When Israel’s air force attacked Iran last month, it targeted a key facility believed to be part of the country’s quest to develop a nuclear weapon. But the Israelis know that if they really want to damage Iran’s bomb-building plans, they’ll have to return—and they’ll need help from the U.S.
The key question for both the Israelis and Iran—and the wider Middle East—is whether the incoming Trump administration will be on board.
The answer depends on who one thinks will make the call.
Donald Trump has been a staunch defender of Israel. And he’s appointed a number of officials to key national security posts who have histories of being hawks on Iran. These include Mike Waltz, his new national security adviser; Marco Rubio, Trump’s nominee for secretary of state; and Elise Stefanik, the incoming ambassador to the UN.
Pete Hegseth, who Trump named last week as his nominee for secretary of defense, called for U.S. military strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites in 2020 while serving as a Fox News host. And the new Republican leader in the Senate, John Thune of South Dakota, told Israelis and Jewish leaders on Tuesday that “reinforcements are on the way.”
Netanyahu met with Republican senator Lindsey Graham—a foreign policy confidante of Trump’s—in Jerusalem on Sunday. “In Senator Graham’s estimation, a nuclear-armed Iranian ayatollah is an existential threat to Israel and a nightmare for the world,” according to a readout of the meeting from his office.
Still, Trump campaigned this year against ensnaring the U.S. in another Mideast “forever war.” And some of his closest advisers, both inside the MAGA political movement and within his family, have been sharply critical of Republican hawks, who they charge drove the U.S. into wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Indeed, as The Free Press reported last week, Trump’s eldest son, Don Jr., and media personality Tucker Carlson campaigned to deny former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo the position of Pentagon chief because they felt he was too committed to the use of military force.)
Israeli officials voiced confusion in recent days over a report in The New York Times that billionaire businessman Elon Musk, a Trump adviser, held a secret meeting with an Iranian official at the United Nations after the U.S. election, potentially to set up a direct diplomatic line to Tehran. (Iran denied the story.) And Trump’s vice president–elect, J.D. Vance, went on Face the Nation last year to say he opposed using U.S. force against Iran, though he said Tehran needed to respect Washington’s “red lines.”
During the October 26 attack, Israel bombed Parchin, a military facility south of Tehran that U.S. intelligence believes has played a central role in nuclear weapons research for two decades. The strike destroyed scientific equipment used in atomic bomb development, three people briefed by the Israelis on the operation told The Free Press.
David Albright, founder and president of the Institute for Science and International Security, told The Free Press that an Israeli official who briefed him on the strike said Netanyahu’s government believed it disrupted Tehran’s “ability to make a nuclear weapon” by destroying equipment and components stored there. That equipment would be expensive and difficult for a highly sanctioned country like Iran to replace.
“Whatever equipment was taken out is no longer available and has created some bottlenecks in their system,” agreed Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who has spoken with senior Israeli officials in recent days.
On Tuesday, Albright’s institute published satellite photos of the facilities at Parchin. (News of the attack on the Parchin facility was first published by Axios on Friday.)
But Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders have stressed in recent days that Iran’s overall nuclear program remains largely intact—and is expanding. And they’ve signaled that future strikes against Tehran may need to more comprehensively degrade Iran’s ability to make nuclear weapons.
“[Iran’s] arming with nuclear weapons can roll back all the great achievements we have achieved,” Netanyahu told the Israeli parliament, or Knesset, on Monday. “There is a certain component in their nuclear program that was damaged in the attack. But still, the program itself, its ability to operate here, has still not been thwarted.”
Israeli officials acknowledge that any major military operation against Iran’s nuclear sites would almost certainly need active U.S. military support to succeed. Some of Tehran’s most important facilities, such as the uranium enrichment site at Fordow, are buried deep underground in fortified bunkers. Israel’s air force would almost certainly need access to the Pentagon’s bunker-busting munitions—in particular, a bomb called the Massive Ordnance Penetrator—to hit these sites. Israel would also likely need the aid of U.S. airmen to fly the B-2 bombers capable of delivering these bombs.
Iran has developed a vast nuclear infrastructure over the past two decades, ostensibly for peaceful purposes. But Iran’s parliament, or Majlis, announced this spring that it was vastly expanding the funding and military activities of a secretive ministry of defense office, called the Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research. (It’s widely known by its Farsi language–based acronym, SPND.)
The facility Israel struck last month at the Parchin military base, called Taleghan 2, played an important role in SPND’s overall activities, people briefed on the Israeli operation told The Free Press.
U.S. and Israeli intelligence officials have detected Tehran engaging in computer modeling and metallurgy experiments that could be used in nuclear bomb development, according to people briefed on the classified information. It’s unclear if the Israel strike was designed specifically to halt this type of work. But the people briefed by the Israelis said the attack on Taleghan 2 was clearly a signal from Netanyahu’s government that it knows what Iran’s pursuing.
As the Mideast struggles to assess Trump’s new policy, the hope among some Iran watchers is that the president-elect can blend the threat of force with diplomacy to strengthen the nuclear deal with Tehran that Barack Obama brokered in 2015, and that Trump killed three years later. Trump has already demonstrated a willingness to hit Tehran hard when he authorized the assassination of Iran’s top general, Qasem Soleimani, in 2020. Now, he might be preparing to back this with a diplomatic push.
Iran’s chief diplomat, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, signaled last week on X that he was ready to talk: “Attempting ‘Maximum Pressure 2.0’ will only result in ‘Maximum Defeat 2.0.’ Better idea: try ‘Maximum Wisdom’—for the benefit of all.”
Jay Solomon is an investigative reporter for The Free Press and author of The Iran Wars. Follow him on X at @FPJaySolomon, and read his piece, “How Close Is Iran to the Bomb?”
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