In a new three-part series, Ramesh Thakur examines dimensions of the Iran war. In part two, he analyses how the US-Israeli war may affect Iran’s nuclear capacity and ambitions.

In the gloaming jungle of international geopolitics, the Iran war offers lessons on the liberal illusions of peace, the limits both of military force detached from post-hostilities political vision and of international law and diplomacy, the seductive trap of appeasement of a bully, and the laws of unintended and perverse consequences. The tandem Israeli-US wars on Iran have seen multiple, often mixed messaging on justifications, objectives, progress and timelines. The alleged nuclear threat from Iran is the glue binding Israel and the US in this war. Both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump have obsessed over this for decades.

To Israel, a nuclear Iran is an existential threat that cannot be allowed to emerge. To Iran, the bomb is the one guarantee of survival. The US-Israeli efforts to destroy Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, facilities, materials and ambition may yet produce the paradoxical outcome of degrading but not crippling Iran’s capabilities to acquire nuclear weapons while simultaneously hardening its political resolve and accelerating clandestine efforts to do so.

Netanyahu has form in crying WMD wolf, assuring the US Congress in 2002: “There is no question whatsoever that Saddam is seeking, and is working, and is advancing toward the development of nuclear weapons.”

Barack Obama described the 2013 interim nuclear deal as “the most significant and tangible progress” with Iran during his presidency. But Netanyahu rejected the agreement as a “dangerous” and "historic mistake". On 3 March 2015, Netanyahu took his Obama critique directly to the US Congress in “ political theatre at its most distasteful".

The final deal, called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action ( JCPOA), was signed on 14 July 2015 and endorsed unanimously by the UN Security Council ( S/RES 2231). Writing on this site on 23 February 2017, I hailed it as a triumph not of US sanctions but global diplomacy, worth defending against foreseeable efforts by the first Trump administration to scuttle it.

The JCPOP shrink-wrapped Iran’s nuclear-weapon ambitions, closed off the plutonium pathway to the bomb, severely curtailed the enriched uranium pathway, reduced its medium-enriched uranium stockpile by 98 per cent, restricted future uranium stocks to non-weapon-grade enrichment level of 3.67 per cent, and imposed a robust transparency, inspection and consequences regime to ensure compliance. Importantly, these restrictions would apply until 2030.

When Trump did exit the JCPOA in May 2018, I wrote that Iran’s pathway to the bomb will be easier and faster. Freed of JCPOA restrictions, Iran began increasing its uranium stockpile, limited inspections, acquired more advanced centrifuges and enriched uranium to 60 per cent purity. The breach of the six-country international agreement underlined US untrustworthiness and damaged America’s credibility with its major European allies, China, Russia and North Korea. I rated it the worst foreign policy decision of Trump 1.0.

The 2025 attacks By August 2024, Iran had increased its stockpile of 60 per cent highly enriched uranium to 165kg – enough to produce more than a dozen nuclear weapons. By 2035 it could also have 60 intercontinental ballistic missiles.

President-elect Trump’s aides began to weigh options for preventing an Iranian nuclear breakout in December. The Israel-US strikes in the 12-day war (13-24 June 2025) demonstrated that Iran’s strategy of relying on Hamas and Hezbollah to contain and deter Israel was flawed, its arsenal of conventional ballistic missiles lack accuracy and punch and Israel can strike any target inside Iran.

Following heavy US strikes on hardened uranium enrichment plants, Trump insisted that Iran’s nuclear program had been “completely and totally obliterated”. In fact, stockpiles of centrifuges and around 400kg of 60 per cent enriched uranium were likely moved out of Fordow ahead of the strikes.

The setbacks vis-à-vis Israel opened up space in Iran’s domestic discourse to raise the prospect of crossing the nuclear threshold. IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi said that while the level of damage was “very serious”, Iran still had “capabilities in terms of treatment, conversion and enrichment of uranium.”

Trump’s critics believed his attacks may have scuttled the prospects of a diplomatic resolution with a built-in intrusive inspection regime. Non-western critics questioned the legitimacy of pointing the finger at a country for clandestine nuclear activities and launching unilateral military action to halt them, by countries with an unacknowledged nuclear arsenal (Israel) and the world’s most lethal nuclear-weapons capability (US) in violation of the global norm against possession by any country.

Be careful what you wish for The shared US-Israeli strategic goal is to convert military triumphs into lasting geopolitical gains. Iran’s is to convert military setbacks into narrative and political gains, solidify public support, consolidate regime control and rebuild networks of influence. If the regime absorbs the blows and survives, that would be enough to claim victory against the combined might of the little and big Satan. Iran suspended cooperation with the IAEA last year and might quit the NPT. It could justify withdrawal with a 90-day notice under Article 10, citing injury to supreme national interests. An Iranian breakout could provoke additional proliferation in the region.

The survival includes means to reconstitute the nuclear program and rapidly accelerate the drive to acquire deliverable nuclear weapons. On 28 February, AP News cited a confidential IAEA report that the Agency had not been given access to Iran’s nuclear facilities and so it could not verify the “size of Iran’s uranium stockpile at the affected nuclear facilities”.

Attempts to search, find and confiscate the stockpile of 60 per cent enriched uranium by launching a ground invasion will heighten the risks of a war that already has departed from the prepared script into escalating and widening chaos and disorder.

As well as Iran’s vulnerability to Israeli and US strikes, the war has also thus far demonstrated the linked vulnerability of US-adjacent energy-rich Gulf states and the limits to unilateral American power, in particular air and naval power. Iran’s motivation to weaponise as the best guarantee of regime survival will have been hardened. Its willingness to enter into negotiations that may have provided cover for preparations to attack will weaken. The US and global appetite to repeat the indiscriminately destructive war of March 2026 will have waned.

Of course, based on the logic of deterrence which all the existing nuclear powers profess to believe, Iran, too, may not be interested in using nuclear weapons once acquired, but in leveraging possession to shape Israeli and US decision-making on thoughts of future hostile operations against it. Should the debacle help the Democrats recapture the House and Senate in November, efforts to remove Trump through impeachment could prove third time lucky.

Far from a defining legacy, Iran could yet become Trump’s political epitaph.

Read part one of this series here. The final part of this series – part three – is coming soon.