Iran’s Weak Attack Is an Offramp. Trump Should Take It.

So far, Iran’s ballistic missile attack on a U.S. military base in Qatar on Monday appears to have been more of a face-saving measure for Tehran than an opening salvo for full-blown war with America.

With no reports of American casualties or severe damage, the attack presents President Trump with a clear offramp from tit-for-tat tensions. He should take it. There’s now an opportunity for both sides to restart diplomatic efforts, rather than escalate hostilities.

It’s not surprising that Iran’s leaders felt they had to do something in retaliation for the U.S. bombing mission against three of their nuclear sites over the weekend. What they evidently came up with was an underwhelming missile strike on one of the most fortified U.S. military bases in the world. Tehran warned the Qataris that the strikes were coming, ensuring that its short-range and medium-range ballistic missiles would be intercepted by American air defense systems — which they were.

In a social media post, Trump seemed to seize the chance to cast Iran’s “very weak response” on the base as more symbolic than destructive, even thanking Iran for giving the U.S. notice: “Perhaps Iran can now proceed to Peace and Harmony in the Region, and I will enthusiastically encourage Israel to do the same.”

U.S. forces in the region must remain on high alert, of course. But if Monday’s attack is any guide, Tehran does not want to enter a wider war with the United States, and its leaders, too, may yet choose to pursue a concerted diplomatic effort with the United States to discuss the future of whatever is left of its nuclear program.

Several rounds of talks this year between the United States and Iran have gone nowhere, and Trump’s latest efforts to talk to Iran after Israel’s began its air campaign this month reportedly fizzled. But the threat of war may propel both sides to work more earnestly to get back to the negotiating table.

Iran’s tepid military response is reminiscent of what occurred in Trump’s first term after he authorized a drone strike in January 2020 that killed Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, who led the powerful Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Five days later, Tehran lobbed ballistic missiles on U.S. forces stationed at relatively small bases in neighboring Iraq, causing limited damage.

This time around, Iran was, at least in its choice of targets, more ambitious. Al Udeid Air Base, the largest American military installation in the Middle East, was a natural target for Tehran. It hosts 10,000 U.S. forces and a rotating mix of fighter jets, bombers and other military aircraft.

All of America’s aerial missions in the Middle East are run out of a building in the middle of the base, called the Combined Air Operations Center. It’s a windowless, multistory structure encircled by razor wire. Inside, American and allied commanders sit at computer stations around an enormous room with LED screens that display maps, aircraft locations and live video feeds from drones flying around the Middle East. The attack on Iran’s three nuclear sites was almost certainly overseen from there.

Before the Israeli and U.S. airstrikes, America’s intelligence agencies made an assessment that Tehran had not yet decided to to make nuclear weapons. Still, Iran has been enriching uranium to 60 percent purity, which is unjustified for civilian energy use, and just below the 90 percent needed for bomb fuel. Much of the enriched uranium was known to be stored inside the Isfahan complex, hit during the U.S. attack over the weekend, but status of that material, along with the machines that made it, remains unclear.

If Iran and the United States can manage to reduce tensions and pursue diplomacy, what happens to Iran’s enriched uranium material — along with the rest of its nuclear program — is likely to be the biggest factor toward achieving peace.

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For decades, a succession of American presidents pledged that they were willing to use force to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. But it was President Trump who, by bombing three of Iran’s key nuclear sites on Sunday morning, was willing to demonstrate that those pledges were not hollow and that Tehran could not simply tunnel its way to a bomb because no country other than Israel dared confront it.

That’s a courageous and correct decision that deserves respect, no matter how one feels about this president and the rest of his policies. Politically, the easier course would have been to delay a strike to appease his party’s isolationist voices, whose views about the Middle East (and antipathies toward the Jewish state) increasingly resemble those of the progressive left. In the meantime, Trump could have continued to outsource the dirty work of hitting Iran’s nuclear capabilities to Israel, hoping that it could at least buy the West some diplomatic leverage and breathing room.

Trump chose otherwise, despite obvious risks. Those include Iranian strikes on U.S. military assets and diplomatic facilities in the region and terrorist attacks against American targets worldwide, possibly through proxies and possibly over a long period. One grim model is the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which was carried out by Muammar el-Qaddafi’s regime most likely in retaliation for President Ronald Reagan’s 1986 bombing of Libya. In the Lockerbie atrocity, 270 people lost their lives.

But one set of risks must be weighed against another, and there are few greater risks to American security than a nuclear Iran.

The regime is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. It is ideologically committed to the annihilation of Israel and is currently attacking it with indiscriminate missile fire on civilian targets. It is an ally of North Korea, China and Russia — and supplies many of the drones Russia uses to attack Ukraine. It is developing and fielding thousands of ballistic missiles of increasingly greater reach. Its acquisition of a bomb would set off an arms race in the Middle East. And it has sought to assassinate American citizens on American soil. If all this is not intolerable, what is?

Critics fault the administration for its refusal to seek congressional authorization for attacking Iran. But there’s a long, bipartisan history of American presidents taking swift military action to stop a perceived threat without asking Congress’s permission, including George H.W. Bush’s invasion of Panama in 1989 and Bill Clinton’s four-day bombing campaign against Iraq in 1998.

Critics of the strike also point to an American intelligence estimate from this year that claimed Iran’s leaders had not yet decided to build a bomb. But that was a judgment about intent, which can be fickle. Trump’s responsibility was to deny Iran’s leaders the capabilities that would have allowed them to change their minds at will, to devastating effect. Amid uncertainty, the president acted before it was too late. It is the essence of statesmanship.

We’ll find out in the coming days and weeks how Iran will react. In his White House address, Trump noted that there are many other targets in Iran that the United States could easily destroy if Iran doesn’t agree to dismantle its nuclear program once and for all. Iran may disregard that warning, but if it does, it is choosing further destruction for the sake of a nuclear fantasy. As in 1988, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini chose to end the Iran-Iraq war for the sake of regime survival — he said it was like “drinking from a chalice of poison” — my guess is that the current supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, will stand down and seek a negotiated settlement. In my column last week, I suggested the outlines of a potential deal, in which the United States could promise Iran relief from economic sanctions in exchange for its complete nuclear disarmament and an end to its support for foreign proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis.

Whether or not that happens, Iran’s hopes of acquiring a nuclear weapon have probably been seriously degraded. And adversaries everywhere, including in Moscow and Beijing, must now know that they are not dealing with a paper tiger in the White House. The world is safer for it.

No one has ever campaigned on a platform calling for the United States to maintain a permanent underclass of illegal workers. America’s immigration mess isn’t the expression of a coherent ideology. We are stuck in this unpalatable reality because no one has mustered sufficient support for mass deportation or for legalization.

President Trump presented his election as an end to the stalemate — a mandate for deportation.

But he is learning the hard way that he is also subject to the competing forces that have long prevented any significant change in the status quo.

Last week Trump suspended a key part of his deportation campaign, instructing federal immigration agents to pull back from raids on farms, hotels and restaurants in pursuit of people who do not have permission to work in the United States.

The president tellingly attributed the shift to complaints from employers, many of whom depend on the labor of workers who aren’t allowed to work here.

Trump quickly sought to reassure supporters by declaring that the government would expand immigration raids in cities. But the reality is that he is caught in a trap of his own making.

The president has built political support for deportations by demonizing immigrants, and many Americans have been receptive to his arguments in the abstract. They have been all too willing to believe that the immigrants they don’t know are bad people.

The problem Trump now faces is that the people he’s trying to round up and deport are not gang members. They’re farmworkers and restaurant cooks.

It’s easy to promise to deport millions of imaginary bad people. The hard part is figuring out how to deal with the millions of actual immigrants who live here.

While it’s far too soon to tell whether Israel’s military strikes will cripple or even substantially set back Iran’s nuclear program, the necessity of stopping Iran’s march to a bomb is far more clear today than it was even three years ago.

Two things have happened since President Trump’s first term that alter the strategic calculus: Russia invaded Ukraine, and Hamas massacred Israeli civilians.

The first event taught the world a lesson it shouldn’t forget. When a nuclear-armed nation engages in armed aggression, the rest of the world’s options narrow considerably. If Russia didn’t possess a nuclear deterrent, it’s highly likely that Western support would have been more immediate, more intense and more decisive.

Instead, Western powers were often slow to approve new weapons transfers, and when they did provide more capable weapons, they initially placed sharp limits on their use. Western aid certainly kept Ukraine alive, but restrictions on that aid have inhibited its defense.

One could easily imagine a NATO-enforced no-fly zone, or granting Ukraine weapons and a freedom of action to use those weapons that is more similar to the freedom Israel currently enjoys. But at every step Western powers have worried that they might be pushing Russia too far. This means that aid has often been too slow and too limited to give Ukraine a viable chance of reversing Russian gains.

Russia’s nuclear arsenal, in other words, serves as the world’s most dangerous insurance policy. It grants Russia the ability to launch aggressive military operations while also exercising at least some degree of control over the armed response.

North Korea’s nuclear arsenal serves the same purpose. It means that Western powers can’t really contemplate the same kind of military actions that ultimately ended Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq or Muammar el-Qaddafi’s regime in Libya.

While the West might look at both interventions as cautionary tales (they unleashed considerable disorder), dictators look and see something else: a gruesome end to despotic regimes, an end they desperately want to avoid for themselves.

Now, imagine Iran with even a modest nuclear arsenal. Even if it didn’t try to obliterate Israeli cities, it could use its arsenal to grant it a freedom of action in conventional war that it currently lacks. Like Russia, it could be relentlessly aggressive at the same time that its nuclear weapons could maintain the regime, even in the face of military defeat. They would constrain Israel’s ability to defend itself.

At the same time, Israel is living with the reality since Oct. 7, 2023, that its enemies will directly target civilians, massacre them on video and celebrate their deaths. Is there a sovereign nation on the planet that would then permit its chief adversary — the primary military backer of its terrorist enemies — to possess the ultimate weapon of mass destruction if it believes it can do so at a reasonable military cost?

In fact, Israel has a much better window of opportunity to stop Iran’s race to a bomb than either India or Pakistan had to stop each other’s nuclear program — or than the United States and South Korea had to stop North Korea. Each of those nations possessed enormous, intact conventional forces that would have made any military intervention extraordinarily costly.

Iran’s military capabilities, by contrast, have been sharply degraded. It still retains the ability to strike Israel with its missiles (it hit Tel Aviv on Friday, causing some damage), but Israel has a capable missile defense. Its proxies in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria have suffered a series of catastrophic military defeats. And previous attacks from Israel damaged Iran’s air defenses. Iran is weaker than it’s been in years.

None of these arguments mean that Israel will prevail or that the strikes will prove effective or wise in the long term. We have to wait on the results of the conflict to understand that. But for now the combination of Iran’s weakness and the catastrophic consequences of an Iranian bomb mean that Israel’s strikes are both more justifiable — and more likely to succeed — than at any time in the recent past.

The kid could actually win. When New York City Democrats choose their nominee for mayor on June 24, it is suddenly plausible that the choice will be a 33-year-old socialist, Zohran Mamdani.

It long seemed lamentable and inevitable that former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, five years after he resigned in the face of 13 accusations of sexual harassment, without having been called to account for his mismanagement of the pandemic.

That may still happen, but this week, as Mamdani pummeled Cuomo on his record on the debate stage, one internal poll reviewed by Politico had Mamdani out ahead, and another showed him just behind.

Other recent polls have found larger leads for Cuomo, and because the former governor could run as an independent alongside Eric Adams even if Mamdani wins, the primary isn’t necessarily the coronation it would be in a normal year. But in just a couple of months, Mamdani — a seeming novelty as recently as this winter — has become one of two front-runners. Come the fall, New York might elect the most left-wing figure chosen to lead any state or major city anywhere in the country for God knows how long.

This would be, if it happens, a very big deal — not just for New York but for Democratic politics more broadly.

Four years ago, when Eric Adams was elected, it seemed to send a national signal that as the pandemic emergency abated, the country’s woke wave was subsiding too.

What story would we tell about the meaning of a Mamdani victory?

One possibility would be: The death of the democratic socialist left has been greatly exaggerated. You never want to hang too much meaning on any one election. But consider the Fight Oligarchy tour headlined by Bernie Sanders, who remains one of the country’s best liked politicians. Those urging Democrats rightward see a zero-sum thinking of a moralistic left obsessed with redistribution rather than growth and progress. But perhaps the most striking feature of the Mamdani campaign has been its relentlessly positive vision, devoted to selling an affordable New York City. It all makes left-populism seem much less of a dead end than conventional wisdom has had it, at least in a place like New York.

A second story might be: In some elections, at least, it is liberating and appealing to have a candidate who doesn’t actually expect to win. Mamdani is just 33, with a relatively limited legislative record, and reporting suggests he didn’t intend to really contest the nomination, only to expand the membership of the local Democratic Socialists of America chapter. Probably, this kind of principled indifference hasn’t been an impediment to his rise but the opposite, a critical part of his appeal.

A third would be: When actually put to voters, in a New York Democratic primary at least, left-wing positions on Israel and Gaza are not nearly the kryptonite they are often assumed to be. Other Democratic candidates have recently ganged up on Mamdani for his support for divesting from Israel and his position that it should offer equal rights to non-Jews. These attacks still may work, but for the moment, he also has the race’s highest favorability ratings. Among Jewish voters, in a recent survey, he’s polling second.

And perhaps a final story is: However obvious and unapologetic his left-wing politics are, Democratic voters do not seem to regard his platform as off-puttingly radical. Some of it really isn’t: Bill de Blasio instituted rent freezes for all of the city’s rent-controlled apartments, and Mamdani’s proposal to open city-run grocery stores is just a one-per-borough pilot program. Some other look a little more far out — making all bus service free and offering universal free child care, using tax money a mayor can’t command without Albany’s approval. But Mamdani has also moderated on some key points, most notably on housing, winning praise from some centrist types who had viewed his candidacy with skepticism.

A month ago, the city seemed to be sleepwalking into a very different outcome. I’ve long thought that Cuomo’s redemption would also be an embarrassment for New York, and maybe it will still be embarrassed on June 24. But almost certainly the race will be much closer than anyone anticipated a few months ago, meaning that even a Cuomo victory will appear, in the end, to be a weak one. And an entirely different path now seems possible, too, with the American left getting a new national figure for the first time since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s shock primary victory in 2018.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has bombed Iran in what may lead to yet another war in the Middle East, and the challenge for President Trump will be to protect American troops in the region and to stay out of this mess.

Netanyahu justified his latest military campaign by saying that Iran was a “clear and present danger.” And it’s true that Iran was enriching uranium to worrisome levels. It’s believed to be just weeks from having enough fissile material to make several bombs (although creating bombs and a way to deliver them would take much longer).

But a key reason for Iran’s increasingly dangerous course was the past colossal misjudgments by Netanyahu and Trump in their dealings with Iran. With strong backing from Netanyahu, Trump in 2018 pulled out of the nuclear agreement that President Barack Obama had reached that largely contained Iran’s nuclear program.

Trump apparently expected Iran to come crawling back and make concessions. Instead, Iran accelerated its enrichment of uranium. One former Israeli security official has described the decision to cancel the deal in 2018 as a “disaster,” and another has said it was a “historic mistake.”

Netanyahu’s bellicosity didn’t work then, and it seems unlikely to work now. The bombing might have been intended to undercut Trump’s recent diplomatic efforts to restore something close to the original nuclear deal with Iran.

We’ll see what the results of the bombing are, but there have always been doubts that the Iranian nuclear site Fordow could be destroyed, at least without American bunker-buster bombs, because it is deep underground. (It was unclear as of late Thursday whether it had been targeted.) Israel has also reportedly bombed housing where Iranian nuclear scientists live, and that may be more effective; military experts have said for years that Iran would have a harder time replacing its nuclear scientists than its centrifuges.

Attacks like this may simply accelerate Iran’s drive for nuclear weapons, because there will be more arguments by its leaders that this shows that the country needs a nuclear deterrent.

More broadly, the Iranian regime has seemed on my reporting trips to Iran to be deeply unpopular. Ordinary Iranian workers, farmers and others constantly complained to me about corruption, hypocrisy and economic mismanagement — but Iranians are also patriots, and foreign bombing may lead people to rally around the flag.

In the coming hours or days, Iran is likely to respond militarily against Israel; an open question is whether or to what extent it will also target American troops in Iraq, Bahrain or elsewhere in the Middle East. The risk is that we see a cycle of escalation leading to a regional war that no one wants. American troops and embassies will be at risk, and the best way Trump can protect them is to stay out of this fight and try to resurrect a nuclear deal.

Senator Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, warned that Netanyahu had undertaken “a reckless escalation that risks igniting regional violence,” and that seems right to me. To his credit, Trump has seemed wary of getting into foreign wars, and let’s hope he shows restraint this time instead of wading into a fight with Iran.