Israel Attacks Iran—and Burns Down the Off-Ramp With America

The Trump administration, which was ready to negotiate on Sunday, is now gambling on an all-out war.

It took 22 months to get from President Barack Obama's June 2009 speech in Cairo, promising a "a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect," to his decision to bomb Libya in March 2011, opening up a new chapter of America's wars in the region.

President Donald Trump has broken that record. Just last month, he was in Saudi Arabia promising the end of the "neocon" era and a future "where people of different nations, religions, and creeds are building cities together, not bombing each other out of existence." Now he's cheering on the Middle Eastern equivalent of Pearl Harbor. And he reportedly used the promise of talks as a smokescreen for the opening shots of this war.

The United States and Iran were scheduled for a round of negotiations over the Iranian nuclear program in Oman on Sunday. Trump even hinted at a grand bargain involving the United States, Israel, and Iran to end the war in Gaza, which continues to drag on.

But on Thursday night, Israeli bombs brought down apartment buildings in a surprise attack on Tehran, killing several generals and nuclear scientists as well as other bystanders. The Israeli military also hit military bases around Iran, and it claims to have damaged the Natanz uranium enrichment plant. Iranian media estimate the casualties at 73 deaths and 329 injuries, including women and children.

"I gave Iran chance after chance to make a deal. I told them, in the strongest of words, to 'just do it,' but no matter how hard they tried, no matter how close they got, they just couldn't get it done," Trump wrote on Truth Social on Friday morning. "I told them it would be much worse than anything they know, anticipated, or were told, that the United States makes the best and most lethal military equipment anywhere in the World, BY FAR, and that Israel has a lot of it, with much more to come."

Trump said that Iran could still accept a deal "before there is nothing left," and a Trump administration official told Reuters that "we still intend to have talks Sunday." That ship seems to have sailed, though. State media in both Iran and Oman have announced that the negotiations are officially over. One of the officials killed in his home, after all, was Ali Shamkhani—the top Iranian nuclear negotiator.

"The Zionist regime at dawn today extended its vile and bloody hand to commit a crime in our dear country and revealed its evil nature more than ever by striking residential centers," Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei declared in a statement. "The regime must expect harsh punishment. The powerful hand of the Islamic Republic's armed forces will not let it go, God willing."

So far, Iran seems to have been disoriented, much like the Lebanese militia Hezbollah after the Israeli pager attacks. The Iranian government has apparently been focused on replacing the casualties, who include Gen. Mohammad Bagheri, the military chief of staff, and Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, in charge of Iranian missile forces. In the first few hours after its attack, Israel says, it shot down a slow-moving Iranian drone swarm outside its airspace.

Some of the attacks were reportedly carried out by explosive drones smuggled and launched from inside Iran, much like the Ukrainian attack on the Russian air fleet earlier this month, which suggests a high level of Israeli intelligence penetration of Iran.

Still, Israeli officials are expecting a more serious, drawn-out fight once Iran gets back on its balance. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the war will last "as many days as it takes." Hospitals are preparing for mass casualty events. Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, the Israeli army chief of staff, declared that "the expected cost will be different from what we are used to."

Although the Israeli government claimed the attack was a "preemptive strike" because Iran was rushing to build a bomb, U.S. intelligence said as late as Thursday that it didn't believe Iran was doing so. In March 2025 interview with Politico, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance predicted this kind of escalation on a thin pretext.

The Iraq War was caused by the emotional "need to fuck something else up, and Afghanistan didn't satisfy that need," Vance said. "If I have a big fear for Israel, right now, it's [about] the same exact dynamic—that they're going to need to try to fuck something else up, because the psychology impact of [the Hamas attacks on] October 7 was so, so powerful."

For an attack aimed at taking out Iran's nuclear program, the Israeli raids left out one curious target: Fordow. The Fordow uranium enrichment plant was not attacked last night, the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) confirmed. Buried inside a mountain, the Fordow plant is designed as a survivable backup site and is the most likely site for a dash to the bomb.

That dash seems increasingly likely to happen for real now. IAEA Director-General Raphael Grossi told The Jerusalem Post earlier this week that Iranian leaders had clearly told him that an Israeli attack would push them towards building a bomb. After all, the lessons of Libya and North Korea (and perhaps Ukraine) suggest that nuclear weapons are a valuable insurance policy and that giving them up invites invasion.

"If [the Israelis] don't destroy Fordow, this entire effort is basically for nothing," Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at the Middlebury Institute specializing in nuclear arms control, wrote on X. But there's a hard limit on what Israel can do by itself. Only the United States is believed to have bunker buster bombs capable of penetrating into Fordow, so Israel may be betting on American involvement in later raids.

Indeed, Israeli officials have told Axios that the Trump administration had pretended to oppose an war as a ruse, even leaking to the press that Trump had told Netanyahu not to strike in a phone call that was really coordinating for the attack.

Immediately after the air raids, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that U.S. forces were "not involved" in the "unilateral" Israeli operation. That turned out to be a distinction without much of a difference. Trump promised to jump in to defend Israel from the consequences of its attack. The only question is how direct U.S. involvement will be—and that's a question neither Congress nor the public seems to have a say in.

Although the usual suspects—neoconservative Republicans and a few hawkish Democrats—were cheering on the war, many other members of Congress came out immediately and unambiguously against U.S. involvement. Senate Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Jack Reed (D–R.I.) denounced the "reckless escalation" that threatens "the safety of American citizens and forces" in the region. Rep. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) posted plainly: "No war with Iran. The Neocons latest plan must be opposed."

And Sen. Chris Murphy (D–Conn.) laid out exactly what the stakes are. "Israel's attack on Iran, clearly intended to scuttle the Trump Administration's negotiations with Iran, risks a regional war that will likely be catastrophic for America," he wrote on X. "As Secretary Rubio stated, the United States was not involved in today's strikes, and we have no obligation to follow Israel into a war we did not ask for and will make us less safe."