By Jim Geraghty
Friday, March 28, 2025
As of Friday afternoon, there are at least five U.S. Air
Force B-2 bombers at Diego Garcia. That’s a quarter of the B-2s in the fleet —
a deployment that Air & Space Forces magazine characterized as “unusual”:
It’s an unusual deployment for
the B-2. While Diego Garcia hosts Air Force bombers on a fairly regular basis,
B-2s haven’t spent significant time there since 2020. Last August marked the
first time in four years that a B-2 even touched down there when a bomber made
a quick “hot pit” stop with its engines running.
A spokesperson for AFGSC said
multiple bombers are on the island but could not comment on why they are there.
An official previously said that the command “routinely conducts global
operations . . . to deter, detect and, if necessary, defeat strategic attacks
against the United States and its allies.”
Northrop B-2 Spirits are what the U.S.
Air Force uses when it needs to drop very powerful bombs in a very stealthy
manner. Among those very powerful bombs is the Massive Ordinance Penetrator
(MOP) Bunker-Buster, a 30,000 pound bomb that is described as “the most powerful and deeply burrowing non-nuclear bunker
buster on earth.” In fact, the B-2 is the only plane that can carry a MOP.
The MOP is exactly the sort of weapon you would use if
you wanted to hit Iran’s underground nuclear facilities. On March 25, Iranian state media “showed
Iranian Armed Forces Chief of Staff General Mohammad Baqeri and Amir Ali
Hajizadeh, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Aerospace Force commander,
showing off what Iranian media said was an ‘underground missile city.’”
(Howard Altman of The War Zone noted
that from what viewers could see in the video, “The munitions are stored out in
the open in long continuous tunnels and large caverns with no, or at least
limited, blast doors or separated revetments. That could result in devastating
consequences should the facility be breached in an attack. The lack of these
protective measures could lead to an absolutely massive chain reaction of
secondary explosions.”)
As of May 2024, Iran has 42 declared facilities and at
least 8 suspected facilities in its nuclear program.
The Pentagon used Diego Garcia for airstrikes against the
Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in 2001 and Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq
in 2003, and for several years afterwards.
Earlier this month, the Pentagon sent a second aircraft carrier to
the Middle East; the USS Carl Vinson and its accompanying destroyers
will join the USS Harry S. Truman carrier strike group.
You may recall that one week after President Trump took office, the Iranian
regime instructed commanders of Iran-backed militias to avoid provocative
actions that could escalate regional tensions. (Apparently, the Houthis missed
that memo, and you saw how that turned out for them.)
Back in February, Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared
that negotiations with America “are not intelligent, wise or honorable” and
that “there should be no negotiations with such a government.”
Undeterred, Trump reached out. In an interview with Maria Bartiromo on March 7, Trump said
he had written to Khamenei: “I said, I hope you’re going to negotiate, because
it’s going to be a lot better for Iran.” “There are two ways Iran can be
handled: militarily, or you make a deal,” he said. “I would prefer to make a
deal, because I’m not looking to hurt Iran. . . . I’m not sure that everybody
agrees with me, but we can make a deal that would be just as good as if you won
militarily.”
This weekend, the answer from Khamenei and the Iranian
government was clear. They’re not interested in direct talks. “In this
response, although direct negotiations between the two parties are rejected, it
has been stated that the path for indirect negotiations is open,” Iranian
President Masoud Pezeshkian said, according to Iranian state media.
Also over the weekend, an Iranian official talked up his
country’s potential retaliation in an interview with The Telegraph:
A senior Iranian military
official told The Telegraph that Tehran would strike the joint US-UK naval base
on Diego Garcia in response to any US attack.
“There will be no distinction in
targeting British or American forces if Iran is attacked from any base in the
region or within the range of Iranian missiles,” he said on Saturday.
He added: “When the time comes,
it won’t matter whether you’re an American, British, or Turkish soldier — you
will be targeted if your base is used by Americans.”
Iranian state media said that
Tehran would strike the Diego Garcia facility with ballistic
missiles and suicide drones in retaliation for any US “hostile action against
the Iranian nation”.
It warned: “Iran possesses
adequate weapons for such an attack from its mainland, such as newer versions of the Khorramshahr missile that have an intermediate range, and the Shahed-136B kamikaze
drone with a range of 4,000km [2,485 miles]”.
As long as that drone’s range sounds, Diego Garcia is
2,358 miles from the closest point in Iran; there are American defense experts
who doubt the range and capability of Iran’s long-range attack missiles and
drones. With that said, the regime in Tehran can take a lot of shots; the United States Strategic Command declared in its most recent
review that Iran has built the Middle East’s largest
and most diverse arsenal of conventional ballistic missiles.
As I discussed with Hugh Hewitt Friday afternoon, the irony
is that a negotiation with Donald Trump is far and away the best opportunity
the Iranian regime is ever going to get. In Trump’s first term, he negotiated
with Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong-un. At minimum, none of those
leaders were harmed by negotiating with Trump. You could argue that Kim Jong-un got the attention and engagement he craved, at
least for a while.
What does Iran have to lose by reestablishing relations
with the U.S. and having a summit meeting? Almost nothing. They could drag out
negotiations if they wanted, creating more time for enrichment. They’ve got
less and less leverage. They lost their allied regime in Syria. Russia is
largely tied up with Ukraine. China isn’t going to stick its neck out for them.
In an early morning interview with NBC News Sunday,
President Trump said of Iran, “If they don’t make a deal. there will be
bombing. It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before.”
Trump really loves reaching a deal that no one else could
reach. If “only Nixon could go to China,” then perhaps only Trump could sign a
deal with the Iranians and convince Republicans it is a good idea. And he’s not
the kind of guy who gets hung up on details. First-term Trump made a huge deal
about tearing up NAFTA, only to replace it with USMCA, which was “actually mostly identical to NAFTA.”
The fact that Iran has rejected the offer for direct
talks reaffirms what many of us have suspected for decades: That in the end,
the mullahs and the whole regime are so vehemently and inextricably hostile to
the United States that no reasonable deal can ever be reached with them. All of
that “death to America” chanting isn’t for show. Or perhaps now that they’ve
spent more than four decades chanting that, and demonized (quite literally) America so intensely, they’ve boxed
themselves in and can’t turn around and make a deal with the Great Satan, even
when a good deal is on the table.
I am fond of looking back at Fareed Zakaria’s June 2009 cover piece for Newsweek declaring, “Everything you know about Iran is wrong,” asserting
that Iran didn’t really want to build nuclear weapons, that the regime isn’t
suicidal, that the regime “behaves in a shrewd, calculating manner, advancing
its interests when possible, retreating when necessary,” and that the country
isn’t a dictatorship. It turns out that almost everything Zakaria knew about
Iran was wrong, and that many of the Iran experts urging engagement were seeing
what they wanted to see — that is, when they weren’t advising the U.S. government while being on Tehran’s payroll.
ADDENDUM: Yesterday on Fox News Sunday, Trump White House senior counselor for trade and manufacturing Peter Navarro once again insisted “tariffs are tax cuts.” Credit Jeff Blehar for recalling that just last summer, JD Vance said in an interview with Ross Douthat, “Well, as the libertarians always say, a tariff is a tax.”
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