US weighs next move on Iran – and faces a complex calculation

For President Trump, it’s decision time.

Ten days ago, he said the US was prepared to go to the “rescue” of Iranian protesters if their government used violence against them.

The US was, the president said, “locked and loaded and ready to go”.

That was before the violent crackdown in Iran had really begun. Now, with its full extent being shockingly revealed, the world waits to see how Trump will respond.

“Nobody knows what President Trump is going to do except for President Trump,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said. “The world can keep waiting and guessing.”

But for how long?

Senior officials are due to brief the president on Tuesday on possible courses of action. Speaking to reporters on Air Force One on Sunday, Trump said he was looking at “some very strong options”.

Flushed with success in Venezuela – the president described the capture of Nicolas Maduro as one of the most successful operations in US history – the temptation to deploy the military must be considerable.

As events last summer demonstrated, the US is perfectly capable of mounting attacks from a distance. B-2 stealth bombers flew 30-hour round trip missions from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri to drop bunker busting bombs on two of Iran’s most important nuclear sites.

Whether the US opts for more of the same, or pinpoint attacks on elements of the regime responsible for the current repression, it is reasonable to assume Washington has a lengthy target list to draw on.

Pentagon officials, quoted by the BBC’s US partner CBS News, say the response could include a variety of other, more covert methods, including cyber operations and covert psychological campaigns intended to disrupt and confuse Iran’s command structures.

One scenario that can almost certainly be ruled out, however, is anything remotely resembling what unfolded in Caracas on 3 January.

Even in its weakened state, and battered by recent American and Israeli strikes, Iran is not Venezuela. The Islamic Republic is a battle-hardened regime. The removal of a single figure is unlikely to bend the entire country to Washington’s will.

Trump’s recent reference to Jimmy Carter’s disastrous 1980 attempt to rescue American hostages held in Iran also shows that he is aware of the pitfalls that could accompany any attempt to put US boots on the ground.

Eight American servicemen died when a helicopter and EC-130 transport aircraft collided on the ground in Iran’s eastern desert.

That botched operation, coupled with the humiliation felt at the spectacle of hooded American hostages being paraded in front of cameras in Tehran, was a significant factor in Carter’s electoral defeat later that year.

“I don’t know that he would have won the election,” Trump told journalists from the New York Times last week, “but he certainly had no chance after that disaster.”

But 46 years later, there is a bigger question driving Washington’s military calculations: what is the Trump administration actually trying to achieve in Iran?

“It’s hard to tell exactly what course of action Trump is likely to take,” Will Todman, senior fellow in the Middle East programme at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said, “given we don’t know what his full aim is here.”

President Trump is probably trying to influence the Iranian regime’s behaviour, Todman said, rather than topple it.

“I think the risks of regime change are so great that I don’t yet believe that is his primary objective here,” he said. “It could be more concessions in the nuclear talks. It could be to stop the crackdown. It also could be to try to implement reforms that lead to… some sort of sanctions relief.”

Trump has said elements of the Iranian regime have reached out, anxious to negotiate, presumably to keep a dialogue going on the country’s nuclear programme.

“What you’re hearing publicly from the Iranian regime is quite different from the messages the administration is receiving privately,” Leavitt said on Monday, adding that diplomacy was “always the first option”.

Unnamed officials have told the Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, that Vice-President JD Vance is one of a handful of senior aides urging Trump to pursue diplomacy first.

“The smartest thing for them to have done,” Vance told reporters last Thursday, “is for them to actually have a real negotiation with the United States about what we need to see when it comes to their nuclear program.”

But if a bloody crackdown continues across Iran, diplomacy runs the risk of looking like weakness.

“If it’s not sufficient, it demoralises protesters,” Todman said.

Perhaps with this in mind, and with gruesome accounts emerging from Iran despite the internet blackout, the president has said he may feel compelled to act even before diplomatic channels have been explored.

A limited strike, some believe, could help to encourage the protesters, while putting the regime on notice that there may be worse to come.

“All Trump has to do is shoot to cause panic inside the regime,” said Bilal Saab, an associate fellow in the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Chatham House.

“A US strike could embolden the protesters and distract the regime,” he added.

But Saab said military action could also backfire.

“It could harden the resolve of the regime and its still-large support base across the country. A rallying around the flag wouldn’t be shocking,” he said. “That’s more likely… if the strike is symbolic or a one off.”

It is a complex set of calculations for the president, made worse by the knowledge that Iran has threatened to respond to any American attack.

And despite the damage inflicted by Israeli and American attacks, Iran still has a significant arsenal of ballistic missiles.

Across the Middle East, Iran’s allies and proxies may be gone – such as Syria’s former President Bashar al-Assad – or weakened, as is the case with Hezbollah in Lebanon, but the “Axis of Resistance” is not yet a spent force.

The Houthis in Yemen and Shiite militias in Iraq are still capable of action.

Among the voices urging President Trump to act boldly is the man offering to lead Iran’s transition away from the rule of the clerics.

“The president has a decision to make fairly soon,” Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s last monarch, told CBS News.

“The best way to ensure that there will be less people killed in Iran is to intervene sooner,” he said. “So this regime finally collapses and puts and end to all the problems that we are facing.”

It sounded simple. At the White House, officials will know it is anything but.

With additional reporting from Kayla Epstein