The United States Air Force B-2 Spirit stealth bomber is the modern equivalent of the Royal Navy gunboat of the 19th century: a stick brandished by the superpower of the day to secure the desired outcome. Currently, six of America’s 19 B-2s are stationed at the Anglo-American air and naval base on Diego Garcia, lined up on the apron for every passing civilian satellite to see. These big sticks are each capable of carrying a pair of the USAF’s biggest conventional bomb, the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, designed to burrow deep into the earth before detonating. The message from Donald Trump to Iran is clear: even your deeply buried nuclear sites are not safe from me. Ditch your ambition to make an atomic bomb, once and for all. Or else …
Yet how serious Mr Trump really is about ending the Iranian nuclear threat is, like everything else in his policy repertoire, uncertain. Today, US and Iranian negotiators gather in Oman for talks on a fresh deal to stop Iran’s progress towards a nuclear weapon. Previous US administrations have used the stick of sanctions and the carrot of lifting them to restrain Tehran. But merely tinkering with sanctions is too insipid for Trump 2.0. The president apparently wants total victory in the form of a denuclearised Iran. In 2018, during his first term, Mr Trump abrogated a deal reached by Barack Obama limiting the amount and purity of Iran’s uranium stockpile in return for an easing of sanctions. In response, Tehran accelerated its enrichment programme and is now capable of making half a dozen atom bombs within weeks. Fear of US and Israeli retaliation appears to have so far deterred Iran from crossing that rubicon. Yet the possibility of the Islamic republic voluntarily renouncing all of its nuclear ambitions seems fanciful.
• How Iran’s nuclear programme became a threat to the West
The last year has seen Tehran weakened and humiliated. Its principal ally, the Assad regime in Syria, has been toppled and its terrorist proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas, have been crippled by Israel. Save for the Houthis in Yemen, the regime is almost friendless in its home region. Its once-feared missile armoury has proved ineffective in the face of Israeli and US technology, and in the face of a direct US attack help from its fairweather friends, Russia and China, can be discounted. That leaves one card in the deck: the A-bomb. In keeping with his taste for an aggressive opening gambit, Mr Trump has told Tehran that it must ditch the bomb and “thrive” or face attack. Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s nuclear-armed prime minister, is egging the president on, insisting that only the supervised destruction of Iran’s nuclear sites will do. Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, is said to have consented to talks only under pressure from senior lieutenants who warned him that, with Iran’s economy on its knees, the very existence of the regime is at stake. In public Tehran is emollient, claiming to want only a fair deal.
Mr Trump is normally averse to military entanglements and his real aim is unclear, possibly even to himself. As usual, his people sing from different hymn sheets. Steve Witkoff, his go-to negotiator, wants a “verification programme”; Mike Waltz, his national security adviser, demands “full dismantlement”. The president’s chaotic approach to Ukraine, Gaza and tariffs offers no clue as to what he would settle for. But if it is full-blown denuclearisation, that could mean war. Faced with capitulating wholesale to the Great Satan, the mullahs may decide it is better to go down fighting.
