Ten Iranian Questions
What Trump’s Strike Means for Iran, the Middle East, and American Power.
By Victor Davis Hanson
June 23, 2025
1. What are we to make of Saturday night’s destruction of the three Iranian nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan?Trump and the U.S. military took a great risk and succeeded in astounding fashion. Operationally, the destruction of the nuclear sites seems to have gone perfectly, in contrast to a long history of America’s Middle East debacles from the failed 1980 Carter rescue mission to the 2021 flight from Kabul.
The long-overdue message to Iran is that there are finally consequences for a half-century effort of killing Americans, promising death to the U.S. and Israel, and attempting to murder a U.S. president.
It’s also surreal to see leftist critics now say that Trump deviated from past presidents’ heroic, peaceful efforts to negotiate an end to the Iranian nuclear threat, when suddenly, after assuming office, Trump was apprised that Iran was weeks away from getting a bomb.
So, how did that happen after all those heroic diplomatic efforts? Why was the Iranian bomb program not ended during the Biden administration’s last four years? And who but Barack Obama opened the floodgates of Iranian revenue to fund these monstrous programs?
How strange the legal criticisms of the left are. In 2011, repeatedly bombing and killing hundreds of Libyan civilians and setting off a decade of chaos and mayhem were constitutionally okay, but a one-mission taking out a rogue nation’s nuclear facilities that threatened world peace and likely killed few, if any, civilians was unconstitutional and amoral?
Note well: Obama bombed, with B-2s no less, Libya again on his last full day in office in 2017—to finish off his disastrous five-year-long Susan Rice/Samantha Power/Hillary Clinton (“We came, we saw, he died”)/Ben Rhodes-directed destruction of Libya.
In the end, critics on the left and right are flummoxed and left sputtering only, “Iran cannot get a nuclear weapon”—even as every prior president had failed to slow Iran’s progression to a bomb—until Trump alone just did.
Intelligence-wise, it was quite stunning how there were no leaks but lots of successful misdirection and deceptions, such as redeploying the B-2s to Guam. It also made sense to strike early in Trump’s two-week window of warning, as otherwise, each day of quiet worked against the element of surprise.
It was not exactly rah-rah, Yanqui recklessness, but rather almost inevitable. Trump had warned the Iranians on numerous occasions. They never got the message. They were apparently listening to the American Left’s smears of Trump as a “TACO” (“Trump Always Chickens Out”)—a silly slur phrase that just died Saturday night.
The decision thus became whether the world wanted another North Korea in the Middle East or not. Even our enemies probably did not.
Trump has now given Iran the chance of a one-off attack and a return to negotiations—but over what, given that Iran now has nothing to negotiate with other than the survival of its regime?
Again, the fact that the operation was so complex and went apparently according to plan will impress allies and warn enemies—and make Iran worry that more of the same could come and be as effective.
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