The Iran Strikes: Six Answerable Questions

Following the dramatic June 22 U.S. strike on Iranian nuclear sites, questions abound related to the “day after.” The minimal Iranian missile response on June 23 and the fragile emergence of a cease-fire announced by President Donald J. Trump the evening of June 23 point the way toward de-escalation. At this point, some questions related to the situation can be answered, and those answers offer valuable insight into those questions that cannot yet be answered and how they might impact the trajectory of the cease-fire and the conflict caused by Iran’s long-term pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability or near capability.

Were the Strikes Successful?

This question can be answered in various ways. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Major General D. Caine answered yes, but his frame of reference was primarily military and technical. Most importantly from the perspective of any military commander, the operation was carried out exactly as planned and without U.S. casualties, in contrast to the last major mission inside Iran, the 1980 Desert One U.S. Embassy rescue mission. Though the Pentagon is awaiting a battle damage assessment before answering what degree of destruction of decisive nuclear program components, especially centrifuges, was achieved, it is likely that the damage was considerable. This does not mean that Iran cannot reconstitute the program, just as Saddam Hussein did after Israel’s 1981 strike targeting Iraq’s nuclear development program. But the likely results – massive damage to infrastructure that will take years to replace and confirmation that the states that just bombed Iran’s nuclear program could easily do it again – could well constrain Iran’s nuclear program and possibly its broader threats to the region.

Was the Rationale for the Strikes Valid?

Relations between major state rivals should not be analyzed as single episodes – a diplomatic exchange here, a bombing raid there – but rather in the context of wider issues. In this regard, the relevant factors are, first, Iran’s 40 plus year quest for hegemony in the Middle East, fueled by both nationalism and religious ideology, and second, its extraordinary success in that quest for the 20 years after 2000, expanding its reach in five Arab states (counting Gaza) through ideologically fraternal local proxies, and building up massive “just short of a weapon” fissile material stocks, nuclear weaponization, and long-range missile capability. But the third factor has been the reversal of much of this success, and most of Iran’s regional coercive capabilities, following its proxy Hamas’ massive attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and Iran’s fateful decision to join the conflict along with its other regional proxies.

By early 2025, Iran was left with only its nuclear program as an effective deterrent and coercive tool. Apparently recognizing this, and unwilling to reverse its 40-year effort to dominate the region, Iran doubled down on the nuclear file, increasing enrichment to the point it had arguably enough material at 60% enrichment, close to the level for a weapon, for nine nuclear devices. It also egregiously violated agreements made with the International Atomic Energy Agency, and rejected a very generous offer in negotiations with the administration of President Donald J. Trump to resolve the dispute, including reportedly some limited, temporary enrichment under international oversight.

Iran’s seeming movement toward nuclear weapons was so worrisome that on June 12 the IAEA Board of Governors, for the first time in 20 years, formally declared Iran in breach of its nuclear nonproliferation safeguard commitments.

There is considerable debate about competing intelligence reports on Iran’s capabilities and intentions, most notably a recent Director of National Intelligence report that argued Iran would need three years to produce a deliverable (a long range missile warhead) nuclear weapon, and that the supreme leader had not given the order to actually build one. Even if this assessment was correct, it is not incompatible with others that argue Iran was within weeks or less of sufficient fissile material enriched to over 90% and thus capable of being quickly fashioned into those nine crude nuclear devices. Moreover, there were signs Iran was “cheating” on its 2003 decision not to continue its already very advanced weaponization research and engineering.

This author had oversight for monitoring the Iranian and Syrian nuclear programs in the administration of President George W. Bush. The first reality then was that intelligence is often ambiguous if not contradictory. Following the “slam dunk” controversy with the Iraq nuclear file, the intelligence community erred toward caution, especially if its findings could be used for military action. The second reality is that at a certain point, sometimes before intelligence on a nuclear program is definitive, the adversary crosses a point of no return, where military action is not advisable because of risk of radioactive contamination (a concern with the Syrian al-Kibar site, for example). Waiting too long also risks the adversary threatening unconventional means to deliver a crude nuclear device in response to efforts to end a program.

What Was the Legal Case?

Legal considerations, both under international law and under domestic U.S. law, are important considerations in any military decision, but they are often complex, including in the case of the Iran strike.

First, traditional international law of war, basically incorporated in the Geneva Convention, up to World War II was relatively clear. However, in reaction to the huge civilian loses in that conflict, and in light of progressive, often anti-war sentiments in Western countries shaping much of international legal thinking, new, more moralistic but less clear principles emerged. These focused on international humanitarian law, difficult to define concepts such as “proportionality,” and institutions such as the Genocide Convention and the International Criminal Court, which taken together arguably render suspect almost any military action undertaken by a Western state (the only states that embrace these expanded concepts).

The result is that Western states actually involved in serious military action, the United States, Israel, Turkey, and Ukraine, often just ignore these modern interpretations of jus ad bellum (the right to go to war) and jus in bello (the right conduct in war). Rather, older concepts, such as the Right of Self Defense under the United Nations Charter’s Chapter 51, are embraced.

Here the Trump administration is on relatively solid footing. The Islamic Republic of Iran’s first interaction with the United States was an act of war in the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in 1979. Subsequently, Iran has arguably been in a perpetual state of war with the United States, not only declaring itself innumerable times the enemy of America but striking out repeatedly, usually through proxies, such as in Beirut in 1983 and Iraq after 2003, but at times directly – the embassy seizure, 1988-89 Tanker War, and 2011 attempt to blow up Washington’s Cafe Milano. The United States at times has countered directly, from the embassy rescue mission and the Tanker War through the killing of Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force leader Qassim Suleimani to this latest strike, but more often, as in 2024, against Iranian proxies, in what has often been called a decades-long “Shadow War.”

Current international law is uncomfortable with this whole thematic but has not consistently condemned it.

The domestic legal picture is just as murky. The aforementioned U.S. attacks on Iran, along with scores of other military actions and deployments, have been “gray zone” operations largely without declarations of war or other formal congressional partnering, such as under the War Powers Resolution of 1973. The exceptions have been major ground combat commitments in scenarios much resembling classic war fighting – Kuwait 1991, Afghanistan 2001, and Iraq 2003 – all of which had some form of congressional authorization. If the current conflict with Iran does not expand broadly (see below) it will fall under the first domestic gray zone case above, not the second, conventional conflict one. As with international law, this is ambiguous and troubling but falls short of illegal.

Does This Open the Door to a “War Without End?”

War outcomes are even more unpredictable than other human endeavors, but an analysis of the legitimate public disdain for endless wars suggests that, while Trump’s strike decision may turn out badly or ambiguously (arguably like his recent campaign against the Houthis), it is unlikely to degenerate into an endless war scenario like Afghanistan, Iraq, or Vietnam.

The salient characteristic of all three of those calamities was commitment of hundreds of thousands of ground troops with attendant casualties and huge costs. Moreover, unlike Kuwait’s liberation or Korea, the national interest at stake in those three conflicts was not clear or accepted, and the justification given, variants of regime change, nation building, or winning hearts and minds, soon looked like mission impossible.

However Iran works out, whatever blunders Trump might make, and thus far his approach has borne substantial fruit, there will almost certainly not be major ground deployments. Moreover, the goals at stake – nonproliferation, global hydrocarbons flow, Israeli security, and counterterrorism – are legitimate, if potentially difficult to achieve, and all resonate with broad swaths of the American people.

Wasn’t This All the Result of Trump Pulling Out of the JCPOA?

There are legitimate arguments for and against Trump’s 2018 decision to pull out of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action Nuclear Agreement with Iran, but the above question misinterprets what the JCPOA actually did, as opposed to administration propaganda at the time (John Kerry: “lasting” effects). The JCPOA restricted the nature, size, and output of Iran’s enrichment program and reduced dramatically its enriched uranium stocks. But as President Barack Obama once admitted, that was to last only for 10 years. Thus, even with the JCPOA, six months from now these restrictions were to begin ending, with most gone by 2029, and with opportunities for Iran to cheat on commitments as is now clear.

But the JCPOA also “legitimized” internationally Iran’s right to enrich at essentially any level beginning after 2025 and effectively ignored Iran’s prior nuclear weaponization work, long-range missile buildup (handled poorly in U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231) and Iran and proxies’ regional advance. The JCPOA thus arguably encouraged Iran to think that, if it granted temporary and reversible enrichment concessions, it would have a free hand on the rest of its agenda.

Will the Strike Help or Hurt a Comprehensive Diplomatic Resolution With Iran?

Media is much focused on this argument, fueled by the Iranian foreign minister’s charge that Trump “betrayed diplomacy,” and echoed by PBS headlines June 22 reporting that many nations are calling for a return to diplomacy. The jury is still out on this specific question but not on the erroneous thinking behind it, the same thinking that tragically enabled Iran’s 2000-23 march through the region.

That thinking assumes that “force” and “diplomacy” are conceptionally parallel but opposing tactics to advance national interests, with diplomacy supposedly always better as it is cheaper, more moral, and more successful. But the two concepts are not parallel; rather, war is a subordinate element or tool of diplomacy as electrons are to atoms, or protein to nutrients. Wars to be sure end with “diplomacy” but its contents (e.g., the diplomacy of Japan’s 1945 surrender) depend on the course of events including decisively military victories and defeats.

And diplomacy from Versailles 1919 to the Oslo Accords also has a record of failure analogous to military endeavors. Securing national interests in a turbulent world is tough, and all means may be necessary, including force, to that end.

As there thus is no hard and fast principle that military action undercuts diplomacy, then the strikes do not automatically exclude later negotiations or even understandings with Iran. But in any case, the strikes have changed the underlying dynamics that shape diplomacy in a way positive to diplomatic success. The analogy here is the Yom Kippur War. Israel’s battlefield success and Washington’s strong military actions against the Soviets’ intervention threat paved the way to dramatic diplomatic results changing the Middle East for the better.

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