While Trump blusters, and Netanyahu spins, is Iran already on the brink of the bomb?

PM enthuses and president notes a good and important meeting behind closed doors at the White House on Tuesday. But the critical war they began in February is anything but over, and it’s not clear they agree on how to win it

US President Donald Trump wants this war with Iran over. Truly over, not just rhetorically. He wants the regime gone. Truly gone, not just superseded by leaders he can claim are different, nicer and more rational, but who are in fact as dangerous or more so than their predecessors. He wants the Strait of Hormuz open. Genuinely, dependably open, not just purportedly open by dint of him saying often that it is. And he wants Iran’s path to nuclear weapons blocked. Truly and protractedly blocked, not ostensibly obliterated but actually revivable if not already reviving.

But the Islamic Republic has proved tougher to crack than he had anticipated. Time and again in the five months since he and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opened their war to, euphemisms aside, bring down the regime, Trump has accurately described the colossal damage the joint assault has done to the Iranians’ military capabilities, and highlighted how long it will take them to recover. Time and again he has attempted to will the regime into capitulation, reasonably arguing that, by any normal standards, the Islamic Republic has been soundly defeated.

But the regime has not been defeated, simply because it is still there. The regime does not look reasonably at its massively depleted war machine, and the devastation it has brought down upon its country with its pursuit of nuclear weapons and its mass-murdering crackdown on internal civilian opposition — any more than Hamas looks around the ruins of Gaza and rues the day it invaded Israel. Rather, it surveys with satisfaction its tightened hold on power, and the deterrence it has elevated against its own citizenry. And it pokes away at a conflicted, erratic and unpopular American president, deeply reluctant to have his party face the electorate in November’s midterms in the lingering midst of a costly, grinding and inconclusive war.

Ahead of his meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday, Trump twice publicly slapped the Israeli prime minister down — determinedly underlining that it is he, and not Israel’s leader, who is setting America’s policy when it comes to Iran, and everything else for that matter.

On Monday, he declared, after Netanyahu had implored the US not to sell F-35 fighter jets to Hamas-loving President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, “Nobody tells me what we should be selling.”

And on Tuesday, just a few hours before the prime minister arrived at the White House, he blasted Netanyahu in a Fox News interview for ostensibly trying to push him into attacking Pickaxe Mountain, sniping that “I don’t need Bibi” for intel on the nuclear facility — “I know exactly what’s going on” — and fuming that Netanyahu was speaking publicly about what the Iranians were up to there. His interviewers hadn’t even mentioned Netanyahu in their question about Pickaxe Mountain, and Netanyahu has not in fact spoken publicly about what is unfolding there, though two leaks attributed to Israeli sources last week claimed Iran last year moved both centrifuges and part of its stockpile of 60-percent enriched uranium to the underground site.

Trump then chose, atypically, to have Netanyahu enter the White House via a side entrance, and to keep reporters out of the Oval Office — no questions from the press, not even joint statements from the leaders. Yes, he vouchsafed hours later in a brief Truth Social post, they and their teams had had “a very good meeting,” and “obviously, many important subjects were discussed.” Thank you for your attention to this matter. That’s all you need to know right now. I’ve got this. I’m running the show.

For his part, Netanyahu, having rushed to release smiling photographs even as the talks were going on — including with the adversarial JD Vance — enthused over “one of the best” meetings he’d ever had with Trump, and later told Fox their alliance was “a wall of granite.” A key aide, who was not in the room but was briefed by the premier, claimed that there’d been no US pressure to withdraw troops from Syria or Lebanon, no push for progress in Gaza, no expressed concern over violent settler extremism in the West Bank.

To echo a senior Israeli official briefing Israeli reporters immediately after the meeting, “we are in a critical period” as regards Iran, and Trump will have to “make a decision soon on where he is heading.”

“We are not pushing him, but also aren’t burying our heads in the sand,” the official said, and went on to convey Netanyahu’s assessment that “there is no choice” but to attack Iran again: “significant attacks — on nuclear facilities, capabilities that have been rebuilt, and sites that weren’t previously hit” and strikes with the potential to “shake the stability of the regime.”

This is indeed a critical period — for Israel, the region, and the free world, in the fateful battle against a demonstrably ruthless, spectacularly dangerous regime bent on destroying this country, dominating the Middle East, and exporting its extremist Islamic ideology worldwide.

It is a critical period, too, for the two warily friendly leaders. One is facing an election three months from now which could see him ousted, or triumphally returned for yet another term in which he would aim to complete his grab for all of Israel’s levers of power. The other is indirectly facing an electorate a week later who could immensely complicate his final two years in office by removing his majority in one or both chambers of Congress — including placing all manner of obstacles to his pursuit of this war.

Both these men would like nothing more than for the regime in Iran to be definitively defeated ahead of their respective polling days. Netanyahu is almost certainly more optimistic than Trump that this could yet be achieved, but then again, that’s where his personal political interests lie. Come what may, Trump will still be president at the end of this year, and can afford to think long and hard about the timing of an intensified attack on the regime; Netanyahu may be finished if the Islamic Republic is intact on October 27.

The regime, as was obvious, is exploiting the lax and lousy terms of June’s memorandum of understanding, falsely touted by Trump as the answer to a region’s prayers for peace. It is maneuvering to solidify its hold on the Strait of Hormuz, reviving its military muscle, and predictably avoiding the slightest concessions on its rogue nuclear program, as the MOU’s vaguely envisaged 60 days of negotiations are frittered uselessly away.

But what really matters is that deep underground, at Pickaxe Mountain — where the International Atomic Energy Agency has never been given access, and where the US does not have cameras and does not know “exactly what is going on” — Iran just might have sufficient quantities of 60%-enriched uranium, and the centrifuges to enrich it to weapons grade within weeks or even days. If that is the case, it would still likely be several months from a deliverable bomb, but would have completed arguably the hardest and generally the most visible step on the road to nuclear weapons.

And then, whatever anybody says or wants to believe, the war against the Islamic Republic would be anything but over.

Related, June 30, 2025 – Israel was facing destruction at the hands of Iran. This is how close it came, and how it saved itself

This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.