The Cost of Waiting

By Noah Rothman

Friday, June 20, 2025

 

New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller made a good point during her Friday appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe — but not about the extent to which the shadow of the universally reviled Iraq War looms menacingly over Donald Trump’s legacy as he contemplates joining Israel in its attacks on Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Rather, she noted that the president’s decision to revert to his nebulous “two weeks” formulation while he waits for Iran to come to its senses (so far, no sign of that) “puts Israel in a really tough strategic situation.”

 

“Israel, as we know, is quickly running out of interceptors to intercept the missiles that Iran is lobbing,” she observed. “So, it’s a question of who has more missiles, who has more interceptors.” In addition, if America withholds its 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrators, Bumiller noted that Israel’s plan B for neutralizing Iran’s Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant involves a significant deployment of Israeli special forces to Iran to take the plant out of commission “manually.”

 

Bumiller is correct to observe that Israel is running low on its stockpiles of the kind of interceptor missiles that can countervail incoming Iranian ballistic missiles. “Neither the U.S. nor the Israelis can continue to sit and intercept missiles all day,” Tom Karako, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the Wall Street Journal’s Shelby Holliday. “The Israelis and their friends need to move with all deliberate haste to do whatever needs to be done, because we cannot afford to sit and play catch.”

 

In addition, the risks to Israeli forces grow exponentially if they must engage in a significant sabotage operation inside Iran. Israel has already disclosed that a small number of special operators have been at work disabling Iranian military infrastructure from the outset of this campaign, but an operation against Fordow would require a larger footprint. Infiltrating and exfiltrating those troops from a combat zone would be risky, as would a combat operation designed to seize the crown jewel of the Iranian nuclear program. “To gain access to and destroy the centrifuges widely believed to be at Fordow with sufficient explosives runs the risks of heavy casualties on all sides,” Durham University professor Clive Jones observed.

 

Israel is prepared to go it alone. Indeed, it has been going it alone, and its tactical successes are, thus far, impressive. But the number of lethal Iranian rockets finding their targets inside Israel is growing, and the war will continue with all its attendant consequences until Israel achieves its strategic objective of defanging the Iranian nuclear threat. There is a cost to Donald Trump’s hesitancy. It may be born in Israeli blood. But if the operation against Fordow that Israel may be forced to reluctantly undertake fails, it will be a strategic debacle not just for Israel but for the United States.