June 12, 2025 - 9:00pm
Tensions between Israel, the US, and Iran have spiked dramatically over the past 24 hours. This reflects a growing belief, supported by private Israeli warnings and US intelligence, that Israel is preparing to launch a major attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities in the coming days.
Underscoring these concerns, the US has evacuated the families of diplomats and military personnel stationed in Iraq and other parts of the Middle East. The move follows Iranian warnings of severe retaliation against US and Israeli interests if its nuclear programme is attacked. Iran is believed to possess around 2,000 ballistic missiles and a similar number of aerial drones. Any response would likely involve saturation missile and drone strikes aimed at overwhelming Israeli air defences and targeting both population centres and the Natanz nuclear facility.
Iran could also strike the US embassy in Baghdad, the Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, and attempt attacks on Americans worldwide — potentially even within the US — through both its own operatives and proxy groups. Additionally, Tehran may try to shut the strategic Strait of Hormuz, potentially calculating that the presence of only one US carrier strike group in the region gives it a tactical edge. American military plans call for deploying at least two carrier groups in the event of a nuclear confrontation with Iran.
Still, it’s far from certain that Israel will imminently attack Iran.
First, Trump has made clear that he wants time and space from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to reach a new nuclear agreement with Iran. It’s possible, then, that Netanyahu is dangling this military pressure with Trump’s approval. The thinking might be that this will increase pressure on Iran to make concessions to the US at the next round of nuclear negotiations in Oman on Sunday. So while some might see the Israeli military buildup as challenging Trump’s interests, we should remember that the President revels in leveraging US power to advance the theatrics of his diplomacy.
Second, while Netanyahu wants to attack Iran’s nuclear programme for both exigent security and domestic political reasons (consolidating support from his fragile coalition government), Israel can ill afford to alienate the American President. Considering Trump’s personal vindictiveness, Netanyahu must worry about the political impact of an attack on Iran that led to a major regional conflagration. Would Trump cut off US aid to Israel — or sideline it further from his evolving Middle Eastern strategy?
It bears noting that Israel is already badly isolated internationally. It also bears noting that influential MAGA voices such as Charlie Kirk and Jack Posobiec align with top national security officials inside the Trump administration in strongly opposing unilateral Israeli action. Support for Israel is way down in the Democratic Party, but Netanyahu’s decision to induce another Middle Eastern whirlwind would risk a fundamental breach in the traditional bulwark of Republican support for Israel.
Third, Israel almost certainly lacks the military capacity to totally destroy Iran’s nuclear programme absent US military involvement. The Israeli air force’s strike, refuelling, transport, and intelligence complement is too small to conduct an operation that would need to target hundreds of locations across Iran and simultaneously defend Israel from Iranian retaliation. Unless the Trump administration has secretly delivered them, Israel also lacks the GBU-57 massive ordnance penetrator and GBU-74 advanced penetrator bombs that would be needed to destroy Iran’s deep underground facilities.
On that point, even US military planners are unsure whether the US Air Force’s employment of these weapons could entirely destroy Iran’s most hardened facilities. This means that Israel would likely have to use special forces to physically enter and destroy some facilities from the inside out in order to do anything more than substantially degrade Iran’s nuclear programme. Again, that’s a very complicated task in terms of logistics and force protection.
Whatever the case, the next few days will be interesting. But if US military bases on domestic soil raise their force protection level, that will be a sign that an Israeli attack is imminent.
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