Trump Enforces His Red Line on Iran

National Review Online

Saturday, June 21, 2025

 

President Trump has been quite clear for as long as he’s been in politics that under his watch, Iran would never be allowed to get a nuclear weapon. In the early months of his second term, he said that he hoped to be able to find a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear threat but, if not, he was prepared to take military action. On Saturday night, he followed through.

 

After a week of Israeli attacks that took out Iran’s air defense systems, crippled its military command, and dealt damage to its nuclear program, Trump delivered what was intended to be the death blow. He ordered American bombers to strike Iranian nuclear facilities at Natanz, Isfahan, and the heavily fortified Fordow. While there was great debate over whether Israel was capable of finishing off Fordow without access to B-2 bombers or 30,000-pound “bunker busters,” U.S. action was clearly the most straightforward path to taking out the facilities.

 

While we await a damage assessment, it is already obvious that the Trump administration, after a week of leaks and intrigue, achieved an extraordinary level of operational security. Not until the president announced that the bombs had been dropped and U.S. planes were on their way back did anybody report what had happened.

 

It’s worth bearing in mind that for decades, Iran has pursued nuclear weapons, in fits and starts — set back by sanctions and Israeli sabotage operations. But before Israel launched a preemptive strike, the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency determined that Iran had been enriching uranium well beyond the level of civilian use, and closer to military grade. With a bit more enrichment, the regime had enough uranium for perhaps ten bombs.

 

Trump tried to get Iranians to agree to a real nuclear deal. Not a rebranded version of the Obama deal, which allowed Iran to continue enriching uranium and to develop ballistic missiles, but a true deal that ended the threat of enrichment and nuclear weapons. Last Thursday, Trump gave the regime in Tehran an ultimatum: The mullahs needed to conclusively abandon their nuclear enrichment program or face devastating American strikes within the next two weeks. But it became instantly clear that Iran was not willing to change its terms and had no intention of ever giving up enrichment. If Trump was to show he was serious about stopping Iran from getting nuclear weapons, he had no choice but to attack.

 

As we noted previously, such action should have been approved by Congress. Since the 9/11 attacks and the resulting congressional Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), presidents have liberally directed military strikes on the rationale that the targets were connected to 9/11 and its aftermath. Iran fits that bill. Moreover, presidents have long had authority to respond, even without congressional authorization, to attacks on American forces and interests. Iran has used proxies to attack Americans for nearly half a century, including the Houthis in Yemen, to whose provocations Trump responded with bombings just a few weeks ago. It would have demonstrated constitutional fidelity for Trump to ask Congress for a new AUMF, specifically tailored to Iran. But his ordering of attacks on the nuclear facilities of the “Death to America” regime are consistent with the American approach to the jihadist threat over the past quarter century, and the vow of several American presidents that Iran could not be permitted to possess nuclear weapons. Congress should not have been so willing to delegate its war powers, but the president was right to grasp that this target is the world’s leading state sponsor of anti-American terrorism.

 

The prospect of Iran’s radical Islamist regime obtaining a nuclear bomb has haunted American foreign policy for decades. During that time, the regime has carried out terrorist attacks throughout the world via proxies and killed hundreds of U.S. servicemen serving in the Middle East. Had they obtained a nuclear weapon, even if they didn’t hit the U.S., they would have been able to shield themselves from retaliation for financing terrorism and engaging in other destabilizing actions in the region.

 

Addressing the nation, Trump said that the nuclear facilities had been “completely and totally obliterated.” While signaling that he was content to let this be the end of the matter, he also said he was prepared to order attacks on other Iranian targets if Iran tried to respond.

 

If indeed the U.S. bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities successfully destroyed the program, Trump’s decision will go down as historically important for eliminating a dire threat to the region and U.S. security.