The Coversation:

By Ian Parmeter
Research Scholar, Middle East Studies, Australian National University

After prevaricating about whether the United States would enter Israel’s war on Iran, President Donald Trump finally made a decision.

Early Sunday, US warplanes and submarines struck three of Iran’s nuclear sites at Natanz, Isfahan and Fordow, where the Iranians have a uranium enrichment plant buried about 80 metres beneath a mountain.

These strikes have to be viewed as part of an overall continuum that began with the Gaza war following Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and then continued with Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah (the Iran-backed militant group in Lebanon) and the fall of the Iran-backed Assad regime in Syria.

Iran has never been weaker than it is now. And when Trump said it may take two weeks for him to decide whether to bomb Iran, the Israelis likely pushed him to act sooner.

We can assume there was a lot of Israeli pressure on Trump to use the massive ordnance penetrators, the 30,000-pound (13,600-kilogram) “bunker buster” bombs that only the US can deploy with its B2 bombers.

Now that Trump has taken the significant step of entering the US in yet another Middle East war, where could things go from here? There are a few possible scenarios.

1. Iran strikes back

The Iranians know they don’t have the strength to take on the US, and that the Americans can do enormous damage to their country and even put the Iranian regime’s stability at risk.

This is always the prime consideration of the clerical regime led by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei – everything else is subordinate to that.

To gauge Iran’s possible reaction, we can look at the how it responded to the first Trump administration’s assassination of the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ elite Quds Force, Qassem Soleimani, in January 2020.

Iran said there would be a major reaction, but all it did was launch a barrage of missiles at two American bases in Iraq, which caused no US fatalities and very little damage. After that token retaliation, Iran said the matter was closed.

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