By: The Editorial Board – wsj.com – June 17, 2025

The President can reverse Biden’s Afghan legacy by helping Israel eliminate Tehran’s nuclear threat.

These are the strategic stakes as the U.S. President contemplates whether to assist Israel in bombing Iran’s nuclear sites. Losing the war but still resisting the dismantlement of their nuclear program, Iran’s leaders are hoping Mr. Trump will come to their rescue with more delaying diplomacy.

Yet, as Mr. Trump has said many times, Iran can end the Israeli assault by agreeing to roll up its nuclear program. Dismantle its enrichment capacity under international supervision, destroy its centrifuges, and allow for unhindered future inspections. Iran’s refusal to do so, even as it risks losing much of its non-nuclear military power and top commanders, shows that the regime wants a nuclear weapon more than it wants peace.

The world is watching closely to see how Mr. Trump responds, especially the hard men in Moscow and Beijing. Does he help a close ally remove a global threat to peace, and diminish a member of the axis of U.S. adversaries? Or does he listen to the voices of American appeasement on the left and right who fear any use of force more than they fear a nuclear-armed radical regime?

Some argue that since Israel is doing so well, there’s no need for the U.S. to join the fight. But as capable and creative as Israel is, it lacks the firepower to destroy all of Iran’s nuclear sites from the air. The United Nations nuclear watchdog says Israel has severely damaged the underground enrichment facility at Natanz. That still leaves Fordow, buried under a mountain. Destroying enrichment at Fordow will take America’s deep-penetrating bombs and the bombers to deliver them.

Others fear that aiding Israel will invite Iran’s retaliation against U.S. troops and expand the war. Yet that’s what Iran threatened to do if Israel attacked, and so far it hasn’t followed through. Iran knows such an attack would invite a far more fearsome U.S. response than bombs dropped on its nuclear sites.

The isolationists say bombing Iran would be another nation-building exercise, but no one is talking about sending American ground troops. An Israeli ground incursion is more likely if the U.S. doesn’t bomb Fordow. Destroying the nuclear sites could end the war sooner, and at less cost in lives on both sides.

The Biden precedent is instructive here, and not merely on Afghanistan. As Russia invaded Ukraine, and Iran’s Houthi proxies attacked U.S. ships in the Red Sea, Mr. Biden’s strategists shrank from a robust response because they feared “escalation.” In practice this meant Russia and Iran controlled when and how to escalate. Mr. Trump can’t possibly want to box himself into that corner.

Iran or its proxies could unleash terrorism against Americans, but that’s nothing new. They’ve been doing it for decades going back to the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon and Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996. The one time in the last 25 years when Iran restrained itself was after the U.S. invasion of Iraq that toppled Saddam Hussein. The mullahs feared they were next.

All of which means that this is a crucial deterrence moment for the new Trump Administration as much as for Israel. The world takes a measure of every new President, even one like Mr. Trump who has served before. He campaigned for re-election as a peacemaker, and U.S. adversaries are looking to see what that means for how Mr. Trump will respond to pressure and strategic threats.

If the U.S. won’t help one of its strongest and most loyal allies finish the job of eliminating Iran’s nuclear threat in uncontested air space, the message to China will be that there is no chance the U.S. will defend Taiwan. Everyone will see it—from the Kremlin’s commissars to the Communist bosses in Beidaihe.

But if Mr. Trump helps Israel enforce his own red lines against Iran’s nuclear program, he can send a message that American deterrence means something again. The Afghan fiasco, and the other failures of the Biden years, will recede that much further into history’s rear-view mirror.

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Source: Iran Is Trump’s Deterrence Moment – WSJ