Donald Trump’s own military intel says he’s failing to make any progress on the key goal he says his war in the Middle East is designed to achieve.
Assessments by U.S. intelligence suggest Iran would currently need exactly the same period of time to build a nuclear bomb as it would have needed in the aftermath of Trump’s attacks on facilities in the country last June, Reuters reports.
The president claimed after those initial assaults that he had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program. His officials instead suggested the attacks had pushed any prospective timeline on building a bomb back by a year.
Trump's war with Iran has not changed the timeline for how long it would take the regime to build a bomb. Social Media/REUTERS
Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, has told the Senate there was no evidence Iran tried to rebuild those facilities prior to the president’s launch strikes on the regime on Feb. 28.
But Trump himself has maintained the conflict is necessary to prevent the Islamic Republic from obtaining weapons of mass destruction.
Gabbard told the Senate in March the regime had made no efforts to rebuild its capabilities following an initial wave of U.S. strikes last June. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
It represents one of several motives Trump has cycled between since launching his February attacks against Iran.
Others have included liberating the Iranian people, affecting a change in leadership, and, more confusingly, protecting U.S. military assets in the region from retaliatory strikes in the event Iran comes under attack.
He has also struggled throughout the conflict to provide a clear timeline for his campaign, at various points suggesting it was already over or that it could quite possibly last “forever.”
The lack of any substantive change to Iran’s bomb-building timeline suggests further damage to the country’s capabilities can only be achieved by “destroying or removing” the regime’s “remaining stockpile of highly enriched uranium,” Reuters reports, citing three sources familiar with current assessments.
Andrew Weber, an Obama-era nuclear weapons adviser who helped de-nuke the former Soviet Union, told The Telegraph earlier in March that any efforts to do so without a peace deal in place would take several weeks and likely see thousands of U.S. service personnel killed.
It also remains unclear when any such de-nuking push might happen. A fragile ceasefire mediated by Pakistan has been in place since early April, but has so far failed to yield a deal for a lasting end to the conflict.
Iran has put forward proposals that call for the lifting of a U.S. naval blockade, the release of frozen assets, the payment of war reparations, and a halt to U.S.-Israeli operations across the region.
Trump told reporters Saturday he was likely to reject the offer because Iran had “not paid a big enough price,” only to claim in a Truth Social post just a day later that his envoys were having “very positive discussions” with Iran.