Staying the Course

A warning that Iran is still capable of building an atom bomb and Russia’s biggest air attack on Ukraine are reminders to Donald Trump that dictators rarely play ball

It wasn’t only Iran’s buried nuclear sites that received a pounding from the Pentagon last week. The White House press corps was firmly in the crosshairs of Pete Hegseth, America’s defence secretary, for daring to report that Tehran’s not-soclandestine atomic weapons programme may not have been damaged to the terminal degree initially suggested by the Trump administration. Rubbishing a leaked preliminary damage assessment suggesting the less than total success of two B-2 bombing raids and a Tomahawk missile strike on three Iranian nuclear installations, Mr Hegseth pulled no punches. The Washington press, he said, was “cheering against” his boss instead of lauding a superbly successful feat of arms. Donald Trump was similarly incensed, claiming the operation was indeed an unqualified triumph.

Now comes a report from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the nuclear inspection arm of the United Nations, that confirms the fears of Israel and every other country with cause to dread a nuclear-armed Iran. According to Rafael Grossi, head of the IAEA, Tehran could restart the enrichment of its uranium stockpile to weapons grade in “a matter of months”. Far from being game over, the work of denying the Iranian regime the ultimate weapon may have just begun.

This conclusion will not sit well with President Trump who likes his expeditions into the outside world, especially military ones, to be brief, neat and successful. The B-2 strike, involving stealth bombers flying direct from America’s midwest to dump 30,000lb bunker-busting bombs on subterranean production facilities at Fordow and Natanz, was his kind of operation. An “America first” display of globe-straddling kinetic power delivering a definitive result (roll credits).

Mr Grossi’s assessment that the bombing had caused “severe” but not “total” damage presents Mr Trump with a conundrum. He has suggested that the US air force may revisit Iran if nefarious activity is again detected. But what the B-2 strike illustrates is something that has been shown time and time again in modern warfare: the impossibility of conventional airpower delivering a definitive and permanent result.

The degree to which Iran’s nuclear programme has actually been damaged may come to light in time as American (and Israeli) intelligence sifts through Iranian communications and receives more data from satellites and spies. But the likelihood is that Iran’s intentions and actions will remain the subject of a guessing game. Tehran has already discounted further IAEA inspections of the bombed sites, claiming the organisation has effectively sided with the United States and Israel. However, Mr Grossi appears confident that uranium centrifuge cascades could soon be up and running. It defies logic to believe that the Iranian regime did not take extensive steps to disperse its nuclear estate, including its eminently portable enriched uranium stockpile, as tensions with the US and Israel rose. For Mr Trump this could mean the kind of sticky military commitment he professes to hate. With ground operations on any scale out of the question, years of whack-a-mole US airstrikes on suspected sites could ensue.

To a messy Middle East is added a messy Ukraine. The past few days have witnessed a substantial intensification in Russian missile and drone strikes as Vladimir Putin seeks to batter Volodymyr Zelensky into territorial concessions at the negotiating table. Mr Trump promised peace in Ukraine in his first 24 hours as president. Unfortunately, the dictators in Moscow and Tehran don’t do neat Hollywood endings. The president must now be prepared to counter Russian and Iranian delinquency over the long term. He should stop drawing a false moral equivalence between America’s friends and its enemies. He must back Ukraine and Israel and stay the course.