US President Donald Trump has handed Iran a choice with his airstrikes: Join peace negotiations or risk further attacks.
In his public announcement after the strikes, he said that the US military carried out “massive precision strikes” on three key nuclear facilities. These included Fordow, Isfahan, and Natanz.
Trump said the objective was the destruction of the nuclear threat and the Islamic Republic’s nuclear enrichment capabilities.
He said that the strikes were a spectacular military success.
Also, the US president named Iran as “the bully” of the Middle East. He called on the country to make peace.
This relates primarily to attacks in Iraq and Lebanon. Trump referenced Iran's former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani, whom Trump killed in 2020, as well.
Trump thanked Israel’s military, saying that he and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have a close partnership.
Peace talks with Iran
The US president wants to see Iran come to the peace table. He hopes that this will happen, but he is warning that more strikes may occur if Iran chooses not to do so.
Iran has not yet shown that it is in the mood to sit down or agree to terms. When it had the opportunity, it preferred indirect talks in April and May.
Those talks did not produce an agreement with the US. Instead, Tehran appeared to be slow-playing the discussions.
Iran wants to keep its enrichment capability. It seems that some of that capability, or all of it, has been heavily damaged by the US and the Israeli strikes.
The US strikes were needed to reach deeper into the earth to destroy key sites such as the one at Fordow.
It will take time to know if the US airstrikes, combined with the Israeli ones, have damaged the Iranian nuclear program to the extent that both countries have wanted.
Nevertheless, Trump has handed the Iranians an exit ramp. This is a ramp that the Islamic Republic may consider as it moves forward. Iran has already been in talks with European powers and Turkey about its next moves.
The Iranian regime will want to come out of this saving some face. However, it has already been humiliated.
Iran has lost its air defenses and has been unable to defend itself.
Iran's next moves
Tehran could escalate and threaten US forces in the region or US partners in the Gulf. It could also seek to unleash what is left of its proxies, such as Kata’ib Hezbollah in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen.
The choices going forward for Iran are not easy. If it accepts a deal now, it will have to justify why it did not take a deal several weeks ago that would have preserved much of its program and kept the bombs from falling. It will be clear that an opportunity was missed.
If it does not accept a deal and chooses to move forward, then it will be trying to call what it may see as a bluff by the US.
Iran could seek to drag the US and Israel into a more protracted war, where Iran assumes that both the US and Israel will see diminishing returns in an air campaign.
Both options are available for Iran. Clearly, Iran’s friends and partners, such as Turkey, Qatar, Russia, or China, may be urging it to accept a kind of deal and reduce tensions in the region.