• U.S. Foreign Policy
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• Iran

June 24, 2025, 2:35 PM View Comments ()

President Donald Trump on Saturday announced that the U.S. military had struck three nuclear facilities in Iran. The escalation followed months of fruitless negotiations between Tehran and Washington over Iran’s nuclear program. Trump described the strikes as a one-off, saying, shortly after dropping massive bombs on the country, that “Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace.”

The reality, however, is that Trump has likely locked the United States into long-term military action and regime change in Iran. Although Trump announced on Monday that he had brokered a cease-fire between Iran and Israel, he has already accused both sides of violating it. In a string of expletive-filled remarks to reporters on Tuesday, Trump said he was “not happy” with either country and that Iran would “never rebuild” its nuclear program.

Trump is clear in his demands that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon, a stance that successive U.S. administrations have shared. But Trump’s decision to strike Iran over the weekend was not driven by this policy. U.S. intelligence assessments showed that Iran was not building a nuclear bomb and had not reversed its 2003 decision to halt its weaponization program, U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said during March testimony to Congress.

Pressed on this point in an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio did not contradict or update the U.S. intelligence assessments. Rather, he said they were “irrelevant” because Iran has “everything they need to build the weapon.” After Trump publicly expressed discontent with Gabbard’s testimony, saying, “She’s wrong,” she wrote on Friday on social media that Iran could “produce a nuclear weapon within weeks to months.” Trump appears to be pursuing a policy of preventing Iran from even the possibility of achieving nuclear threshold status.

The U.S. demand for zero Iranian enrichment—civilian or nuclear—is new. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), negotiated under President Barack Obama, permitted limited Iranian enrichment for civilian and research purposes alongside an intensive inspections regime to prevent Iran from developing a weapon. Enrichment to generate power or conduct research is permitted under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, to which Iran is a party. Diplomats were able to reach this deal because it bridged significant gaps in trust and allowed both sides to get enough of what they wanted to be palatable.

Iran was able to keep its civilian nuclear program under tight supervision while retaining the option of escalating enrichment to approach a threshold status in case the United States walked away from the deal—as Trump did in 2018, during his first term—or Israel attacked. The United States secured a tight inspections regime over Iran’s nuclear program and retained all response options, from diplomacy to sanctions to military strikes, if Iran backed out.

Perhaps most importantly, because the JCPOA would delay Iran’s breakout time, it would afford the United States and its partners space to respond to potential Iranian weaponization via other options, such as diplomacy and sanctions, keeping military force as a last resort.

Trump escalated his zero-enrichment demands at a time of even greater distrust between Iran and the West and as Iran faces unprecedented vulnerability following Hezbollah’s weakening in Lebanon. Iran had long been able to count on the proxy militia to act as a check on Israel and the United States. But after nearly two years of Israeli strikes on Hezbollah—which culminated in the killings of much of its leadership last year—Iran is more exposed than before.

In its negotiations with Tehran in recent months, the Trump administration was pushing for greater Iranian concessions in an environment where Tehran was less likely than ever to agree to them. While this divergence set diplomacy up for failure, Trump’s decision to use U.S. military force to back up his zero-enrichment policy sends everyone involved down an even more dangerous road.

For decades, Iran’s support of regional allied militias such as Hezbollah has helped keep Israel at a distance—even as Israel has sought to target Iran through cyberattacks and other clandestine methods. But this balance has fallen apart as Israel degraded Hezbollah. As of this month, Israel is not only carrying out repeated airstrikes in Iran, but the United States has also joined in. Two massive taboos were broken in just over a week.

From Iran’s perspective, its severely weakened deterrence capacity via proxies has led to a rapidly devolving security situation at home. Though Iran retains a ballistic missile deterrent that is doing real damage in Israel, its impact is limited—as are Iran’s stockpiles. Iran has also taken significant losses in the last two weeks, as Israeli strikes have decimated infrastructure and killed high-ranking officials and likely also civilians. Iran’s health ministry reports that Israel’s attacks have killed around 500 people, while Israeli authorities have recorded at least 24 deaths from Iranian retaliation, as of June 23.

Iran faces a choice between reestablishing a deterrent or complete submission to Israeli and U.S. regional hegemony. Given that Israel has demonstrated the ability to strike at will in Iran, it may continue to do. Israel has for years struck Syria and Lebanon when it saw opportunities to hinder the development of conventional weapons capacities in the hands of militias or unfriendly governments.

It’s also not clear what happened to Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile following the U.S. strikes. If it still exists and has been withdrawn from nuclear facilities to a safe house—as many reports indicate—it could serve as an advance restarting point for a dash to a bomb. Even if the stockpile doesn’t exist anymore, a hampered Iranian nuclear program can be reconstituted through either homegrown knowledge or the support of partners such as Russia or China. What has changed now is that Iran—in the face of Israeli and U.S. bombardment—is likely as convinced and desperate as ever to achieve a nuclear deterrent.

In 2003, after U.S. President George W. Bush famously put Iraq, Iran, and North Korea on his “axis of evil” list (and later proceeded to invade and destroy Iraq), North Korea responded by dashing to a bomb. A year after Bush’s speech, Pyongyang withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty; three years later, it conducted its first nuclear test. Iran took a different route. Tehran halted its nuclear weaponization program and never restarted it while keeping open the possibility of approximating threshold status and relying on regional deterrents such as allied militias. This choice has now shown its limits.

Iran has no option now but to consider a dash for a nuclear deterrent as synonymous with regime survival. This is also a perilous path, as it may invite regime destruction. But it seems that Israel and the United States have already begun working to that end.

If U.S. policy toward Iran remains a demand for zero enrichment, the quickest and surest way to get there would be to replace Iran’s regime with one that does not require a nuclear deterrent for survival because it is subservient to Israel and the United States. Otherwise, the alternative for the United States—which has effectively ruined any chances for diplomacy—is to continue striking Iran when and if it gathers intelligence, or is given intelligence, about clandestine nuclear efforts in the country. That road likely escalates into regime change as well.

The United States finds itself in this position today not only because of Trump’s 2018 choice to unilaterally withdraw the United States from the JCPOA but also because renewed U.S. efforts at diplomacy kept shifting the goalposts for Iran. Zero enrichment was a nonstarter—a poison pill that ensured the negotiations collapsed into war.

The chance of returning to a viable diplomatic option that does not demand zero enrichment has very slim prospects, especially after Trump decided to try to bully Iran into submission with strikes on its nuclear facilities. But in the interest of avoiding further war, the United States and its allies should spare no effort in negotiations.

It is imperative that proponents of Trump’s foreign policy and the administration itself be honest and straightforward with the American public about where their demands of Iran are heading—and that is toward a regime change war.