At this point in the Israel-Iran conflict, the biggest question is: where is it going to end? What’s Israel’s endgame here? And, well, who is going to ultimately win this war, if wars are ever won and if there can be a victor and a vanquished in this particular one?
Broadly, there are only a handful of possible outcomes of this war. There can be a nuclear treaty with Iran that limits Iran’s ability to produce a nuclear bomb better than the one Trump walked out of in his first term. The persistent attack on state institutions and functionaries in Iran may result in the collapse of the state, paving the way for a regime change. And then there might be some kind of agreement suitable to all three parties, the US included.
The third outcome and the least preferable is where Israel manages to drag the US into the war and succeeds in persuading Trump to give Israel what it needs to take out Fordo Fuel Enrichment Plant (FFEP), Iran’s most well-protected nuclear facility. Fordo was built deep inside a mountain to protect it against the heavy bombing from advanced fighter jets, so it is immune to aerial bombing, no matter how intense. The only bomb capable of destroying the site is a 20-feet long “bunker buster” formally called Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) or GBU-57, weighing 30,000 pounds (13,600 kg), and designed specifically to destroy exactly such facilities as Fordo. The only vehicle big enough to take GBU-57 to the target site is the American B-2 stealth bomber. And Israel has neither the bomb nor the bomber.
Furthermore, it will take a trained American pilot to fly GBU-57 to Fordo on a B-2 bomber, meaning the US will have to be directly involved in the conflict, which amounts to the US declaring all-out war on Iran, for which Trump would need Congressional authorization. While there might be a bit of a grey area when it comes to presidential powers to send troops into a foreign country, post-9/11, there is little ambiguity that only Congress can declare war on a foreign nation.
Also, Iran has not attacked the US, so it would be an unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation, which is well outside the self-defence exception of international law. Besides, no US interest is directly served by a military attack on Iran. Those factors alone — not to mention several others — make it unlikely for Congress to greenlight a war against Iran.
Israel, on the other hand, is not as interested in a treaty-driven curb on Iran’s nuclear capabilities as it is in the complete destruction of Iran’s physical capability to produce the N-bomb, which is why it has been persistently lobbying for the US to join its war on Iran by assisting it with the bunker buster and a B-2 bomber. So far Trump has resisted, but, like he said, you never know what he’ll do (“Nobody knows what I am going to do”).
Even though Trump seems to have walked back from his election promise of not starting any new wars, he has been reluctant to directly take on Iran militarily, threats aside. For its part, Iran has refused to accede to Trump’s capital-lettered demand for “TOTAL SURRENDER!”, and has sent a fresh barrage of missiles into Israel to underscore the point in deed that Iran’s “Supreme Leader” had made when he said in response to Trimp’s call for surrender: “Iran stands firm in the face of imposed war, just as it will stand firm against imposed peace, and it will not yield to any imposition.” That’s where we are with the US-Iran pulling and shoving.
Iran’s Nuclear Capability
Nobody wants Iran to have nuclear weapons. So it’s only about figuring out the best way to stop Iran most effectively and for the longest possible duration. Israel sees a nuclear Iran as an existential threat, which is understandable, given that destroying Israel has been Iran’s credo since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Since the Revolution, Iran has also extended every kind of support to Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebonan and Houthis in Yemen, and the three militant outfits have constantly targeted Israel with everything they have had. So if the very idea of a nuclear Iran makes Israel antsy, it’s not without reason.
The US does not want a shift in the power balance in the Middle East, which a nuclear-armed Iran would certainly usher in. The rest of the world, too, is not awfully comfortable with the idea of Iran, a known purveyor of Islamist militancy, coming in possession of a usable nuclear bomb. So there are no real dissenters here. The problem, therefore, is not “why” or “what” but “how”.
Israel has so far attacked and severely damaged the Natanz enrichment facility, Iran’s largest uranium enrichment center, where much of Iran’s nuclear fuel is produced. While the facility may have suffered damage, it has not been destroyed. Israel has killed several Iranian nuclear scientists and at least eleven of Iran’s top generals. It has also bombed Iran’s energy infrastructure to administer a severe setback to Iran’s nuclear program. However, the Isfahan facility, where Iran is believed to have stockpiled most of its almost-bomb-grade nuclear fuel remains intact even though Israel did strike Iranian laboratories engaged in converting uranium gas back into a metal, one of the final stages to getting a weapon-grade nuclear device ready. To sum it up, Natanz has sustained serious damage, but Fordo and Isfahan remain intact. Damage to the uranium metallurgy facilities might be a setback, but the laboratories can be up and running in a few years, even if they have been completely destroyed. And generals and scientists are also replaceable.
As of now, most of Iran’s known nuclear facilities have not been destroyed, even though some have been attacked and damaged. But there can always be undisclosed and unknown facilities, a possibility that is quite high on the scale of probability, all things considered. Even Israel and the US together cannot attack what they don’t know about, can they?
To put it simply, it will take a lot of bombing for a very long time for Iran’s ability to put together a nuclear bomb to be completely off the table. And it may not be militarily possible because even though Israel is a formidable military force, Iran is no sitting duck. The military entanglement, therefore, is unlikely to result in a denuclearized Iran, and nothing short of a complete destruction of Iran’s nuclear capabilities would be a satisfactory outcome for Israel, which might not happen even if the US takes GBU-57 to Fordo on a B-2 bomber.
And here is the kicker: an attack by a nuclear-armed adversary is an argument for nuclear armament, not against it. So even a regime change may not be enough for Iran to drop its nuclear ambitions permanently. I wonder if there are any long-term options here that I do not see. What we have, as far as I see, are a bunch of bad and worse outcomes of every possible choice.
Originally written and published as a Substack Post on June 21, 2025.
