Trump's Dilemma
Join Israel to end Iran's nuclear program or strike a messy deal
TO strike or not to strike? That is the question facing President Trump this weekend. Whether to join Israel in one final bunker-busting onslaught to end Iran’s nuclear programme, or whether to strike a messy last-minute compromise which preserves MAGA unity and avoids a potential conflagration in the Middle East.
Nobody knows the president’s mind, maybe not even Trump himself. In public, he appears to be revelling in the guessing game. In private, say Trump confidantes, he is more on edge, casting about for the magic answer, often delivered by the last person he has spoken to.
So will Trump channel his inner Churchill or will he turn out to be a poundshop Hamlet? In search of an answer, I turned to Anthony Scaramucci, the Wall Street banker, spin doctor and broadcaster. He knows Trump’s mind better than most. (Clue: it helps if you are born and raised in Long Island, not far from where Trump grew up in Queens).
“The Mooch” served for 10 chaotic days as White House communications director in Trump’s first term before everything came to an explosive end. He has since become one of Trump’s most trenchant critics while reinventing himself as co-host of The Rest is Politics US podcast with NBC and BBC broadcaster Katty Kay.
You can listen to our interview on the Media Confidential podcast next week, along with Alan Rusbridger, former editor of the Guardian and now editor-in-chief at Prospect magazine.
We met in an oak-paneled room at the ultra-posh Four Seasons Hotel near Tower Bridge, formerly the Port of London Authority’s headquarters. The Mooch believes Trump is minded to strike a deal with the Tehran regime. The president loves conflict, but he hates war, he says. Crucially, Trump is wary of alienating his MAGA base where Tucker Carlson et al are lined up against joining Israel in the fight.
More tantalising, the Mooch believes that Trump remains in thrall to Vladimir Putin whose hand continues to manipulate proceedings. Trump reached out to Putin at the weekend, to the consternation of European leaders who treat the Russian president as a pariah responsible for the Ukraine war. Trump may be deftly using all means to ratchet up pressure on the mullahs in Tehran to formally surrender their nuclear ambitions, agree to international inspections and then declare victory. But Putin is counting on Iran for drones his Ukraine offensive and he regards the Middle East as Russia’s backyard.
So who is using whom?
In the real world, an Iranian promise (and there have been many over the past two decades) to allow more intrusive IAEA inspections lacks the certainty of the GBU-57 E/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator, the world’s most powerful non-nuclear bomb which is made in the US and delivered via the stealth B-2 bomber. Only the US possesses this weapon of massive destruction. Only this bunker-buster (or a combination of strikes) can be assured of destroying Fordow, Iran’s secretive uranium enrichment facility buried deep under a mountain.
Israel desperately wants that weapon to be deployed. Trump has reportedly approved plans for the US to join Israel in its military campaign but has yet to decide whether to authorise the go-ahead. Despite his bloodcurdling war talk (“we won’t kill Khameini - at least not for now”) and his call for “unconditional surrender”, many commentators believe he will, in the end, play safe. Better a deal rather than a regional war.
Here are my counter-arguments, none of which is conclusive but which nevertheless should give pause for thought to the “peaceniks”.
The wider war is already underway and the Israelis have the Iranian regime on the run. Thanks to weapons-grade intelligence, courtesy of a formidable internal network of spies, the Israelis have decapitated the Iranian high command, laid waste to Iranian missile sites and taken command of the skies. The mullahs and the much-feared Iranian Revolutionary Guard are dazed and confused, like boxers taking multiple counts on the mat.
In an “astrategic” age, where the Kissingers and Brzezinskis are long departed, Israeli prime minister Netanyahu has shown he is a master of strategy. Having suffered an ignominious failure of intelligence on October 7, 2023 when Hamas conducted its barbarous cross-border attacks, Netanyahu and the Israeli security state have led a devastating counter-attack. Hamas in Gaza and Hizbollah in Lebanon, both Iran’s proxies, have been rendered toothless. The fall of the Assad regime in Syria has further weakened the Iranian regime.
Netanyahu can plausibly argue that Israel has done the bulk of the dirty work against Iran. Now it is up to the US to finish the job by eliminating Fordow. Anything short merely postpones the day of reckoning (like the earlier imperfect JCPOA deal engineered by the Obama administration which Trump junked in his first term in office).
The MAGA arguments that Trump risks a repeat of the forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan do not hold up. Nobody is suggesting invading Iran or putting American boots on the ground. Trump is not explicitly endorsing regime change; he is targeting Iran’s long-held ambition to build a nuclear weapon and its threat to the existence of Israel.
Now it may well be that the fate of the revolutionary regime in Iran is tied inexorably to its nuclear programme. To abandon that programme, either voluntarily or under duress, might be existential for a theocracy whose popular support is threadbare. What might come next is far from clear.
There are two final considerations which will weigh on Trump’s mind. Though Iran’s internal defences have been smashed and its counter-offensive ballistic missile systems severely depleted (cf the fall-off in attacks on Israel), the regime does have assets abroad, including terrorist cells capable of wreaking havoc against soft targets either in Europe or the US. It could also wield economic warfare by closing the Straits of Hormuz for international shipping or using Houthi proxies to attack shipping in the Red Sea - though this would surely invite a US response.
The other factor concerns Russia and China (often grouped alongside Iran and North Korea in the so-called Axis of Autocracy). If Trump goes ahead with his bunker-busting operation, he will likely wish to signal to Moscow and Beijing that this is a confined strike aimed solely at destroying the underground complex at Fordow rather than regime change per se. Mission accomplished, he would then seek to restrain the Israelis and herald a new non-nuclear order in the Middle East, with the (notable) exception of Israel.
A script fit for a Nobel Peace Prize winner? In an ideal world, perhaps. But in the real world, as Trump is about to discover, nothing is quite so simple.
Further reading:
Trump’s Churchillian choice at Fordow by Andrew Roberts https://www.thefp.com/p/trump-churchill-iran-nuclear-arsenal-israel-foreign-policy
The Trump era enters its second decade by Peter Baker https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/16/us/politics/trump-escalator-10-years.html
Israel’s secret war in Iran by Mehul Srivastava, Neri Zilber and John Paul Rathbone https://on.ft.com/449T4qk
Ends
Good analysis. The other issue is will Isreal stick to any peace deal Trump wants as it will only frustrate them. I am unconvinced Trump fully signed off on this attack initially. Feels like Isreal is running the US foriegn policy just now.
Barber’s panegyrics to Mossad and, even more so, to Netanyahu are toe-curling. The rest of the piece is an elaborate rationalization of whatever Trump does, even if Trump hasn’t done it yet.
Though he may have been a struggling hack when Blair told his Ambassador to Washington, David Manning, to climb into Bush’s fundament and make his home there, it would appear that Barber has taken that lesson to heart. And from what I hear about his frequent trips to this country, he might as well do that.