The return of the nuclear threat

Humanity has lived with nuclear weapons for so long — 80 years, this year — without destroying itself, that we sometimes take them for granted. But there's no guarantee that our run of luck will continue. In fact, the risks are growing and transforming.
The recent round of fighting between India and Pakistan, the most serious violence between the two nuclear rivals in decades, is a reminder that the risks of nuclear escalation have not disappeared. But that doesn't mean the risks are exactly the same as they used to be.
The 'nuclear age,' can be divided into three parts: The first, from the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945 until the end of the Cold War, was characterized by arms build-ups and the ever-present threat of nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union. The second, a roughly 30-year period after the end of the Cold War, was marked by arms control agreements, a reduction in the threat of nuclear war, and new concerns like nuclear terrorism and proliferation to rogue regimes like North Korea.
The third age is just beginning. In his new book, The New Nuclear Age: At the Precipice of Armageddon, leading nuclear security analyst Ankit Panda introduces readers to a new era that began in roughly the mid-2020s. This new era is characterized by renewed tensions between the world's superpowers, the emergence of China as a third major nuclear power, the collapse of Cold War-era arms control treaties, and new and potentially destabilizing technological developments like cyberwar and artificial intelligence. The war in Ukraine, the largest conventional war in decades and one that nuclear threats have loomed over from the start, was the most vivid illustration yet of the dynamics of this new era.
In an interview with Vox, Panda, the Stanton senior fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a widely cited authority on all things nuclear, discussed the dynamics of our new nuclear world and how Donald Trump's return to the White House could raise nuclear risks.
When nuclear weapons first appeared, leaders and experts expected that their use would just become routine. They'd be just another tool in the arsenal. That, thankfully, hasn't happened.
So is there a case to be made that deterrence, the idea that countries will avoid using weapons because of the risks of retaliation, just works? Are leaders too afraid of the dangers of these weapons to actually use them, and maybe the risks of nuclear war aren't as high as we might think?
I wouldn't go that far. The presence of nuclear weapons does induce a degree of caution in national leaders, militaries, and policymakers in general. But I consider myself something of a deterrence pessimist in that I believe deterrence is real, that it has the effects that its practitioners seek, but I'm not assured that deterrence itself can be rendered perfectly safe because rendering deterrence perfectly safe is something of an oxymoron.
Deterrence is about the manipulation of useful risk. We endlessly debate what level of risk we should be willing to tolerate when it comes to the practice of nuclear deterrence, but we know from the Cold War that there have been instances of organizational failure and human miscalculation that easily could have led to the use of nuclear weapons.
Ultimately, nuclear weapons are a human invention. Nuclear deterrence is an enterprise that requires the involvement of fallible, human organizations.
Longer term, making sure that we keep nuclear weapons unused is going to require a lot more active tending of this incredibly complex enterprise that's growing a lot more complicated by the day.
This past month, we saw a real-world demonstration of some of the dynamics you write about in the book, in the brief but very intense conflict between India and Pakistan, two nuclear rivals. What do you think that incident tells us about how crises like this are likely to play out in this new nuclear age?
I think we can describe what we saw last week between India and Pakistan as the first South Asian nuclear crisis of this third nuclear range. Both countries have tried to rewrite the rules of their mutual coexistence under the nuclear shadow. [Indian Prime Minister Narendra] Modi's government has for years been interested in calling Pakistan's 'nuclear bluff.' It wanted to find ways to inflict punishment on the Pakistanis with military force for what India perceives as state-backed terror, and it did exactly that.
I think it's fair to say that what we saw was the most intense multidomain, air-to-air and air-to-ground engagement between two nuclear-armed countries ever. We've never seen anything like this in the nuclear age.
Does that imply that India is simply no longer afraid of Pakistan's nuclear deterrent or no longer takes it seriously? India has taken steps to avoid escalation with Pakistan in the past, in part because of nuclear fears, but Modi said in his speech following the end of this most recent conflict that India would no longer give in to what he called 'nuclear blackmail.'
I argue in my book that what we call nuclear blackmail is actually just nuclear deterrence. We're simply applying a value judgment to the deterrer: In this case Pakistan, but it's also how Vladimir Putin's nuclear signaling is described in European and American commentary about the war in Ukraine.
When it comes to Pakistan's nuclear signaling, it had several audiences. One was, of course, the Indians, and I think this crisis perhaps told the Pakistanis that some of the older assumptions they might have retained about the ways in which India would be deterred are no longer sufficient.
The second is the United States. This is what really gave me concern in the early days of the crisis. Traditionally, we in the United States have seen a pressing national interest in preventing India and Pakistan from getting into direct clashes, but this is a very different Washington, and based on the statements from the administration, it wasn't clear that the US saw it as in its interest to get involved. But then whatever the US saw in its intelligence reports changed that pretty quickly.
So initially, you saw JD Vance coming out and saying this is none of our business, then very soon after was working the phones with the Indian prime minister. I suspect what we saw was the Pakistanis beginning to either talk about moving their nuclear weapons around or actually moving nuclear weapons around in a way that convinced the United States that, if the escalation continued, we could end up in a place where things could get really ugly.
I think we saw that we still have an interest in not seeing the nuclear taboo broken anywhere in the world. And I think even if your worldview is that we should be placing America first, that interest doesn't fundamentally change.
Over the past few weeks, we've seen more non-nuclear countries talk about whether they should get their own weapons. Several countries in Europe are talking about it. There's a very active debate in South Korea. Do you think we could see more countries going nuclear in a world where US security guarantees seem a little less ironclad than they used to?
The United States has played a vital, I would argue, load-bearing function in global non-proliferation, by virtue of extending its own nuclear defense to a long list of countries around the world. There's more than 50 countries to which the United States extends assurances that it will use all of its military capabilities, including nuclear weapons if necessary, to defend these allies.
I should emphasize that these allies, at no moment, really have been perfectly assured. This is fundamentally a promise that the United States makes that's very difficult to render fully credible. We're essentially telling non-nuclear countries, including some that share borders with countries like China — like North Korea, like Russia — that we would be willing to run the risk of nuclear war on their behalf. And that sounds a little crazy, and from the perspective of our allies, that's part of the reason why they've been very skittish, historically, about the statements our national leaders make.
So, as we sort of live through the first few months of the second Trump administration, for the first time since the end of the Cold War, the level of interest among many allies of the United States in acquiring nuclear weapons is higher than it has been in decades. Again, not everything about this new nuclear age is new. During the Cold War, we did have prominent concerns from allies about these very same issues. The West Germans wanted nuclear weapons. The South Koreans had a covert nuclear program that the United States put in the box in the late 1970s. So we've been here before.
But, of course, today, the kinds of dynamics we're seeing now are fundamentally a lot more serious. Because I would argue that the United States is currently in the process of relitigating its entire grand strategy. It is rethinking the role that it sees for itself in the international system and its relationship to long-standing alliances. So this increases the pull of nuclear weapons [for some countries].
Now, does this mean that nuclear proliferation is preordained in the 21st century and the third nuclear age? I don't think so. I think for a variety of very good reasons, allies will be very careful about how they choose to proceed, even if they have a national conversation about whether nuclear weapons potentially answer some of the sources of insecurity they currently perceive. Even if they answer that question in the affirmative, there's a second question that they then have to ask, which is, well, how do we get them, and what would the costs be? That is where things start to get a lot more complicated.
What do you think is going to be the lasting legacy of the war in Ukraine on the nuclear weapons front? On the one hand, we've seen the threat of nuclear weapons brandished by Vladimir Putin in a really alarming way. On the other hand, the fact that nuclear weapons been used, shows that deterrence and the taboos against their use are still at least partly in effect, right?
I mean, my book exists because of the Ukraine war. I think the Ukraine war has been the biggest wake-up call, [showing] that we have arrived in this new nuclear era where we, once again, need to think about the possibility of global nuclear conflict.
It's not that we live in the world of the Cold War, where we are worried about massive nuclear exchanges or first-strike scenarios. I think the most likely scenario leading to nuclear use today would be a conventional war or a crisis that either directly implicates the nuclear-armed states or implicates their national interests in a way that's likely to draw them into a conflict.
I think Ukraine is the first conflict, in many ways, of this new nuclear age, in that it has definitely tested many of our beliefs about nuclear deterrence and has really revealed the opportunities and limitations with deterrence. Deterrence has been beneficial for both NATO and Russia in seeking their political ends: Russia to carry out its conventional war, NATO to support Ukraine militarily.
Both Russia and NATO have respected fundamental red lines as they perceive them on the other side, but at the same time, each party has been frustrated with its ability to fully implement its plans. If Russia were more successful with its nuclear threats, NATO wouldn't be in the position where it ended up supplying Ukraine and ensuring that Ukraine could put up an effective conventional military resistance. Similarly, NATO hasn't been able to implement a no-fly zone over Ukraine or put its own boots on the ground. So deterrence doesn't solve all your problems, but it certainly is an important factor in shaping the modern battlefield between nuclear-armed countries and their patrons.
When it comes to the current administration, Donald Trump has made several comments about how seriously he takes the threat of nuclear war, and he's even proposed 'denuclearization' talks with China and Russia. But do you see any signs that this kind of talk is actually being turned into policy?
I don't see a big policy push on arms control or even nuclear policy matters. The Trump administration, for the moment, doesn't appear to be deeply interested in questions of nuclear policy, and so things are really just on autopilot from where the Biden administration left off.
That said, Donald Trump certainly has spoken about nuclear weapons quite a bit. He's cited them as an existential threat to humanity. He's pointed out on multiple occasions that he sees nuclear war as a greater threat to mankind than climate change. And he has said for decades that he does have an interest in something resembling arms control. In the 1980s, he even said that one of his greatest dreams of life was to negotiate an arms control agreement.
So I do think as a second-term president, he does appear to be more concerned with matters pertaining to his personal legacy. I think that explains some of what we've seen with regard to talk of, for instance, territorial conquest of Canada, Greenland, and Panama, and so we might see a similar impulse as he tries to renormalize relations with Russia, to broach the topic of arms control.
Now the risk here is, of course, that the Russians will be a lot better prepared. I think the Russians have a policy process at the moment that will lead to them having a much clearer sense of what they would want to ask of the United States in that arms control negotiation. Arms control has always been a means to advance national security. It hasn't been an end in itself.
During the first Trump administration, Trump did authorize his envoys to try to seek arms control breakthroughs with both Russia and China. It just so happened that at the time, neither country really saw a national interest-based case for engaging with the United States in good faith on arms control.
So it's possible that we get arms control. It just might not be the kind of arms control agreement that would advance US or allied national interests.
Next year, we're going to see the expiration of New START, the last significant treaty putting limits on the size of the US and Russian nuclear arsenal. What happens after that? Could we see the kind of arms build-ups we saw during the Cold War again?
The idea that we're going back to a world of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons is just not consistent with the current state of the nuclear enterprise. It would just be incredibly costly. But what I think the end of New START will mark is the formal arrival of a more dangerous, multipolar nuclear era to which the United States will look to respond, and there's a really active debate about how it will respond.
One of the fundamental changes for the United States, in particular, but also for American allies and even non-ally countries like India, is the remarkable shift that we've seen in China's approach. We don't understand exactly why that change has happened, but the change is that China has moved from a nuclear force that for decades remained fairly low in terms of numbers to a nuclear force that the US intelligence community now estimates will potentially reach 1,500 warheads by the mid 2030s.
That's still less than the current deployed nuclear force that the United States and Russia maintain under new START. But the question for the United States if you're looking at Russia as well as China, as well as a North Korea that probably is soon going to have as many warheads as China did at the start of the start of the 2020s, is whether the US might need more tools in its nuclear to
\olkit. This, I think, is going to be the fundamental question for the Trump administration.
There are realistic things the US could do, like it could put additional nuclear warheads on intercontinental missiles and submarine-launched missiles that, for arms control reasons, largely have deployed for a number of years with less than the total number of warheads they can accommodate.
But if Russia and China determined that the US response to this new environment will require them to also make adjustments to their own nuclear postures, we end up in an arms race, and we end up in a world where we face greater nuclear dangers because all three of the major nuclear powers will see incentives to posture their nuclear and conventional forces in more dangerous ways.
It certainly seems, as you note in the book, that despite the growing dangers, nuclear weapons are still not as prominent in our political debates or the culture (notwithstanding) as they were in the Cold War. Certainly, younger generations don't have the same visceral experience with this as those who lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis or the 1980s arms build-ups did. Do we, as Americans, particularly younger Americans, need to be more worried about nukes?
For me, I lived in India in 1998, the year India tested a nuclear weapon. The next year, in 1999, India and Pakistan fought a war in the nuclear shadow. And so, I'm a millennial, but that gives me a perspective that's not too common in the United States or in the West. I think millennials and Gen Z, these generations that have come of age in largely peaceful and prosperous Western countries in the aftermath of the Cold War, will need to wrap their heads around this really important source of catastrophic risk for humanity.
There's a fine line between being alarmist and trying to inform the public, and I hope my book walks that tightrope appropriately. It's not that, you know, I think we all need to run around with our hair on fire about global thermonuclear war breaking out at any moment, but the message for future generations is that nuclear weapons very much deserve our attention, especially in democracies where citizens vote for their lawmakers and for their national leaders.
In the United States, when it comes to matters of nuclear war, the president has absolute authority. There's not a second center of decision-making. The greatest way we could actually mitigate some of these risks is to have more conscientious national leaders.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

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Atlantic

12 hours ago

• Atlantic

The Only Iran Hawk Is Trump

By carrying out air-strikes on three Iranian nuclear sites last night, Donald Trump showed the fundamental error of American political ornithology: There have never been Iran hawks and Iran doves. There have been only doves. Every prior U.S. president, including Trump himself, has refrained from attacking Iranian territory, even in response to killings and attempted killings of Americans, not only abroad but also on American soil. Whether this dovish approach was wise is debatable; that it was anomalous among American policies toward hostile countries is not. Imagine if Venezuela relentlessly plotted to kill Americans, in locations around the world—and tried to acquire a weapon that would safeguard its campaign of violence for generations to come. Other countries have not been so bold as Iran, and if they had been, the response might have looked like what Iran saw last night in Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. At a press conference, Trump said the nuclear sites were 'completely and totally obliterated.' Also beyond debate are the results of that dovish policy, up to yesterday. Some of those results were positive. The United States and Iran were not at war, and American forces in the Middle East were not all at high alert for reprisals. But Iran had gone metastatic. It had, with impunity, set up armed proxies in Lebanon, Yemen, Gaza, and Iraq, and less overt forces around the world. What other country does this? What other country does this without rebuke? The best argument against attacking Iran's nuclear program has always been that the attack will not work—that it would at best set the program back, rather than end it, and that Tehran would respond by building back better, in a deeper bunker and with greater stealth. An enrichment facility capable of producing a nuclear weapon need not be large, perhaps with the size and power needs of a Costco or two. The Obama-era nuclear deal secured unprecedented access for monitoring Iran's known nuclear sites. The demolition of those sites means that any future ones will be unmonitored, remaining a secret from outsiders for years, like China's was. Think of the cavernous chemistry lab built below the laundry-processing plant in Breaking Bad, but churning out uranium-235, not blue meth. If any other country is thinking about going nuclear, it will learn the lesson of last night and start with the Breaking Bad approach, or better yet scrap its plans completely. From the perspective of nonproliferation, Trump's strikes could be good news, in the obvious sense that countries that desire nuclear weapons now have more reason to think their centrifuges will be destroyed before they produce enough material for a bomb. Up to now, most countries that have persevered have eventually succeeded in going nuclear. The most notable counterexamples were Iraq, whose so-called 'nuclear mujahedin' (as Saddam Hussein later called them) had their enrichment plant at Osirak bombed by Israel in 1981; and Syria, which built a secret plutonium-producing nuclear reactor only to have it destroyed, again by Israel, in 2007. If the strikes last night worked (and it is far too early for anyone, including Trump, to say), Iran will join the small club of nations whose nuclear ambitions have been thwarted by force. 'There will be either peace,' Trump said at his press conference last night, 'or far greater tragedy for Iran.' What might peace and its alternatives look like? Trump did not say, as the Iran dove George W. Bush might have, that peace is conditional on the overthrow of Iran's theocracy. Trump has always seemed open to Iran's continued rule by any authoritarian or scumbag or religious nut who is willing to keep to himself and maybe allow the Trump family to open a hotel someday. So peace could conceivably still take many forms, some of which will disappoint Iranian democrats and secularists. The alternative to peace, which Trump promises will draw such a tragic reply, can take both immediate and longer-term forms. The immediate form is continued Iranian strikes against Israel and the expansion of those attacks to include U.S. bases in the region. (The logic of international law, for what little it is worth, would seem to permit retaliation against military targets—but not hospitals, apartment buildings, or other civilian infrastructure—of both Israel and the United States.) It would at this point be foolhardy for Iran to increase such attacks, rather than ending them or tapering them off. But no one familiar with Iran's history would expect it to limit its reply to conventional strikes, or to prefer them to the irregular forms of attack that it has practiced avidly for more than 40 years. A barrage of ballistic missiles, the regime understands, may invite a tragedy for Iran. But what about the mysterious disappearance of an American from the streets of Dubai, Bahrain, or Prague? Or the blowing up of a hostel full of Israelis in Bangkok? Or cutting the brakes of some American or Israeli diplomat's car in Baku? Small acts of harassment, such as these, force Iran's enemies to make hard choices about how to retaliate. The difficulty of those choices are part of the reason for past presidents' consistent reluctance to attack Iran. Do you attack Iran after the death of one U.S. Marine? How about two? How much proof of Iranian involvement in a diplomat's car crash will it take to trigger a renewed state of war? Iran's history suggests that under normal circumstances, it knows the level of provocation that will keep an American president from responding with direct force. Its estimations seem to have failed it for Trump (and Benjamin Netanyahu), but in the past and in the future, one can expect that it will, like a niggling spouse from hell, know the precise limits of its adversaries' patience. The point of the prolonged pressure, staying a smidge under the threshold of renewed hostility, is to drive Iran's adversaries mad, to tire them out, and to convince them to leave the region out of sheer stress and weariness. Ironically Trump's foreign policy is, or was until yesterday, proof that this strategy is effective. Trump came to power as an isolationist in trade and a bring 'em home skeptic of U.S. military action abroad. In his first term he fired John Bolton, a tireless advocate of regime change. In his second he appointed Tulsi Gabbard, high priestess of weary isolationism, as a top adviser. Trump said that he would escalate American attacks 'if peace does not come quickly.' It is possible that peace will come quickly, and Iran's government will survive in humiliated form. It is also possible, under those circumstances, that the peace that comes quickly will again be illusory, and Iran will revert to tactics short of war, so it can wait out Trump's term, and let another dove take his place. In that case, the Middle East and beyond will be a scarier place to be an American than it was a few days ago.

Vox

13 hours ago

• Vox

This time, it's Trump's war

is a senior correspondent at Vox covering foreign policy and world news with a focus on the future of international conflict. He is the author of the 2018 book, Invisible Countries: Journeys to the Edge of Nationhood , an exploration of border conflicts, unrecognized countries, and changes to the world map. US President Donald Trump addresses the nation, alongside US Vice President JD Vance, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, from the White House in Washington, DC on June 21, 2025. Carlos Barria/Pool/AFP via Getty Images Donald Trump claimed during his 2024 campaign for president that America had fought 'no wars' during his first presidency, and that he was the first president in 72 years who could say that. This was not, strictly speaking, true. In his first term, Trump intensified the air war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, ordered airstrikes against Bashar al-Assad's Syrian regime in response to chemical weapons use, and escalated a little-noticed counterinsurgency campaign in Somalia. But in those cases, Trump could say, with some justification, that he was just dealing with festering crises he had inherited from Barack Obama. Likewise, the president has repeatedly claimed that the wars in Gaza and Ukraine never would have happened had he been president when they broke out, rather than Joe Biden. That's a counterfactual that is impossible to prove, and he may have been overly optimistic in his promises to quickly negotiate an end to both those conflicts, but it's fair to say that both are wars Trump inherited rather than chose. This time, it's different. This time, it's Trump's war. On Saturday night, the United States bombed three nuclear sites in Iran at Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan, ending weeks of speculation about whether the US military would join the Israeli war on Iran that began more than a week ago. The past few days in Washington have felt a bit like the battles over intelligence in the lead-up to the war in Iraq, but run in fast-forward. Rather than pressuring intelligence agencies to justify his preferred course of action, Trump has simply overruled them. Rather than building a case before Congress and the UN for the need to act, he's simply ignored them. Trump argued that Iran brought the attack on themselves by not taking the deal he was offering — but negotiations were ongoing at the time Trump abandoned the diplomatic path. Trump endorsed the Israeli assessment that war was necessary because new information showed Iran was 'very close to having a weapon.' But this contradicts the very recent statements from his own intelligence agencies and director of national intelligence. According to the Wall Street Journal's reporting, officials in these agencies were not convinced by Israel's new evidence that something dramatic had changed in Iran's nuclear program. It also contradicts Trump's own statements from earlier this month when he publicly discouraged Israel from attacking Iran, saying it would derail his efforts to negotiate a new nuclear deal. It's hard to overstate just how fast the Trump administration's policy has shifted. Just a month ago, Trump appeared to be giving Netanyahu's government the cold shoulder, pursuing direct diplomacy with Israel's staunchest enemies – including Iran – and cozying up to governments in the Gulf that plainly had no appetite for a new war. Now Trump has not only endorsed Netanyahu's war; he has joined it, and boasted in his brief statement from the White House on Saturday that the two had worked as a team like 'perhaps no team has ever worked before.' He ended his speech with 'God bless Israel' along with 'God bless America.' Tonight was also a major blow to those on the right, as well as some on the left, who hoped that the Trump administration would usher in either a new era of military restraint or a shift in priorities away from the Middle East toward China. (The US has now relocated military assets from Asia for this war.) There's still a lot we still don't know, but it's fair at this point to say that this is a war of Trump's choosing. Trump's extraordinary gamble In his statement from the White House on Saturday night, Trump said that the operation had been a 'spectacular military success' and that the enrichment facilities had been 'totally obliterated.' For the moment, we don't have corroborating evidence of that. Israel had mostly avoided striking these sites itself. Only the US has the powerful GBU-57 'bunker buster' bombs that can destroy Iran's most security nuclear sites, particularly the underground uranium enrichment facility at Fordow, and only the US has the aircraft that can carry them. US officials told the New York Times that US bombers dropped a dozen bunker busters on Fordow on Saturday. Many experts believe the facility would be difficult to destroy and require multiple strikes, even with those bombs. Doubts about whether Fordow could be destroyed were reportedly one reason why Trump hesitated in ordering these strikes. In his statement, Trump also implied that this was a one-off operation for now. Speaking of the pilots who dropped the bombs, Trump said, 'hopefully we will no longer need their services at this capacity' but also threatened that if Iran did not 'make peace' then 'future attacks will be far greater and a lot easier.' He added: 'There are many targets left.' The hope appears to be that Iran will now be forced to cut a deal to entirely give up its nuclear program. But an Iranian regime mindful of its own legitimacy is also likely to retaliate in some form, possibly by targeting some of the roughly 40,000 US troops deployed around the Middle East. The hope may be that these will be limited tit-for-tat strikes like those that followed the US assassination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani in 2020, though subsequent assessments have found that those attacks did more damage than was initially thought and could easily have killed far more US troops. In any event, the Iranian regime is far more desperate now, and once the missiles start flying, it could get very easy for things to escalate out of control. If Iran has any remaining enrichment infrastructure, either at these sites or hidden elsewhere throughout the country, the country's leaders may now feel far less hesitation about rushing to build a bomb. There was long a view that Iran's leaders preferred to remain a 'threshold nuclear state' — working toward a bomb without actually building one. In this view, they believed that their growing capacity to build a weapon gave them leverage, while not actually trying to build one avoided US and Israeli intervention. That logic is now obsolete. It's also not clear that Israel simply wants nuclear concessions from the Iranian regime. While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that new intelligence about Iran's nuclear capabilities was the reason for starting this war, it's been clear both from the Israeli government's rhetoric and choice of targets that this is a war against the Islamic Republic itself, and that regime change may be the ultimate goal. Trump didn't mention regime change in his statement, but he has now committed American military power to that Israeli war. So far, this war has been characterized by stunning Israeli tactical successes, as well as the seeming impotence of Iran and its once vaunted network of regional proxies in its response. (Though it's unclear how long Israel's air defense system can keep up if Iranian strikes continue at this pace.) This may have emboldened a president who has backed off of actions like this in the past, convincing him that striking Iran's nuclear program now would be effective and that the blowback would be manageable.

Vox

14 hours ago

• Vox

This time it's Trump's war

is a senior correspondent at Vox covering foreign policy and world news with a focus on the future of international conflict. He is the author of the 2018 book, Invisible Countries: Journeys to the Edge of Nationhood , an exploration of border conflicts, unrecognized countries, and changes to the world map. US President Donald Trump addresses the nation, alongside US Vice President JD Vance, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, from the White House in Washington, DC on June 21, 2025. Carlos Barria/Pool/AFP via Getty Images Donald Trump claimed during his 2024 campaign for president that America had fought 'no wars' during his first presidency, and that he was the first president in 72 years who could say that. This was not, strictly speaking, true. In his first term, Trump intensified the air war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, ordered airstrikes against Bashar al-Assad's Syrian regime in response to chemical weapons use, and escalated a little-noticed counterinsurgency campaign in Somalia. But in those cases, Trump could say, with some justification, that he was just dealing with festering crises he had inherited from Barack Obama. Likewise, the president has repeatedly claimed that the wars in Gaza and Ukraine never would have happened had he been president when they broke out, rather than Joe Biden. That's a counterfactual that is impossible to prove, and he may have been overly optimistic in his promises to quickly negotiate an end to both those conflicts, but it's fair to say that both are wars Trump inherited rather than chose. This time, it's different. This time, it's Trump's war. On Saturday night, the United States bombed three nuclear sites in Iran at Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan, ending weeks of speculation about whether the US military would join the Israeli war on Iran that began more than a week ago. The past few days in Washington have felt a bit like the battles over intelligence in the lead-up to the war in Iraq, but run in fast-forward. Rather than pressuring intelligence agencies to justify his preferred course of action, Trump has simply overruled them. Rather than building a case before Congress and the UN for the need to act, he's simply ignored them. Trump argued that Iran brought the attack on themselves by not taking the deal he was offering — but negotiations were ongoing at the time Trump abandoned the diplomatic path. Trump endorsed the Israeli assessment that war was necessary because new information showed Iran was 'very close to having a weapon.' But this contradicts the very recent statements from his own intelligence agencies and director of national intelligence. According to the Wall Street Journal's reporting, officials in these agencies were not convinced by Israel's new evidence that something dramatic had changed in Iran's nuclear program. It also contradicts Trump's own statements from earlier this month when he publicly discouraged Israel from attacking Iran, saying it would derail his efforts to negotiate a new nuclear deal. It's hard to overstate just how fast the Trump administration's policy has shifted. Just a month ago, Trump appeared to be giving Netanyahu's government the cold shoulder, pursuing direct diplomacy with Israel's staunchest enemies – including Iran – and cozying up to governments in the Gulf that plainly had no appetite for a new war. Now Trump has not only endorsed Netanyahu's war; he has joined it, and boasted in his brief statement from the White House on Saturday that the two had worked as a team like 'perhaps no team has ever worked before.' He ended his speech with 'God bless Israel' along with 'God bless America.' Tonight was also a major blow to those on the right, as well as some on the left, who hoped that the Trump administration would usher in either a new era of military restraint or a shift in priorities away from the Middle East toward China. (The US has now relocated military assets from Asia for this war.) There's still a lot we still don't know, but it's fair at this point to say that this is a war of Trump's choosing. Trump's extraordinary gamble In his statement from the White House on Saturday night, Trump said that the operation had been a 'spectacular military success' and that the enrichment facilities had been 'totally obliterated.' For the moment, we don't have corroborating evidence of that. Israel had mostly avoided striking these sites itself. Only the US has the powerful GBU-57 'bunker buster' bombs that can destroy Iran's most security nuclear sites, particularly the underground uranium enrichment facility at Fordow, and only the US has the aircraft that can carry them. US officials told the New York Times that US bombers dropped a dozen bunker busters on Fordow on Saturday. Many experts believe the facility would be difficult to destroy and require multiple strikes, even with those bombs. Doubts about whether Fordow could be destroyed were reportedly one reason why Trump hesitated in ordering these strikes. In his statement, Trump also implied that this was a one-off operation for now. Speaking of the pilots who dropped the bombs, Trump said, 'hopefully we will no longer need their services at this capacity' but also threatened that if Iran did not 'make peace' then 'future attacks will be far greater and a lot easier.' He added: 'There are many targets left.' The hope appears to be that Iran will now be forced to cut a deal to entirely give up its nuclear program. But an Iranian regime mindful of its own legitimacy is also likely to retaliate in some form, possibly by targeting some of the roughly 40,000 US troops deployed around the Middle East. The hope may be that these will be limited tit-for-tat strikes like those that followed the US assassination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani in 2020, though subsequent assessments have found that those attacks did more damage than was initially thought and could easily have killed far more US troops. In any event, the Iranian regime is far more desperate now, and once the missiles start flying, it could get very easy for things to escalate out of control. If Iran has any remaining enrichment infrastructure, either at these sites or hidden elsewhere throughout the country, the country's leaders may now feel far less hesitation about rushing to build a bomb. There was long a view that Iran's leaders preferred to remain a 'threshold nuclear state' — working toward a bomb without actually building one. In this view, they believed that their growing capacity to build a weapon gave them leverage, while not actually trying to build one avoided US and Israeli intervention. That logic is now obsolete. It's also not clear that Israel simply wants nuclear concessions from the Iranian regime. While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that new intelligence about Iran's nuclear capabilities was the reason for starting this war, it's been clear both from the Israeli government's rhetoric and choice of targets that this is a war against the Islamic Republic itself, and that regime change may be the ultimate goal. Trump didn't mention regime change in his statement, but he has now committed American military power to that Israeli war. So far, this war has been characterized by stunning Israeli tactical successes, as well as the seeming impotence of Iran and its once vaunted network of regional proxies in its response. (Though it's unclear how long Israel's air defense system can keep up if Iranian strikes continue at this pace.) This may have emboldened a president who has backed off of actions like this in the past, convincing him that striking Iran's nuclear program now would be effective and that the blowback would be manageable.