• United States
• Iran
• Matthew Kroenig

June 22, 2025, 12:49 PM View Comments ()

Iran’s nuclear program has posed one of the greatest challenges to U.S. and global security for more than two decades. Now, according to U.S. President Donald Trump, that program no longer exists. This may be the United States’ biggest foreign-policy victory since the end of the Cold War.

Since late 2011, I have been publicly arguing that U.S. military strikes on Iran’s key nuclear facilities were the only way to keep Tehran from the bomb. I took a lot of heat from academic and think tank colleagues for holding this view, but events to this point have proved me right and the critics wrong.

Some argued that the world could live with a nuclear-armed Iran and that the only thing worse than Iran with the bomb was bombing Iran. But every U.S. president disagreed, declaring a nuclear-armed Iran to be unacceptable. Trump was crystal clear in his repeated declarations that “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.”

Many hoped that Washington could resolve the Iranian nuclear issue at the negotiating table—myself included—but more than two decades of negotiations failed to end the Iranian nuclear threat. The Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is a case in point. It permitted Iran to maintain a robust nuclear program with limits that expired over 10 to 15 years. It was a temporary Band-Aid that paved a patient pathway to an Iranian bomb. This week, even while at war with Israel and with a credible threat of U.S. military force hanging over his head, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, still stubbornly refused to negotiate away the country’s uranium enrichment program.

Critics of military action have long argued that there was still time to address this issue through other means, but the clock ran out this week. Iran’s breakout time to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for one bomb had shrunk to two and half days.

Reports that the U.S. intelligence community had assessed that Khamenei had not yet made a final decision to build nuclear weapons were so precise as to be misleading. Khamenei spent decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to get one screwdriver’s turn away from the bomb. He was not going to stop at this point.

Some argued that the world should let Israel do the dirty work, but only the United States possessed the bunker-busting bombs and heavy bombers capable to destroy Iran’s deeply buried and hardened facilities.

Critics further argued that the fact that Iran’s nuclear program was dispersed over multiple locations, deeply buried and hardened and ringed with air defenses, made it invulnerable to military assault. Although the extent of the damage still needs to be assessed, U.S. bombers appear to have proved them wrong, making swift work of Iran’s key nuclear facilities with a single run—supplemented by a series of U.S. missile strikes.

So, what will happen now? The critics would have us believe that this will lead to a wider regional war, worse than Iraq and Afghanistan, and possibly to World War III. They argue that military action will remove any doubt in Khamenei’s mind about building nuclear weapons and cause him to redouble his efforts to sprint to a bomb. Paradoxically, they argue, strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities will actually make it more likely that Iran builds the bomb.

But they have been wrong about much else, and we should not believe them on this point.

Iran has few good retaliatory options, and moreover, it does not want a major war with the United States. Iran’s proxy network, including Hamas and Hezbollah, has been decimated by Israel over the past year, and, so far, the groups are staying on the sidelines of this conflict.

Iran continued launching ballistic missiles at Israel following the U.S. strikes and could possibly target other U.S. allies, forces, and bases in the Middle East. But Iran is running out of missiles. Its ballistic missile launchers and stockpiles have been both depleted and degraded in a week of war with Israel. It is estimated that less than half of Iran’s original stockpile of 2,000 missiles remains. Moreover, the destruction of launchers means that Iran has been forced to fire smaller salvos, of 20 or so missiles at a time, making the attacks less capable of overwhelming U.S. and Israeli air and missile defenses. About 24 Israelis have been killed in the Iranian strikes since the war began, but the casualty toll has tapered off. In any case, U.S. bases are better defended than Israeli population centers.

Iran could turn to more desperate measures, such as sponsoring international terrorism, launching biological weapons, or closing the Strait of Hormuz, but Iran knows that these are the kinds of actions that could lead to a major war with the United States and result in the destruction of Iran’s military and the end of its regime.

Trump played on these fears this week, indicating that he knows where Khamenei is located and warning Saturday, in a post on social media, that “ANY RETALIATION BY IRAN AGAINST THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WILL BE MET WITH FORCE FAR GREATER THAN WHAT WAS WITNESSED TONIGHT.”

But the critics’ main fear of a wider war comes less from a distrust of Tehran and more from a distrust of Washington. They fear that the United States would be compelled to respond to any Iranian attack, possibly resulting in a U.S. invasion and occupation of Iran, but this does not make sense. The strategic goal of eliminating Iran’s nuclear facilities appears to have already been accomplished. Trump describes himself as a “peace through strength” president who is willing to hit adversaries hard but unwilling to get sucked into amorphous military interventions.

Indeed, Trump telegraphed to Iran’s leaders that this was a one-off attack on the country’s nuclear program, not a regime-ending war, and that he hopes to return quickly to the negotiating table.

For these reasons, I expect the conflict to de-escalate quickly, as after the U.S. assassination of Iranian general Qassem Suleimani in 2020.

Fears that Iran will now dash to a bomb are also nonsensical. Iran’s nuclear program likely lays in waste, and its top scientists have been eliminated. There is no capability to dash to a bomb in the short term.

Perhaps Iran’s leaders will decide to slowly rebuild the nuclear program over the coming years, but I doubt it. They just spent decades and billions of dollars and have little to show for it other than a smoking pile of rubble. Why hit replay on that tape? If they do, the United States can always attack again.

Some worry that military action against Iran will make it harder for the United States to focus on its biggest threat, China, but the opposite is true. With the Iranian threat now defanged, it will be easier for Washington to pivot attention and resources to the Indo-Pacific.

Washington has not enjoyed many foreign-policy victories since the end of the Cold War. Younger generations, in particular, associate U.S. international engagement with inconclusive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But the U.S. strikes send a message to future nuclear proliferators, and to America’s friends and enemies alike, that the United States is still willing and able to use force decisively to defend its interests and protect the broader free world.

The United States likely just stopped a hostile regime from building the world’s deadliest weapon. Even in today’s cynical and polarized world, this should be a cause for celebration.