Special Roundtable on Iran

Bold success? Dangerous risk? Distraction? Our experts discuss.

Operation “Midnight Hammer,” launched by the United States following Israeli strikes on Iran, has captured the world’s attention. As global audiences watch for signs of escalation or regional spillover, analysts examine to what extent the U.S. and Israeli attacks have meaningfully set back Iran’s nuclear program. In this special post, Blue Blaze columnists, joined by several experts in international security, offer early reactions and assessments.

Our experts discuss the following questions:

1. Why is a nuclear-armed Iran unacceptable?

2. Why do proponents support the strike?

3. How should we think about the various criticisms of the attacks?

4. Do these kinds of preventive strikes work?

5. If hostilities resume and escalate, how might Iran attack the United States?

6. Are there interesting technological lessons from this strike? Any indication of weapons or doctrinal innovation?

7. What does the strike suggest about the Trump admin’s broader national security policy?

8. Did the strike succeed in halting Iran’s nuclear program?

9. Was the US strike on Iran constitutional? Was it legal under international law?

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Q. Let’s take a big step back. Why do people argue that the United States and Israel cannot tolerate Iran having nuclear weapons?

KIRSHNER: Because they don’t know the difference between “cannot tolerate” and “really don’t like that.”

BYMAN: The argument is straightforward, especially for Israel. Iran has long been hostile to Israel, putting it front and center in the regime’s rhetoric (a former Iranian president declared Israel a “one bomb country” and supporting a range of proxy groups, especially the Lebanese Hezbollah but also others. It’s not hard to see why this mix of rhetoric and hostile actions would make many Israelis fearful of Iran going nuclear, and I don’t think academic pieties about the stability of nuclear deterrence are particularly reassuring for Israelis. For the U.S., it’s much more about regional security interests, but there are also some direct concerns (Iran is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans in Iraq, supported anti-U.S. terrorism at different times, over the years, etc.). I think from a U.S. point of view an Iranian bomb is “bad” or “very bad” while for Israel it is perceived as “existential.”

MILLER: Some politicians argue that if Iran got nuclear weapons, they would not be deterred from using them against the United States or Israel in a crisis or war scenario, or that they would hand off a nuclear weapon to one of their proxies to use. The more realistic concerns are that Iran would be emboldened to act more aggressively with its conventional or proxy forces in the region, banking on the fact that its nuclear arsenal would limit the response of its adversaries, or that its nuclear program would lead other countries like Saudi Arabia to try to acquire nuclear weapons of their own.

Q. Relatedly, why do proponents of the US military strike on Iran’s nuclear program support the move? Why do they argue that it’s necessary or advances US interests?

FRIEDMAN: Proponents of the attack believed that damaging Iran’s enrichment facilities will make it harder for the country to build nuclear weapons. Of course, Iran could always try to reconstruct its centrifuges. But it would be hard for Tehran to do that in secret, without exposing itself to another round of strikes, especially given the degree to which Israeli intelligence has penetrated its security apparatus. In the best-case scenario, credible threats to attack again would deter Iran from trying to rebuild its enrichment facilities in the first place. This, of course, is a risky gambit – critics say the strikes may only redouble Iran’s commitment to obtaining a nuclear weapon.

PRESS: Iran checks off several boxes on the list of traits that you don’t want to see in a country getting nuclear weapons. Even before the war, Iran’s domestic stability was in question. When you see a totalitarian state like Iran beset by anti-government protests, that’s a sign of reduced legitimacy and control. The possibility of future state collapse – and what that would mean for the risk of “loose nukes” – is a key reason to be worried about an Iranian bomb.

Going deeper on this point, Iran’s geography is not reassuring. Compare it to another nuclear-armed country with regime stability concerns: North Korea. Korea is a peninsula and the North has a land border with China. If the government in Pyongyang collapsed, China and South Korea would be in a good position to round up the North’s nuclear materials and prevent that material from escaping. Compare that to Iran: it’s big, it's mountainous, and it's in a region with lots of terrorist groups. Loose nukes in that environment would be a disaster.

Beyond the risk of state collapse is the danger of a regional proliferation cascade – and the resulting demand for ever-expanding US security commitments. Note that the way that the US has prevented nuclear spread in the past is to bolster security guarantees to those who were thinking about going nuclear – as we did to West Germany and later to South Korea. If Iran got nukes there are others in the region that might follow suit, creating significant pressure on Washington to avoid this via security guarantees. A nuclear Iran might lead to US defense treaties with Saudi Arabia and others – something I would greatly prefer to avoid.

Q. Critics of the attack make many arguments. What do you think of them?

“Israel dragged the US into this.”

KIRSHNER: Of course Israel dragged the US into this. I can’t follow the logic of how one could not make that claim.

PRESS: Yes, I think so. A week into the war it was pretty clear that, unless Israel was prepared to launch a major ground operation – Entebbe meets Osiraq – or the US intervened, Fordow would survive the conflict. From a US perspective, a semi-successful Israeli operation meant that Iran would be enraged and also fully capable of enriching its intact HEU in its surviving centrifuges. I understand why, in that context, even a President who badly wanted to stay out of the war authorized a limited strike. Might one even say it showed flexibility and updating on his part?

That doesn’t mean it was necessarily “wrong” or even unwise for Israel to have done this. As Dan Byman noted above, the academic pieties about stable deterrence carry less weight in Israel, which I understand. After decades of murdering each others’ children (blame whomever you’d like for that history), plus years of very provocative statements by Iran’s leaders about nuclear employment, I understand why Israelis would do almost anything to avoid living under an Iranian nuclear threat. Nuclear deterrence feels different when you’re sitting in Tel Aviv, or Seoul for that matter, than in Washington. I only wish the Israelis had had a better answer for (a) Iran’s existing HEU, and (b) the challenges of Fordow than it appears they had when the war started. But in short: US interests and Israel’s interests overlap but aren’t identical–so yes they dragged us in.

HURLBURT: There’s a whole literature that considers agency in security partnerships – it’s a very vexed problem and it’s really worth carefully considering how we define “dragged into” and how we apply those criteria consistently. I certainly see evidence that Israel designed its campaign to produce the outcome we got. What I don’t see in this case is any evidence that Trump officials pushed back, offered any impediments to Israel’s actions or tried to create space to explore other policies. As a policymaker, when I see something described as “dragged into,” that’s what I’m looking for. The Obama Administration’s extended back-and-forth with European partners before the Libya action is an interesting counter-example.

“There was still a chance for a diplomatic solution for preventing Iran from getting nukes.”

BYMAN: I would say there was a chance of a diplomatic solution that would have committed Iran to not weaponizing its nuclear program. Iran, under most variants of the deal that seemed plausible to me, would still have some nuclear program, and much of the dispute was about the extent of the safeguards. So a lot depends on 1. How much you trust Iran and 2. If not, how confident you are in monitoring and verification.

FRIEDMAN: Prediction markets placed the chances of a U.S.-Iran deal around 50% prior to the United States joining the conflict. That outcome is now trading at 40%. This is one indication that the U.S. strike marginally reduced the chances of a diplomatic solution for preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. For comparison, prediction markets put the chances of a U.S.-Iran deal as high as 75% prior to Israel launching its attacks, which indicates that the market thinks the initial Israeli strikes were more disruptive to diplomacy than Washington’s decision to join in.

MILLER: This is probably true. Iran appeared to be seriously negotiating with the United States before the Israeli and American attacks. The sticking point was whether Iran would have to end enrichment entirely. If the Trump administration had been willing to accept a strictly limited enrichment program, along the lines of the JCPOA but perhaps with the sunset provisions eliminated, I think a deal was possible that would have prevented Iran from going nuclear. The Trump administration was not willing to accept this.

“Iran was nowhere near close to getting nukes.”

FRIEDMAN: Prior to the strike there was widespread agreement among experts that it would only take Iran a few weeks or months to produce enough weapons-grade fissile material for a nuclear weapon. Constructing a deliverable weapons could take longer but it is hard to believe that Iran was “nowhere close” to that goal. The relevant question was instead Iran’s willingness to tread that path, and the conditions under which it might do so.

PRESS: Jeff is right. I think people in DC and in the press have been (intentionally) talking past each other on this point. Those who were sounding the alarm about Iran were saying (correctly) that Iran was making two types of important progress toward a nuclear weapon (1) reducing the time required for “breakout” (meaning the time between a decision to acquire an actual bomb), and (2) reducing their nuclear program’s vulnerability so that intervention to stop breakout would be harder. On the other side, those arguing against using force tended to note (correctly) that Iran had apparently not decided to take the fateful step to build a bomb. Both those views were factually correct, and different observers will place more weight on the first or the second. But is it accurate to say that Iran was “nowhere close”? No way.

“The United States will find itself in yet another endless war in the Persian Gulf.”

BYMAN: I could imagine a number of scenarios where this turns out to be a mistake. However, I don’t think there are any plans to put significant numbers of ground troops into Iran (vs. the 2003 invasion of Iraq). And I think Trump is very willing to change his mind if things don’t work out as he imagines.

HURLBURT: If by “quagmire,” you mean a massive or decades-long deployment of U.S. ground troops, probably not. However, if you mean extending for another decade or more Iran and the region’s status as a net exporter of insecurity to U.S. interests and persons, not to mention extending suffering among the region’s own people, then that’s exactly where this is going.

Q. Israel bombed nuclear weapons programs in both Iraq (1981) and Syria (2007). The US debated attacking North Korea and Iran’s nuclear programs at various times. Do operations like this tend to accomplish their goals? Do they backfire? Escalate?

BYMAN: I don’t think we have a simple answer here (especially given the small N). Iraq redoubled its efforts after 1981 (see Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer’s fantastic work on the subject). Syria, to my knowledge, did not invest heavily in a program after 2007. Others know more about North Korea.

MILLER: There is large variation here. The attack on Syria seems to have decisively ended their nuclear program. The attack on Iraq in 1981 set back their nuclear capabilities but increased their motivation to seek nuclear weapons and to do so in a more covert fashion. As a result, the international community was surprised by how much progress Iraq had made toward a bomb in the aftermath of the Gulf War. The Gulf War then damaged Saddam’s nuclear program, but it took a strict UN-backed inspections and sanctions regime to fully dismantle the program after the war.

LIND: On the North Korea comparison, there were times when people urged for a preventive strike, but such advocates always lost the argument. In the early 1990s, after North Korea withdrew from the NPT, some Clinton administration officials considered a preventive strike on North Korea’s Yongbyon reactor. Later, when it looked like North Korea was developing an intercontinental ballistic missile, Ash Carter and Bill Perry in 2006 argued that the US should use force if necessary to stop this. In 2017, North Korea’s ICBM tests and sixth nuclear test led Trump administration officials to debate "bloody nose" options—limited strikes on North Korea. But each time such preventive strikes were discussed, US leaders rejected them because of the fear that an Osirak- (or, now we can say, Fordow)-style strike was viewed as highly likely to escalate to a general war on the peninsula.

Just to be clear, I opposed the use of force then because of that belief. But the hawks then (and today’s supporters of the US strike against Iran) are making important points that we have to grapple with. Today, Carter & Perry (and others who thought like them) could assert that because the US did not strike to prevent the North Korean intercontinental threat, today the US homeland faces the threat of North Korean strikes in the event of war, and the US-ROK alliance is confronting major problems (e.g., doubts that the US would “trade Seattle for Seoul”) that could lead to the end of the alliance. Such doubts are leading many South Koreans to favor acquiring nuclear weapons. So people like Carter & Perry could say, hey, we told you that North Korean ICBMs would create an unacceptable situation for the United States - so unacceptable that the US should accept the high risks of a preventive strike.

So when we think about the US operation against Iran, it’s important to consider not only the costs of a strike but the costs of NOT striking – thinking about the specifics of the Iranian situation but also drawing on lessons from other cases.

Q. In one view, the “12-day war” has ended, without significant retaliation by Iran. But it’s early still. If things escalate, is Iran likely to strike back against Israel and the United States? How would it attack the United States?

BYMAN: I’d highlight three ways to attack the U.S., in order of likelihood: 1. Attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq and elsewhere in the region (which indeed we saw in Qatar); 2. International terrorism, with attacks on the U.S. homeland being hard and the highest risk; and 3. Closing the Strait of Hormuz (though I can easily imagine threats to do so and some limited posturing there).

RUSSELL: Iranian retaliation through cyber attacks is always a possibility. While it is unclear if Iran’s cyber capabilities have been damaged by the recent military strikes, it is prudent to prepare for retaliation in cyberspace. DHS has warned of potential retaliation. Jen Easterly, former Director of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, warned on Sunday that US critical infrastructure owners and operators should be “Shields Up” in expectation of a retaliatory attack in cyberspace.

Iran has sophisticated cyber capabilities (not on par with US and Israel though), and it may choose to retaliate with cyber attacks. Iran has a history of targeting critical civilian infrastructure, such as water systems, energy pipelines, telecommunications networks, financial institutions, and government networks, so these are likely targets in a future attack. Retaliatory cyber attacks could take the form of distributed denial of service attacks, or ransomware or wiper attacks designed to exact an economic penalty or create longer-lasting damage. Iran could also launch a disinformation campaign to erode public confidence in the US or Israel, create confusion, and amplify political and social divisions. The proliferation of interconnected devices (e.g., Internet of Things) has increased the vulnerability of networks, as there are more systems that are interconnected and need increased protection within a network.

Q. Let’s talk technology. This was the first time the Massive Ordinance Penetrator (MOP) has been used. Does the US military strike reflect any weapons, doctrinal, or other innovation? Anything else interesting?

PRESS: In the big picture, this strike was old school: heavy bombers flying transcontinental distances to drop GPS guided bombs – whose major feature of distinction was that they were rather heavy and had a time-delay fuse. This is remarkably retro in today’s era of rapidly evolving air power: e.g., the shift to UAVs, autonomous systems, and munitions that derive their destructiveness from small explosives delivered with precision. Sure there was stealth; sure there was GPS; but the strike on Fordow was an illustration of America’s old airpower capabilities –not its new ones.

One detail I noticed about this operation that might be relevant to broader technological trends: the extent of support that the US allegedly gave to the B-2s over Iran. The raison d’etre of the B-2 is stealthy operations, to permit deep strike in heavily defended airspace. US analysts (and planners) are always asking themselves whether B-2s can still penetrate the heavily defended airspace of peer competitors. We don’t know the answer, of course, but note that against a country with a second-rate air defense capability, which had recently become a fourth-rate air defense capability, the United States still seems to have supported its B-2s with (reportedly) UAV operations to “light up” surviving Iranian air defenses before the B-2s arrived, and by some number of F-35s in an electronic warfare role to make sure the B-2s were safe.

Perhaps the B-2s would have been fine without that support; after all, it’s better to be safe than sorry. But the more we support them to penetrate rather weak air defense networks the more I wonder if we’re confident they can still do their day job.

Q. In the debate leading up to the US strike, the prioritizers/America First-ers were opposed, with the more traditional or neoconservative wing of the GOP in favor. What does the strike tell us about the direction of the Trump administration national security policy?

KIRSHNER: It tells us that US foreign policy is being orchestrated by an ignorant, mercurial would-be strongman. I think it would be a mistake to describe current USFP as having a direction.

BYMAN: I think the divide is overstated. Much of the movement follows Trump happily and will change their views when he changes views. This is a great media story (“Tucker vs. Cruz”) but I don’t think it’s playing out among the broader pro-Trump movement.

FRIEDMAN: President Trump’s willingness to attack Iran shows that his risk tolerance for using force is higher than many people expected. That's frustrating for those who believed Trump's America First agenda meant “no more wars.” But it also contradicts critics’ claims that Trump is an isolationist who will never stick America's neck out on behalf of allies and partners.

LIND: Daryl and I just wrote an essay in Foreign Affairs about a prioritization strategy for the United States. That strategy is aimed at preventing the rise of Chinese dominance in Asia. We lay out the strategy and show how many of the Trump administration’s actions (notably its efforts to get Europe to take responsibility for its regional security) conform with it.

Going to war against Iran certainly does not conform to a prioritization strategy – but of course the US has other interests other than preventing the rise of a rival regional hegemon (and counterproliferation is a major one). The big question is, just how much will the Iran problem derail the Trump administration from the pursuit of prioritization or America First?

If this is indeed a “12-day war,” prioritization remains possible. But there’s the risk that the strike on Iran could lead to the United States getting embroiled in yet another Persian Gulf adventure — but this time with a polarized nation, high deficits, massive debt, and a looming entitlements crisis. Worse still, this time we have a rival superpower, China, to capitalize on our folly: a superpower that will devote attention and resources to strengthening its position in Asia, lamenting that the US is a bad leader that (they will say, “unlike China!”) violates international law—all the while improving the PLA’s ability to invade Taiwan.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that a regime-change operation or other broader war against Iran would be so disastrous that I’m hoping the Trump administration will resist another Middle Eastern “forever war” in order to return to our core national security problem, which is preventing Chinese dominance in Asia–which in my view would be best achieved through prioritization.

HURLBURT: Trump’s decision to use military force on a country that posed no imminent threat, despite having campaigned on peace-making rhetoric, is perhaps the most “normal” policy choice of his second term. It puts him squarely in the tradition of U.S. presidents first resisting, then succumbing to the lure of applying our military’s incredibly powerful hammers to deeply complex policy problems. A legendary 1990s exchange between Colin Powell and my late boss Madeleine Albright crystallized it, in Albright’s words: “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” Powell and Albright, it’s true, were fighting over how to achieve shared U.S. regional goals – not how to insert themselves into FOX News coverage. But the dilemma goes back, if not to Trump’s favorite William McKinley, at least to Harry Truman. This is a reality that prioritizers from both parties have struggled to deal with and seldom acknowledge: the political economy of the U.S. national security establishment is built to give everyone a little bit of what they want, which is the very opposite of prioritization.

Speaking of giving everyone a little bit of what they want, for a brief moment we had a reminder that U.S. public opinion includes a quite strong anti-intervention undercurrent that crosses party lines. Obama, Biden and Trump all found it useful to wield rhetorically against opponents when running for office. Yet here we are.

Q. What about the future of the Iranian nuclear weapons program after this strike? Do we yet have any sense for how much the US has set Iran back? Early reports are now saying only perhaps by a few months.

MILLER: It’s probably too early to say definitively, but a matter of months seems plausible given that the air strikes seem to have damaged rather than destroyed key facilities, and given that the whereabouts of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium (HEU) is unknown. Iran reportedly moved at least a portion of it prior to Israeli and American strikes, suggesting some portion of it is intact. If this is true, it raises the prospect that Iran could develop a new covert enrichment and conversion facility and have a major jump start on producing nuclear weapons using the existing HEU.

Certainly Iran’s motivations to acquire nuclear weapons are higher than they were before the war, and it’s possible they could use the Israeli and US attacks as a justification for leaving the NPT or reducing cooperation with the IAEA.

PRESS: I agree with the thrust of Nick’s comments. It’s strange to me that the US and the Israelis are talking about these recent operations as a success.That seems premature. Did IDF and USAF strikes delay or hasten an Iranian bomb? The conventional wisdom is that Iran hadn’t decided to acquire nuclear weapons before this war - and its enrichment efforts merely were part of a hedging strategy. If that interpretation is correct, then the Israeli and US strikes may have nudged Iran from hedging to acquisition. We may come to learn that the strikes destroyed nearly all the centrifuges, nearly all the centrifuge parts and manufacturing, and set back their program for years. However, given that early reports suggest that Iran’s existing HEU may have been secreted away, it’s also possible that the strikes moved Iran’s timetable up from “likely never” to “about a year from now.” It’s too early to claim victory or defeat.

FRIEDMAN: As I noted earlier, the future of Iran’s nuclear program largely hinges on the prospect of Israel and the United States attacking again if Tehran tries to rebuild its enrichment facilities. The fact that Iran could plausibly rebuild those facilities in a few months is moot if those efforts would simply be demolished by another round of strikes. But it would be no small feat for Israel and the United States to permanently retain the capability and willingness to do that. The resolution of this standoff will thus hinge, in large part, on Iran’s appetite for risk and the credibility it assigns to its adversaries’ threats.

HURLBURT: What if success means “the visuals look cool, no one got killed and we don’t have ground troops there for a decade?” Mainstream discourse has stuck security policy so far off in a corner that non-experts will struggle to come up with a heuristic that sticks – and that’s before we get to the problem of sorting actual facts out of the blizzard of claims.

Q. President Trump didn’t have congressional authority for this strike. Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, a Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said he read about the attack on X. Was this strike unconstitutional?

LIND: by way of background: the Constitution grants Congress the power to declare war. But Article 2 of the Constitution gives the president significant power to deal with threats using military force. Namely, a US president has authority to use military force to defend U.S. personnel, interests, and allies abroad without prior Congressional authorization, especially in limited, short-term military operations. Recall we saw Clinton (in Iraq, Serbia, and elsewhere) and Obama (in Libya) exercise this authority without Congressional approval. So Trump joins previous US presidents in using force to advance what they all said were vital US security interests. See Dartmouth’s Prof. Linda Fowler on “The Decline of Congressional Oversight on US Foreign Relations.”

PRESS: I’m against the steady expansion of presidential authority to use force without Congressional approval. But I don’t see anything new here. A brief online search of US uses of force without congressional approval since 1980 revealed 18 cases. A few of them are debatable (e.g., could the Sulemani strike be covered by the Iraq authorization?), but this is a frequent phenomena. What is leading to this problem? The inherent vagueness of the meaning in the US constitution? Or is it a natural result for a country with a very engaged, globalist national security policy that sees dangers everywhere? I do think this is a problem, but what we saw shouldn’t feel new or unique to those of us following US national security policy for any time.

HURLBURT: As others have noted, Administrations have bypassed Congress for decades now, so it’s hard to argue this strike was more illegal than others. I do want to stress that the Administration’s failure to notify Congressional Democrats in advance is unprecedented and shocking. That sets a precedent that takes us a significant step further away from the checks and balances over war-making that the Founders intended.

Relatedly, was the U.S. strike illegal under international law?

LIND: The UN Charter prohibits the use of force against other countries. Article 51 of the UN Charter says self-defense is permitted only in response to an armed attack or an imminent threat. If the U.S. cannot demonstrate imminence (and in this case I’d love to hear someone try), the US can’t justify this as self-defense. And of course there is no UN Security Council (UNSC) resolution authorizing the use of force against Iran.

Furthermore, when Israel struck the Osirak reactor in 1981 and Syria's al-Kibar reactor in 2007, the UNSC condemned both strikes as illegal. You’re hearing similar reactions today from France, China, and others. Russia also condemned Israel and the United States for violating the UN Charter (it’s heartwarming to see that Moscow suddenly so concerned about violations of sovereignty).

Contributors

Special thanks to our guest experts! Here’s some more to know about them.

Jeff Friedman is Associate Professor at Dartmouth, affiliated with the Dickey Center and its Davidson Institute for Global Security. Jeff is the author of The Commander‑in‑Chief Test: Public Opinion and the Politics of Image‑Making in U.S. Foreign Policy (Cornell University Press, 2023). Stay tuned for his “The World Is More Uncertain Than You Think: Assessing and Combating Overconfidence Among 2,000 National Security Officials,” forthcoming in Texas National Security Review.

Heather Hurlburt is Associate Fellow at Chatham House and a former USTR, White House, and State Department official. Read her here on Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs.

Nicholas Miller is Associate Professor at Dartmouth (part of the Dickey/Davidson community) and an expert on nuclear proliferation. Don’t miss his book Stopping the Bomb: The Sources and Effectiveness of U.S. Nonproliferation Policy (Cornell, 2018). See his recent article “How Nixon Pushed Allies to Build the Bomb” in Foreign Policy, March 20, 2025.

Daryl Press is a professor at Dartmouth and Faculty Director of the Davidson Institute. He’s the author (with Keir Lieber) of The Myth of the Nuclear Revolution: Power Politics in the Atomic Age (Cornell, 2020). East Asia and military analysis wonks, don’t miss Daryl’s recent article (with Nicholas Anderson) in TNSR analyzing the North Korean artillery threat: “Lost Seoul?”

Alison Russell is our NH neighbor – an assistant professor at Merrimack College and a cyber security expert. See her book on Strategic A2/AD in Cyberspace.