WASHINGTON — President Trump, with his decision to order U.S. military strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, 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 would address the nation about the strikes at 10 p.m. Eastern 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 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 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 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 whether 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 said 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.
But to destroy the Fordo nuclear fuel enrichment plant, Israel had appealed to Trump for the U.S. bunker-busting bombs, the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, which uses its immense weight and sheer kinetic force to reach deeply buried targets and then explode. The penetrator is currently delivered only by the B-2 stealth bomber, which is found only in the American arsenal.
The bomb carries a conventional warhead and is believed to be able to penetrate about 200 feet below the surface before exploding, and the bombs can be dropped one after another, effectively drilling deeper and deeper with each successive blast.
The International Atomic Energy Agency has confirmed that Iran is producing highly enriched uranium at Fordo, raising the possibility that nuclear material could be released into the area if the GBU-57 A/B were used to hit the facility.
Trump’s decision for direct U.S. military intervention comes after his administration made an unsuccessful two-month push — including with high-level, direct negotiations with the Iranians — aimed at persuading Tehran to curb its nuclear program.
For months, Trump said he was dedicated to a diplomatic push to persuade Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions. And he twice — in April and again in late May — persuaded Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to hold off on military action against Iran and give diplomacy more time.
The U.S. in recent days has been shifting military aircraft and warships into and around the Middle East to protect Israel and U.S. bases from Iranian attacks.
All the while, Trump has gone from publicly expressing hope that the moment could be a “second chance” for Iran to make a deal to delivering explicit threats on Khamenei and making calls for Tehran’s unconditional surrender.
“We know exactly where the so-called ‘Supreme Leader’ is hiding,” Trump said in a social media posting. “He is an easy target, but is safe there – We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now.”
The military showdown with Iran comes seven years after Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Obama administration-brokered agreement in 2018, calling it the “worst deal ever.”
The 2015 deal, signed by Iran, the U.S. and other world powers, created a long-term, comprehensive nuclear agreement that limited Tehran’s enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions.
Trump decried the Obama-era deal for giving Iran too much in return for too little, because the agreement did not cover Iran’s non-nuclear malign behavior.
Trump has bristled at criticism from some of his MAGA faithful, including conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, who have suggested that further U.S. involvement would be a betrayal to supporters who were drawn to his promise to end U.S. involvement in expensive and endless wars.
The action by Trump immediately raised some concerns among U.S. lawmakers that the president had exceeded his authority.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) quickly posted on the social media site X: “This is not Constitutional.” California Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) said on social media that Trump hit Iran without congressional authorization and that lawmakers should pass a resolution he’s sponsoring with Massie “to prevent America from being dragged into another endless Middle East war.”
Vice President JD Vance in a lengthy posting on X earlier this week defended his boss, while acknowledging that “people are right to be worried about foreign entanglement after the last 25 years of idiotic foreign policy.”
“But I believe the president has earned some trust on this issue,” Vance wrote. He added, “I can assure you that he is only interested in using the American military to accomplish the American people’s goals.”
Madhani and Boak write for the Associated Press. Madhani reported from Morristown, N.J.
