Tehran’s options include striking US military assets with ballistic missiles and exiting a nuclear treaty to “save face”.

Iranian retaliation against the American air strikes ordered by President Donald Trump is inevitable, despite a diplomatic backchannel message from Washington to Tehran before the attack that it was intended as a one-off, according to analysts.

The only uncertainty, Middle East experts say, is how the Islamic republic will balance its responses so as to preserve the regime and show its potency within the region – if only to buy enough time to clandestinely build nuclear warheads.

“Trump just guaranteed that Iran will be a nuclear weapons state in the next five to 10 years – particularly if the regime changes,” said Trita Parsi, executive vice-president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a Washington think-tank.

According to James Acton, co-director of the Carnegie Endowment’s nuclear policy program, “retaliation — especially ballistic missile strikes against US regional assets — is highly likely”.

But what comes next, including the US response, is unclear.

“That’s why this may well not be ‘one and done’," despite Trump’s warning to Tehran not to retaliate, Acton said.

Gregory Brew, senior Iran analyst of the New York-based Eurasia Group risk consultancy, said Tehran is sure to respond to the US attack because “to do nothing would be a colossal blow to the regime’s credibility”.

While there will be a short-term reaction, he said, “the bigger response, the more significant one, is likely to play out on the nuclear file”.

Analysts say a statement issued by Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation soon after the bombing of the Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan nuclear complexes, hinted at a forthcoming Iranian withdrawal from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty by describing the attacks as a “violation of international law, particularly the NPT”.

Tehran has long maintained that its membership of the NPT, along with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s 2003 fatwa (decree) against nuclear weapons, proved it had no intention of doing so, despite having the capability.

“NPT withdrawal is quite likely,” said Ali Vaez, director of the Crisis Group risk consultancy’s Iran project.

“We failed to see through the lies and poor analyses that led to the disastrous Iraq war in 2003, but with Iran, we know … it is questionable whether there was any intelligence on imminent nuclear weaponisation,” he said.

“Military action alone likely won’t end” Iran’s nuclear program, so US involvement in striking the country “may not be limited”, Vaez said.

While it is too soon to ascertain the extent of the damage to Iran’s nuclear facilities, analysts say the absence of any detectable radiation leaks strongly suggest the US and Israeli attacks have not affected Tehran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium.

In an interview on Friday (20 June), Mohsen Rezaei, a former commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said Iran had relocated its reserves of 60%-enriched uranium to secret facilities in March in anticipation of US-backed Israeli attacks.

Uranium becomes nuclear weapons-grade material at 90% enrichment.

Iran has been assessed by US intelligence agencies to possess enough to make up to nine atomic bombs.

Given that the strike was long anticipated, Iran “may well have pre-emptively dispersed” some nuclear assets, including enriched uranium stockpiles and advanced centrifuge cascades, to alternate sites, “hoping to reconstitute the program if the government survives the current war”, according to Mohammed Soliman, a senior fellow of the Middle East Institute think-tank in Washington.

Acton said the underground tunnels of the Isfahan nuclear complex were used to hoard most of Iran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile.

But HEU is “very easy to move” in the chemical form of uranium hexafluoride stored in cylinders roughly the same size and shape as scuba tanks.

“Tracking them will be very difficult,” Acton said, adding that the US hit the facility with Tomahawk cruise missiles to “presumably collapse the entrances, rather than destroy the tunnels”.

“But if the HEU is no longer inside, that won’t achieve much,” he said.

Analysts expect the coming days would likely see an escalation in the war, leading to a short window for a diplomatic solution to the crisis.

“Major hostilities will likely continue for at least a week,” said Farzan Sabet, managing researcher of the Geneva-based Global Governance Centre.

Iran will “feel compelled to respond to President Trump, and Israel will want to complete its operational cycle and mostly exhaust its target banks”, he said.

The subsequent emergence of off-ramps will depend on US, Iranian and Israeli calculations. Trump would have to be satisfied to declare “mission accomplished” and go home, “with no deal required”, he said.

Iran’s response to the US would have to be “sufficiently disciplined to not elicit retaliation” and an escalatory cycle.

And Israel would have to be content to end major hostilities at the end of its operational cycle and permit Iran to have the “last word”, at least publicly.

In the case of Israel, Trump would also have to ask the ally to “stand down” and “take the win”, Sabet said.

Acton agreed, saying Trump could take credit for destroying Iran’s nuclear program “if the US dodges a large-scale [Iranian] escalation”.

“He will claim a historic win [and] end his term with this feather in his cap – but the Iranians will rebuild,” he added.

Mirette Mabrouk, a senior fellow of the Middle East Institute, said the rest of the region’s fears “have come to pass” because of the US attacks on Iran.

If Washington can indicate to Tehran that the bombing was limited solely to the nuclear targets, and there will be no further attacks, that “might leave the Iranian regime with some room to save face and negotiate with the US”.

“If not, we are likely to see an escalating spiral of violence that may suck in regional allies, forcing them to do something that, to date, they have refused to do – choose sides,” Mabrouk said.

Republished from the South China Morning Post, 22 June 2025

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.