thread, and that thread is its core constituents,” he said, referring to hardline nationalist supporters of the regime. “The only thing that the Iranians find more dangerous than suffering from US sanctions or another US strike on their territory is surrendering to US terms,” he added.
At the same time, this is an administration that prefers quick, decisive, and overwhelming victories and has shown no appetite for true regime change. Even Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a dyed-in-the-wool Iran hawk, told senators yesterday that his hope was that if Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei were to fall, he would be succeeded by “somebody within their system.”
This also appears to be borrowing from the Venezuela playbook, where the country’s regime was left in place without its problematic president, though most analysts don’t believe the US has the capability to carry out the same kind of snatch-and-grab operation in Iran that it executed in Venezuela.
In his international conflicts thus far, including the confrontation over Greenland that came to a head last week, Trump has demonstrated a remarkable ability to find an off-ramp that allows him to declare victory, even when he achieves far less than his initial demands. Through either negotiations or military action, he may find his way to an outcome like that with Iran, though at the moment it’s not clear what it would be. That leaves us in a familiar position for now: forced to take Trump’s ultimatums both seriously and literally.
