WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump with his decision to order U.S. military strikes on Iran’s nuclear facility is gambling that direct U.S. involvement can deliver a decisive blow to a weakened Tehran while managing to avoid bringing the U.S. into an expansive regional conflict.
Trump announced the strikes on three Iranian enrichment facilities — Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan — and said that a “full payload of BOMBS was dropped” on Fordo.
“All planes are safely on their way home,” Trump added in his post. “Congratulations to our great American Warriors. There is not another military in the World that could have done this. NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE!”
It remained to be seen whether the attacks mark the totality of direct American involvement in strikes against Iran or the opening salvo of a larger campaign.
Trump, who said he will address the nation about the strikes at 10 p.m. Eastern U.S. time, called it a “very successful military operation.” The president also celebrated the strikes in a call with the news site Axios in which he said, “We had great success tonight” and that “Israel is much safer now.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Thursday had said that Trump would decide whether to move forward with U.S. strikes on Iran within two weeks.
But on Saturday afternoon, commercial flight trackers identified multiple U.S. aerial refueling tankers that were on a path suggesting that they were accompanying aircraft from the Midwest to the Pacific, raising speculation that something could be afoot.
Still, the flight pattern left many in Washington speculating that an attack might happen soon but would not happen immediately because of the time it would take for the aircraft to make it to the region. But that aircraft may have been a decoy — it was not part of the the mission that was carried out early Sunday morning in Iran.
Trump returned from his New Jersey golf club just after 6 p.m., and was to head to a previously scheduled meeting with his national security team. Less than two hours later, the president announced the strikes had been completed.
The decision to directly involve the U.S. comes after more than a week of strikes by Israel on Iran that have moved to systematically eradicate the country’s air defenses and offensive missile capabilities, while damaging its nuclear enrichment facilities.
The strikes are a perilous decision for the U.S., as Iran has pledged to retaliate if it joined the Israeli assault. The stakes are also high for Trump personally — he won the White House on the promise of keeping America out of costly foreign conflicts and scoffed at the value of American interventionism.
U.S. and Israeli officials have said that American stealth bombers and the U.S. 30,000-pound bunker buster bombs offered the best chance of destroying heavily fortified sites connected to the Iranian nuclear program buried deep underground, including at Fordo.
It was not immediately clear if the U.S. bombers did in fact drop the bunker busters on the Iranian facilities.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned the United States in advance that strikes targeting the Islamic Republic would “result in irreparable damage for them.” And Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei declared “any American intervention would be a recipe for an all-out war in the region.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the damage inflicted by the bombings.
Trump has vowed that he would not allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon and he had initially hoped that the threat of force would motivate the country’s leaders to give up their nuclear program peacefully.
But Trump appears to have made the calculation — at the prodding of Israeli officials and many Republican lawmakers — that Israel’s operation had softened the ground and presented a perhaps unparalleled opportunity to set back Iran’s nuclear program, perhaps permanently.
The Israelis have said their offensive has already crippled Iran’s air defenses, allowing them to already significantly degrade multiple Iranian nuclear sites.
