Seven months ago, President Donald Trump announced that U.S. strikes had “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear facilities. This week, he’s threatening to strike them again, warning that the next attack will be “far worse” unless Tehran agrees to nuclear negotiations.
Something here doesn’t add up.
Either the June strikes worked, in which case there’s nothing left to threaten. Or they didn’t work, in which case Trump overclaimed success. Both can’t be true. This contradiction reveals something fundamental about how the administration approaches Iran and why the current escalation is more performance than strategy.
June’s “Total Victory” That Wasn’t
Operation Midnight Hammer was genuinely impressive militarily. Seven B-2 bombers flew 18 hours from Missouri, dropped fourteen 30,000-pound bunker busters on three nuclear sites, and returned home. It was the first operational use of the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, the only weapon believed capable of destroying Iran’s deeply buried facilities.
Trump immediately declared total victory. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called it “an incredible and overwhelming success.” But within days, a leaked Defense Intelligence Agency assessment found the strikes hadO set Iran’s program back by only “a few months.” The entrances to facilities were sealed, but underground structures weren’t collapsed. Most critically, Iran had moved an estimated 400 kilograms of enriched uranium enough for multiple weapons—before the attacks.
Israeli officials were more candid: Fordow was “substantially damaged, but not destroyed.” Destroying it would require “waves of airstrikes, with days or even weeks of pounding the same spots.” One strike, however spectacular, was never going to be enough.
So Trump’s current threats aren’t about a nuclear program he destroyed. They’re about a nuclear program he wounded but didn’t kill: one that Iran has had seven months to reorganize, disperse, and possibly accelerate.
From Saving Protesters to Bombing Them
The current escalation didn’t start with nuclear threats. It started in late December with anti-government protests across Iran, sparked by economic collapse and political repression. Trump repeatedly threatened military intervention if the killing continued, deploying the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group as a show of force.
Then the protests died down. The brutal crackdown worked. Thousands were reportedly killed or detained, and demonstrations abated by early January. Trump briefly backed off, claiming the “killing has stopped.”
But the carrier group kept moving toward Iran. And Trump’s rhetoric shifted from humanitarian intervention to nuclear demands. “Come to the table and negotiate,” he posted this week. “NO NUCLEAR WEAPONS.“
This pivot is telling. Protests gave Trump a politically palatable reason to deploy forces and threaten strikes framed as supporting Iranian freedom. When that justification evaporated, he simply switched to the nuclear file. The military posturing remained constant; only the stated rationale changed.
It’s unclear whether Trump ever seriously intended to strike over the protests, or whether they were always just convenient cover for nuclear coercion. Either way, the contradiction is stark: if you’re genuinely concerned about Iranian protesters, threatening to bomb their country isn’t the most obvious expression of solidarity.
When Every Threat Becomes White Noise
Trump now faces a familiar problem: he’s threatened repeatedly, deployed massively, and struck once, with mixed results. Each subsequent threat carries less weight.
This is his pattern with Iran. He assassinated Qasem Soleimani in 2020, then spent months threatening follow-up strikes that never came. He deployed ships over the protests, threatened intervention, then backed down. He struck Venezuela’s military leadership in November after months of threats. Now Iran again.
Regional actors have learned to discount Trump’s rhetoric. When everything is treated as maximally urgent, nothing is. Iran’s response this week was telling: Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi warned that forces have “their fingers on the trigger” but also said Tehran “has always welcomed” a nuclear deal. It’s the posture of a government that’s heard this before.
More striking: Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Congress that Iran’s government is “probably weaker than it has ever been.” Yet U.S. intelligence reportedly shows “no major fractures” in the regime’s upper ranks. If Iran is collapsing, strikes are unnecessary. If it’s not, strikes without a follow-up plan are dangerous. The administration seems to be arguing both simultaneously.
Maximum Pressure, Minimum Strategy
It’s not clear the administration has a coherent Iran strategy beyond “maximum pressure.”
Trump withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal during his first term, reimposed crippling sanctions, and has now struck Iranian facilities. He clearly believes military pressure will force Tehran to negotiate better terms. But what terms? The 2015 deal already blocked Iran’s path to a bomb in exchange for sanctions relief. Trump abandoned it, Iran resumed enrichment, and now he’s demanding a new deal from a weaker position with less international support.
Why would Tehran accept worse terms after being bombed twice? And if the answer is “because we’ll keep bombing them,” at what point does that push Iran to actually build weapons as the only guarantee of survival?
There’s no coherent plan for regime change, no operational capability to engineer it, and no regional ally eager to manage the aftermath. The Atlantic Council notes that military action is more likely to “consolidate elite cohesion around the regime” than spark transformation.
Our Take: Accidental War by Design
Strip away the rhetoric and here’s what’s happening: Trump is pursuing a strategy of escalating threats backed by periodic strikes, hoping Iran will capitulate before the situation spirals into full-scale war. It’s coercive diplomacy without diplomacy—or a clear endgame.
The danger isn’t that Trump will strike Iran again. He might. The danger is that the constant cycle of threat, deployment, and partial follow-through is creating the conditions for accidental war. Every time forces deploy, every time rhetoric escalates, the risk of miscalculation increases. Iran has already struck a U.S. base in Qatar in response to June’s operation. At some point, one side misjudges the other’s red lines, and what was meant as posturing becomes actual conflict.
Meanwhile, the nuclear program Trump claimed to obliterate continues operating in dispersed, hardened facilities that are now even more difficult to locate and strike. Iran has had seven months to learn from June’s operation and adapt accordingly. The next strike, if it comes, will need to be larger and more sustained to achieve what the first one didn’t.
Trump’s bet is that Iran will negotiate before he has to make good on his threats. Iran’s bet is that Trump’s threats are mostly theater, and that the domestic and international costs of sustained military action will constrain him. One of them is wrong.
The contradiction at the heart of current policy—that the nuclear program is both obliterated and threatening, isn’t just rhetorical sloppiness. It reveals an administration that claimed victory prematurely in June and is now trying to threaten its way out of that corner. You can’t bomb what you already destroyed. But you can pretend you destroyed it, then threaten to destroy it again when it turns out you didn’t.
That’s not a strategy. That’s improvisation with high explosives. And in the Middle East, that’s how accidents become wars.
