Actually, Trump made things between Israel and Iran way worse
He still has an opportunity to turn the ship around, but must act fast
President Donald Trump at the White House on July 14. Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Columnist Dan Perry July 25, 2025
If President Donald Trump had not pulled the United States out of the Iran nuclear accord in 2018, it is quite plausible that the recent, devastating Israel-Iran war never would have happened.
Instead, Iran would have remained beholden to stringent international inspections, with its enrichment efforts frozen far below weapons grade, its nuclear breakout capability blunted, its economic lifeline limited, and its proxies more cautious.
Now that Iran’s vulnerabilities have been thoroughly exposed after a combination of attacks by Israel and the U.S., Trump has undertaken a campaign of glorifying his decision to strike some Iranian nuclear facilities. With his customary mix of delusion, gaslighting and self-glorification, he insists that the Iranian nuclear program has been “obliterated” — which credible intelligence disputes — and has questioned whether there even need to be more talks with Tehran. “I don’t care if we have an agreement or not,” he said a few weeks ago.
He’s wrong. If the goal is to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, then talks are essential. And they must be tough, realistic, and backed by a credible threat of renewed force. Otherwise, Iran will simply resume its previous course toward becoming an increasingly serious threat toward Israel, the U.S., and more — a point that Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, hammered home in an interview this week with Al Jazeera.
Pezeshkian dismissed Trump’s boasts of destruction as “an illusion.” The nuclear program, he said, lives on. “Our nuclear capabilities are in the minds of our scientists, not in the facilities,” he said. (Some top Iranian nuclear scientists were killed in the recent war.) And just in case anyone missed the point, he added that Iran will continue enrichment and is fully prepared for renewed war with Israel.
It’s painful to imagine what might have happened if Trump, in his first term, had resisted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s urging. The nuclear deal, brokered by former President Barack Obama, was working, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Every serious national security expert, including much of the Israeli security establishment, opposed abandoning it.
And it’s instructive to remember just how poorly Trump’s self-aggrandizing celebrations worked out last time. He replaced a functional deal with a fantasy: that Iran would surrender under “maximum pressure.” Instead, it restarted enrichment, dialed down inspections, turbo-charged the effort to armed its proxy militias, deepened ties with Russia and China, and accelerated the very threat the 2015 deal was meant to defuse.
That’s how Iran came to be, as of mid-June, a nuclear weapons threshold state, according to at least some intelligence assessments. The result was the “12-day war” in which Israel struck first, controlled Iran’s skies, and took out much of its nuclear infrastructure and ballistic missile capability. That led, of course, to Trump’s decision to help by sending B-2s with bunker-busting bombs to hit the nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan.
In recent days, Iranian officials have confirmed that while the Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan facilities were damaged or even destroyed in U.S. and Israeli strikes, key materials and centrifuges were moved before impact. The core infrastructure and human capital that powers the program remain intact. U.S. Defense Intelligence assessments now say the program has been set back by “months,” not years. There is “low confidence” in the efficacy of the strike as a long-term deterrent.
And now, Iran knows what the U.S.-Israeli plans for nuclear strikes look like, and knows its program can survive them.
The window for diplomatic leverage is still slightly ajar. Iran is reeling from military blows. Its proxies — Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis — have been dealt massive setbacks. The regime is desperate to avoid snapback sanctions from France and Germany that are scheduled for the fall, and even Russia and China are nudging Tehran toward negotiation. Tehran seems to want talks.
This is precisely the moment when American leadership is needed, to demand not just nuclear constraints, but also limits on Iran’s missiles and a halt to its proxy wars.
Yet instead of seizing this opportunity, Trump is dismissing it.
Why? Seemingly, because acknowledging the need for diplomacy would mean admitting that the “obliteration” he’s bragged about wasn’t real. And that would threaten the narrative he’s selling to his base: that he was tough, decisive and successful.
There’s probably another reason Trump is brushing off diplomacy: His political instincts tell him his base, which is suspicious of any foreign entanglement that can’t be resolved by bombs or bluster, won’t like it.
Trump understands that many of his supporters aren’t horrified by the Iranian regime’s repression of women, its executions of gays, or its export of violent militancy — they see it, at best, as someone else’s problem.
Which helps explain why Trump’s foreign policy is often not based on facts or strategy. Instead, it’s performance art for an audience that distrusts institutions, scorns nuance, hates the world order that the U.S. has built, and deeply prizes the vision of the U.S. as a beacon of unmatched strength.
But other Americans should care. A nuclear Iran threatens not only Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Europe — it threatens the U.S. Whether via long-range missiles or by slipping a weapon to a terrorist group, the risk is not hypothetical. Moreover, Iran’s proxies have done huge damage to Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen, and have targeted U.S. troops in the region.
Containment requires diplomacy that limits Iran’s options, isolates its aggression, and binds it to commitments that it fears breaking. The 2015 deal — imperfect as it was in failing to curb the proxies and the missiles — succeeded in doing that, to a degree.
What the U.S. needs — certainly if it wants to help its allies in the Middle East — is to negotiate anew with Iran, amid a credible threat of renewed force, and put an end to the madness from Tehran. Taming the Islamic Republic’s criminal regime would also be a favor to Iranians.
