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With the Saudi Deal, Trump Risks Aiding and Abetting a Nuclear Arms Race

jinsa-shavdala — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 13:24:45 +0000

Last week, the Department of Energy announced that Secretary of Energy Chris Wright and his Saudi counterpart had signed a peaceful nuclear cooperation agreement along with a bilateral safeguards pact. The former is commonly known as a 123 agreement because, under Section 123 of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, it is subject to congressional review.

But before the required review process could take place, a wave of criticism from nuclear nonproliferation experts and conservative pundits led the administration to backtrack. By Thursday morning, President Donald Trump had knocked the deal into a cocked hat with a Truth Social post insisting the agreement would not entail the enrichment of nuclear material and would be “totally subject to Saudi Arabia joining the very respected and successful Abraham Accords.”

Riyadh’s interest in energy diversification and nuclear energy in particular is not new. The Biden administration engaged in protracted discussions over its last two years on this and other issues as part of its effort to entice the kingdom into joining the Abraham Accords, a U.S.-brokered deal to normalize relations between Israel and a number of Arab states. Those discussions ultimately foundered on Saudi reluctance to adhere to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Additional Protocol (which expands the atomic inspection authorities to detect undeclared nuclear activities), potential restrictions on uranium enrichment, and Riyadh’s insistence that it would not normalize relations with Israel while Gaza remained occupied. Wright’s announcement last week appeared to drop the requirement that Saudi Arabia normalize ties with Israel, but the president’s post appears to have reinstated it. The Saudis, for their part, have indicated that the agreement was signed before the normalization prerequisite was added, leaving the pact in limbo.

The likely delay in the agreement’s implementation provides an opportunity to consider the broader implications of a nuclear cooperation agreement with Riyadh as dispassionately as one can. At the outset, it is important to note that the text of the deal has not been made public and that critics (and advocates) have been reacting to leaks in the Wall Street Journal and other media outlets. Therefore, commentators should proceed with caution about the details until they are clearly spelled out. That is the gravamen of a lengthy X post by nuclear proliferation expert David Albright, in which he poses the question of whether the proposed deal is a “new approach to stop proliferation or a proliferation-prone mistake.” He notes that Saudi Arabia has long been considered a potential candidate country for nuclear proliferation, with its leaders vowing to pursue a bomb if Iran obtains a nuclear weapon (a position I heard articulated explicitly by King Abdullah, Saudi Arabia’s monarch until his death in 2015, when I visited the kingdom as a government official for defense cooperation meetings in 2006). Concerns about Riyadh’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon were recently reinforced by the conclusion of a mutual defense agreement between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, given the latter’s well-known record of promoting proliferation in North Korea, Libya, and Iran.

Albright, whose proliferation credentials are impressive, offers a framework for judging the deal once its text actually becomes available. The most controversial element, he notes, is the potential for Saudi uranium enrichment, given media reports indicating that “the agreement does not include an outright ban on uranium enrichment, but it does not include an outright provision [for enrichment] either.” But if an enrichment plant is built on Saudi soil, he adds, “it would reportedly be controlled by the United States and involve U.S. centrifuge technology.” To keep these capabilities out of Riyadh’s hands, “the plant should be run by U.S. personnel, cleared by U.S. clearance processes. Such a plant would be consistent with the view of no nationally controlled enrichment plants in the region.”

Moreover, Albright notes, the agreement reportedly stipulates that no enrichment plant would be built before the completion of a two-year study on the commercial viability of enrichment in Saudi Arabia—a prospect about which he is clearly skeptical. The outcome of the study may turn on whether enrichment is intended to solely meet Saudi needs or whether enriched material would be exported to serve other countries’ civilian nuclear power programs. Albright also addresses Saudi Arabia’s past reluctance to sign the IAEA Additional Protocol, and on that issue, he is unequivocal: U.S. bilateral inspection arrangements are not enough; Riyadh must agree to robust international monitoring.

On balance, Albright thinks U.S.-Saudi cooperation might be a superior alternative to the Saudis pursuing a nuclear program with another partner, like Pakistan. A cooperation agreement that gives the U.S. significant leverage over Saudi enrichment may be the least bad outcome.

Albright may, however, be overly sanguine here. While details remain scarce, there is good reason to be concerned that the deal would not only be a departure from longtime U.S. policy but also have the potential to upend the traditional U.S. strategic objective of attempting to slow, halt, and reverse the adoption of nuclear weapons. The U.S. might inadvertently make itself into a handmaiden for a nuclear proliferation cascade that would break a nonproliferation regime that is already under enormous stress from a range of geopolitical forces.

The deal as described in press accounts would mark a distinct departure from traditional U.S. policy toward Saudi Arabia and nuclear power. As a Congressional Research Service review notes, “longstanding U.S. policy has linked a U.S.-Saudi 123 agreement to a requirement that the kingdom accept enhanced international safeguards and forgo pursuit of the most proliferation-sensitive nuclear facilities—those for enriching uranium or reprocessing spent nuclear fuel to obtain plutonium.” These undertakings would essentially block the two paths to a nuclear weapon.

They also are the essence of the “gold standard” 123 agreement that the U.S. reached with the United Arab Emirates in 2009. That agreement provided that the U.S. could terminate its nuclear cooperation with the UAE if the latter developed sensitive nuclear technology on its territory or engaged in enrichment or reprocessing activities. An agreed minute to the deal stipulated that its terms “shall be no less favorable in scope and effect” than U.S. cooperation with other Middle Eastern countries and provided for consultations, at Abu Dhabi’s instance, “regarding the possibility of amending” the agreement to provide “equally favorable terms.” This nuclear equivalent of most-favored-nation status means that proceeding with a Saudi agreement that allows for enrichment or eschews IAEA inspections could open the door to the UAE following suit.

For some years, Saudi officials have indicated that they wish to have access to the full nuclear fuel cycle and intend to use the kingdom’s ample uranium reserves to produce low-enriched uranium. Although Saudi Arabia has been a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) for almost 40 years and has a Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement with the IAEA, it has curtailed some of its cooperation with the watchdog agency in recent years. While the guardrails that Albright has suggested might assuage concerns about enrichment activity, it is not at all clear that such protections exist in the signed agreement. Nor would they (as he himself notes) mitigate concerns about IAEA inspections or soothe Emirati concerns about equal treatment, with potential knock-on effects with other countries in the region down the road.

In sum, between its apparent concessions on enrichment and temporary reversal of the Biden administration’s attempts to make a nuclear pact contingent on normalization with Israel, the Trump team’s deal has abandoned key policy objectives with little in the way of compromises from the Saudis. The president’s Truth Social post may block the agreement for now, but, given the inconstancy of his positions articulated via social media, this injunction could be lifted at any time.

Probing the Saudi nuclear agreement more deeply, it appears not only to upend 20 years of U.S. policy across four administrations—both Republican and Democratic—but also to compromise a key U.S. strategic objective reaching back to the dawn of the nuclear age. American statesmen, after the initial use of atomic bombs to force Japan’s surrender in 1945, have always been chary about other countries getting their hands on nuclear technology. The initial efforts at international nuclear arms control in 1945-46 foundered on precisely this issue, and America’s concerns were not exclusively directed at U.S. adversaries. Washington cut off British access to nuclear technology after the war’s conclusion (despite the fact that the initial development of nuclear weapons had been a joint wartime effort) and was notoriously unsympathetic to France’s nuclear advances.

As Johns Hopkins scholar Francis Gavin argued in 2015, the U.S. government has gone to “extraordinary lengths since the beginning of the nuclear age to inhibit — that is, to slow, halt, and reverse — the spread of nuclear weapons and, when unsuccessful, to mitigate the consequences.” The tools that Washington uses to accomplish this he calls “strategies of inhibition.”

American policymakers developed and adapted the tools of statecraft to execute this strategy because they feared the unconstrained spread of nuclear weapons to an unknown number of states would lead to an unstable world in which the odds of nuclear use were exponentially higher. RAND scholars at the end of the 1950s identified this as the “nth country problem,” which carried with it the threat of “catalytic” nuclear war.

In February 1963, in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara provided President John F. Kennedy with his assessment of the dangers of the spread of nuclear weapons to other powers with or without a test ban treaty. Echoing many of the concerns expressed by the RAND experts, he noted that “the continued diffusion of nuclear weapons is clearly not in the interest of the US. Even if these weapons are not used, diffusion will make existing disputes more acute and will generate new ones. And although their use by a weak power will be irrational, such action cannot be ruled out.” Although some so-called realist scholars have argued for the benefits of additional nuclear proliferation on the basis that the more countries that have nuclear weapons, the more world leaders will be deterred from using them, American policymakers have shared McNamara’s assessment since the 1960s.

Kennedy, shortly after receiving McNamara’s memo and just months before his tragic assassination, was asked at a press conference about the prospects for a nuclear test ban, and his response suggested that he had thoroughly assimilated McNamara’s argument: “I am haunted by the feeling that by 1970, unless we are successful, there may be 10 nuclear powers instead of four, and by 1975, 15 or 20.” But in 1968, his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, negotiated the NPT and with it established the nonproliferation apparatus that has limited the number of nuclear weapons states to nine. That effort, in fact, marks the single greatest accomplishment of arms control in our time.

Despite its successes, that treaty regime has been under continuous stress. In the 1970s, Sweden, Australia, and South Korea all gave up their aspirations for nuclear weapons. In the 1980s, the Israeli raid on the Osirak reactor delayed an Iraqi nuclear program that was then further precluded by the first Gulf War and the Iraq War. India and Pakistan both tested nuclear weapons in the late 1990s, but they were never signatories to the treaty (nor was Israel, which maintains a policy of strategic ambiguity). The nuclear program of North Korea, a former NPT signatory, has bedeviled policymakers for 30 years, representing the most serious challenge to the viability of the treaty yet. And ongoing concerns about the Iranian nuclear program have revolved around the idea that an Iranian weapon would set off a “chain reaction” of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, upending the last major achievement of the effort to control nuclear weapons.

Saudi Arabia, of course, has been the linchpin of speculation about a “chain reaction” due to its understandable fears about the Iranian nuclear program. These fears help explain why Saudi leaders were quite content to see Operation Midnight Hammer’s strikes on the core elements of Iran’s program in June 2025. The Saudis have been less enthusiastic about the current round of warfare initiated by President Trump on February 28, 2026, particularly as Iranian retaliatory strikes target Saudi soil and amid the prospect of Houthi attacks on the kingdom’s infrastructure. In this context, it is not at all surprising that Saudi officials have supported the mediation efforts of Pakistan, Qatar, and others to end the fighting or that they would, in light of the U.S. failure to completely defend the kingdom from Iranian attacks, pursue a hedging strategy with regard to their own nuclear weapons capability.

Given Saudi apprehension about the course of the conflict and the potential of Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz, it is also not astonishing that the Trump administration might see concessions on the nuclear issue as mollifying the kingdom. The irony, however, is that these concessions might very well prompt the kind of nuclear cascade that has animated fears over the Iranian program in the first place. As Andrea Stricker of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies wrote of the Saudi deal, “We could quickly see Turkey, Egypt, potentially others like Qatar and Oman lining up for similar treatment.” In Stricker’s view, providing Riyadh with access to enrichment technology, even under conditions that deny Saudi personnel access, would also “risk Saudi espionage or seizure, potentially forcing a future president to destroy it.”

If the agreement ultimately does move forward, Congress should examine it with a fine-tooth comb, and if it is as flawed as current descriptions suggest, it should reject it with a veto-proof majority.

Although the issues surrounding the Saudi nuclear deal are mired in technical details, the broader policy and strategic implications are momentous. Proceeding with the agreement would open the door to the very nuclear cascade that American policymakers have tried for years to prevent by limiting or destroying the Iranian nuclear program. One can hope the president’s current posture of linking the deal to normalization with Israel will keep U.S.-Saudi nuclear cooperation from proceeding on the terms as we currently understand them. But even normalization with Israel will not fix the issues of enrichment and inspections that could well open a Pandora’s box of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, realizing six decades of policymakers’ fears.

Amb. Eric Edelman is a JINSA Distinguished Scholar and the former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy.

Read the original piece in The Dispatch.

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Taking Out Iran’s Pickaxe Nuclear Site is Key — Here’s How Trump Can Do It

Yoni Tobin — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 19:37:32 +0000

At Pickaxe Mountain, Iran thinks it has built a nuclear fortress America can’t destroy. President Donald Trump can’t afford to let that illusion survive another week.

Fortunately, he has options.

Tehran has followed the same playbook for decades, secretly building underground nuclear sites that become the workhorses of its drive for the bomb.

Pickaxe appears to be the latest and potentially most dangerous.

Back in 2020, Tehran’s nuclear chief warned that workers were excavating the site for “a more modern, vaster, and inclusive building” — “working 24/7 to move all our sensitive work into the heart of this mountain.”

Since then, Iran has spent six years carving Pickaxe into what it hopes will be an indestructible nuclear sanctuary.

This is more than double the time it spent secretly building its enrichment plants at Fordow and Natanz before being caught.

Both those sites were already in “an advanced stage of construction” when inspections occurred.

Inspectors still have never been to Pickaxe, and it appears unlikely they ever will.

Satellite imagery suggests the facility may well be large enough to reconstitute many, possibly all, of Iran’s core nuclear activities: centrifuge storage and production, uranium enrichment and stockpiling and even weaponization.

This is helped by Iran’s technological advances in recent years, which minimize its need for floor space, and time, to dash for a bomb.

A recent report says Iran might now be moving enrichment centrifuges to Pickaxe; it’s been observed working on the site in recent months.

Trump himself warned this year that Iran was undertaking new activities at a site “protected by granite.”

Yet Pickaxe went untouched in Operations Midnight Hammer last year and Epic Fury in the spring.

Iran is banking on the site being impenetrable in a way that its other subterranean sites were not.

Initial estimates suggested it could be even further underground than Fordow, Iran’s most sensitive and deepest-buried enrichment plant at the time it was struck in Midnight Hammer.

Hence Iran’s refusal to negotiate over the site. No new nuclear deal will bring to light, let alone shut down, this key node in the regime’s undimmed nuclear ambitions.

Every month Pickaxe remains intact gives Tehran more time to move equipment, rebuild enrichment capacity and shorten the path back to a nuclear weapon.

The president recognizes the urgency: “That’s where the action is. We’ll be hitting that area pretty soon and very heavily.”

Now he needs to follow through. Targeting it would shatter Tehran’s belief that one mountain can preserve its nuclear ambitions from American airpower.

Midnight Hammer showed that America’s most powerful Massive Ordnance Penetrator bunker busters could severely damage even a deeply buried facility like Fordow.

These weapons relied on smart tactics, precise targeting and fuses that enabled these weapons to drill sequentially through weak points, like ventilation shafts, before detonating to full effect.

That same operation also showed that blocking access to a site can be nearly as effective as burrowing into it.

With Iran’s highly enriched uranium sitting at Isfahan, in storage tunnels potentially beyond reach of bunker busters, salvos of low-flying Tomahawk cruise missiles were used to collapse the entrances and entrap the “nuclear dust” instead.

In the more than a year since these attacks, Iran has poked around but not reentered the site.

Striking Pickaxe could combine elements of what worked best in last summer’s operation, seeking both to maximize direct damage and minimize Iran’s ability to access it afterward.

The site was designed, and construction started, long before Midnight Hammer revealed innovations enabling the MOPs to create and exploit new structural vulnerabilities.

This would entail a mix of bunker busters, cruise missiles and possibly other munitions to attack Pickaxe at multiple points, and from multiple angles.

The facility’s ventilation shafts and tunnel entrances are key. Israeli airstrikes on other Iranian nuclear sites show that disabling their power supplies can add to the effectiveness.

What comes after the strikes would be equally important. Working with Israel and its incredible intelligence capabilities, the United States would need to monitor the site closely and make clear it will conduct follow-on attacks if Iran tries to access it.

Trump has already upended many of Iran’s beliefs about what American presidents will or won’t do.

Now he can confound the expectation that its nuclear program can survive U.S. military action.

Jonathan Ruhe is Fellow for American Strategy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA).

Read the original piece in the New York Post.

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Trump’s Hands Are Tied in Hormuz. Here’s ‘Plan B’

Nolan Judd — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 15:28:31 +0000

By attacking Iran, President Donald Trump triggered a crisis over the Strait of Hormuz that he’s struggled to resolve as commander-in-chief. His only way out now may be as a statesman — but the window to avoid uncontrolled escalation could be closing.

Multiple U.S. troops were recently killed in Iranian missile strikes. The memorandum of understanding whose key job was reopening the strait lies in tatters. The sides are now exchanging expanded strikes to impose their competing visions of Hormuz’s future. The prospect that the war could enter an even more dangerous phase is growing by the day.

Shutting down Hormuz has been Iran’s greatest achievement of the war. A successful U.S. operation to liberate it would represent a huge strategic reversal — not just dramatically strengthening Washington’s leverage in future negotiations but transforming the conflict’s current narrative of U.S. defeat into one of American success in restoring deterrence.

Given those advantages, if a unilateral U.S. military option exists that could, with high confidence and acceptable cost, free Hormuz and — crucially — keep it free, Trump should give the order. The problem is that despite knowing for five months how central the strait’s disposition is to the war effort and America’s global standing, the order hasn’t come.

Which strongly suggests that the option doesn’t exist — in no small part because as Trump has observed, one “guy with a drone can shut [the strait] down.” Last week, Vice President JD Vance offered his version of the dilemma: “You can bomb them, you can take away their radar, you can take away some of their drones and some of their missiles,” he said, “but it’s just too easy to fire at ships in the straits.”

The likely costs of seizing Hormuz are daunting. The battle could take months, involving ground forces, high casualties, and the dangerous depletion of critical munitions stocks. Iran could unleash its remaining firepower to devastate Gulf energy infrastructure, while its Houthi allies shut down shipping through the Red Sea — potentially ruinous for the global economy. Meanwhile, any U.S. military gains could be undone by Trump’s “guy with a drone.”

There is a fundamental asymmetry of interests and pain thresholds at work. For Iran’s rulers, the stakes in Hormuz are existential — the essential lever they need to deter future attacks once this war concludes. They seem determined to fight as long as necessary, absorbing devastating costs without regard to the immense suffering of their own people.

The United States, in contrast, is a democracy with midterm elections looming. Trump’s war has been deeply unpopular from the start, exacerbated by spikes in gas prices and inflation. Expanding the war now would carry enormous military, economic, and political risk, with no guarantee of sustainable victory.

If the honest assessment is that a military solution remains unavailable at a price either Trump or the American people are prepared to pay, the clear-eyed response is to accept reality, however regretfully, and develop an alternative strategy to make the best out of a horrible situation.

That strategy would use aggressive diplomacy to weaponize the widespread international consensus on restoring freedom of navigation. Washington’s most powerful allies in the Gulf, Europe, and Asia already reject Iranian control of Hormuz and are primed to be forged into a more forceful multinational coalition.

The missing piece has been China, which vetoed a UN Security Council resolution on Hormuz in April on grounds that America’s military attacks and blockade of Iran should end. Nevertheless, Chinese officials have repeatedly called for a rapid return to free, safe, and unimpeded navigation, rejecting efforts to militarize the strait or charge tolls.

Between 40% and 50% of China’s oil imports transit the Gulf, and its economic relations with the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Qatar, Kuwait, and Oman dwarf its ties to Iran. Once the guns fall silent, a U.S.-organized, Gulf-led offensive to pressure and incentivize Chinese cooperation might succeed in isolating Iran by shifting the dynamic from Iran vs. Trump to Iran vs. the world.

The sequencing might work as follows: an initial Security Council resolution calling for the urgent restoration of Hormuz as a free and open international waterway and authorizing a multinational naval coalition to work with Iran and Oman in clearing it for safe passage. Britain and France have already volunteered to lead such an effort. Should the coalition report back that Iran is impeding the resolution, the Security Council would reserve the right to take additional action, including condemnation, sanctions, and, ultimately, authorization to reopen Hormuz by force.

It would not be easy or quick. It would require tremendous diplomatic skill, patience, and presidential leadership — none of which have been hallmarks of this administration. Even then, pulling it off will be a long shot. But in a world of terrible options, where further military escalation courts disaster and success in equal measure, a Plan B focused on an American diplomatic push could be the least bad path forward.

John Hannah is the Randi & Charles Wax Senior Fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America. He served in both Republican and Democratic administrations, including as former Vice President Cheney’s national security advisor.

Read the original piece in the Washington Examiner.

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Winning Before the Battle Ends

Yoni Tobin — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 05:06:03 +0000

Lt Gen David Harris, USAF (ret.) is a Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) Generals & Admirals Program Participant and the former Deputy Chief of Staff of U.S. Air Force Futures Directorate. He also has served as Director for Strategic Plans, U.S. Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC).

Click here to read the full piece in The Hill.

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How Trump Can Win Back Allies and Rejuvenate U.S. Diplomacy on Iran

Nolan Judd — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 15:25:43 +0000

When Secretary of State Marco Rubio touched down in Abu Dhabi on June 23 for his first visit to the Gulf since the Iran war began, he offered a telling description of his purpose. “We want to make sure their views are taken into account in every decision that we make,” he told reporters.

It was a welcome sentiment — albeit long overdue. Collectively, the Gulf states took the brunt of Iranian missiles and drones fired during the war. Critical energy, transportation and tourism sites were struck. Their economies suffered massive disruption from Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

…

John Hannah is the Randi & Charles Wax Senior Fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America who served as national security advisor to former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Read the full piece in the Hill.

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Ahmed Al-Sharaa Needs a Course Correction

Nolan Judd — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 13:32:00 +0000

When Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa officially assumed power after the fall of Bashar al-Assad in January 2025, he pledged to preserve “civil peace,” rebuild Syria’s military and security institutions, and restore state authority after years of fragmentation and civil war. It was an appealing proposition. Under Assad, weak state control and ungoverned territory allowed jihadist groups like the Islamic State in Syria (ISIS) to seize and hold ground. At the same time, Iran exploited eastern Syria’s porous borders to sustain a land corridor to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Restoring coherent state authority offered a credible path toward long-term stabilization of Syria and the region.

But Syria’s ongoing transition reveals a dangerous contradiction. As Damascus consolidates military and political authority, some of the policies intended to strengthen the state risk weakening its ability to secure it. Chief among them is the marginalization of the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the US-backed force that spent the last decade dismantling ISIS’ territorial caliphate, governing former jihadist strongholds, and building the intelligence networks that kept eastern Syria from sliding back into insurgency. As the SDF has lost operational control over key terrain in the northeast following clashes in January 2026 with Damascus, resurgent ISIS cells, escaped jihadist detainees, and Iran-backed Iraqi militias are taking advantage of a growing security vacuum.

…

Giran Ozcan is the fellow for Kurdish affairs at the Jewish Institute for National Security in America (JINSA). Prior to JINSA, Giran was the founding executive director of the Kurdish Peace Institute. He previously worked with the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) at its overseas representative offices and served as the HDP Representative to the United States of America between 2017 and 2021. He graduated from the University of Warwick with a degree in sociology and worked at the Center for Turkey Studies in London between 2011 and 2016. He was a founding editor of The Region, an online news outlet covering the Middle East.

Jonah Brody is a policy analyst at JINSA. His research interests include Middle Eastern geopolitics, counterterrorism, and Turkish foreign and security policy. Jonah holds an MA in International Security from Sciences Po Paris, a BA in History from the University of Tennessee at Martin, and a Post-Graduate Diploma in Comparative Politics from Sciences Po Toulouse. He previously worked at the National Democratic Institute on the West and Central Africa portfolio and has interned at the Hudson Institute, the European Army Interoperability Centre, and the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism. His writings have appeared in The Hill, RealClearDefense, The Jerusalem Strategic Tribune, and Modern Diplomacy.

Rena Gabber is a research associate for JINSA Senior Fellow John Hannah. She formerly worked as a research assistant at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, focusing on Arab-Israel relations. Rena graduated from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service with a degree in International Politics in May 2024.

Read the full piece in the National Interest.

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America Has Upended Its Own Order in the Persian Gulf

Nolan Judd — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 19:18:42 +0000

The Israel-Lebanon agreement at the very least works against the equation established by the memorandum of understanding (MOU) between Iran and the U.S. As Hussein Aboubakr Mansour observes, this equation is as disturbing to Gulf governments as it is to Jerusalem:

If Tehran can compel American pressure on Israel to cease operations against Hizballah as a condition of a ceasefire with the United States, then the proxy network that directly threatens Gulf security—not only Hizballah in Lebanon but the Houthis in Yemen and the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq—has been validated as a going concern. Iran’s success in including Lebanon in the MOU suggests that Tehran has no intention of resetting or reducing its regional ambitions, and this is among the principal concerns of Arab states evaluating the MOU’s long-term implications…

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour is a Fellow with the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA).

Click here to read the original piece in Mosaic.

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Trump Went to War to End Iran’s Missile Threat. Now He Endorses It.

Yoni Tobin — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 16:10:40 +0000

U.S. President Donald Trump launched the war against Iran in part to remove the ballistic-missile threat he long railed against. On June 17, he announced that Iran can keep them.

At the G7 summit in France, Trump said Iran’s missiles only “hurt a little location” and “aren’t the problem,” doubling down by saying “⁠if other countries have them, it’s a little bit unfair for them not to have some.” The Memorandum of Understanding sets no limit on those missiles and leaves them off the agenda for later talks.

This deal fails in many ways, but Trump’s endorsement of the missiles he went to war to degrade gives Tehran every incentive to deepen the threat it posed before the war.

Trump’s own words show how far he has reversed himself.

Announcing the campaign in February, he told Americans that Iran had developed missiles that could threaten Europe and U.S. bases overseas, and was building more that “could soon reach the American homeland.”

He returned to that warning in April, casting Tehran’s drive to mass-produce missiles as an intolerable danger. He long attacked the Obama administration’s 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal for trading sanctions relief to a regime that kept building missiles, including nuclear-capable types. Four months after sending American forces to destroy those weapons, he calls them a minor concern.

Yet those missiles remain precisely the threat Trump once described. According to JINSA data, Iran fired roughly 2,300 missiles during the war, including more than 580 at Israel and 550-plus at the United Arab Emirates, with nearly 170 hitting targets in the region. American, Israeli and Arab air defenses stopped the vast majority, but penetrating missiles killed civilians and damaged critical infrastructure.

The war showed that Iran does not need most missiles to land. It needs only “some” to penetrate defenses, exhaust interceptors, disrupt daily life and keep Israel, U.S. bases, Gulf partners, shipping and global energy markets under threat.

Iran also demonstrated its arsenal could reach further than previous estimates. During the war, Iran fired ballistic missiles at the American and British base on Diego Garcia, nearly 3,800 kilometers away and well beyond the previous 3,000 maximum range estimate, threatening deeper into Europe. In May 2025, the Defense Intelligence Agency indicated that Iran was pursuing an arsenal of 60 intercontinental ballistic missiles by 2035.

Iran has repeatedly responded to attacks by speeding up missile production and expanding its role in its deterrent strategy. It amassed a stockpile of roughly 2,500 medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBM) able to hit Israel and several thousand short-range missiles, and, following Israeli strikes in 2024, accelerated production to an estimated 300 missiles a month that would have enabled it to reach 10,000 missiles in two years. After Israel cut that to roughly 1,500 MRBMs in the 12-day war last June, Iran rapidly rebuilt its stocks to about 2,000.

This year’s war destroyed much of Iran’s missile capacity and more than 85% of the defense industrial base it needs to rebuild, but its proven ability to sustain fire throughout the war makes these weapons more valuable to Tehran.

Letting Iran rebuild its missile capacity is among the MoU’s fundamental flaws, removing the pressure that the war imposed. By allowing Iranian oil sales, sanctions relief and at least $300 billion in outside investment, the MoU gives Tehran resources to rebuild military power and could leave the regional threat stronger than before the war. Even with Iran’s weapons production in shambles, that would turn a war meant to reduce Iran’s threat into a deal financing its return on a greater scale.

The reversal places Trump in the position he condemned.

He criticized former President Barack Obama for treating the nuclear program as the only danger worth bargaining over, leaving Iran free to expand its missiles, proxies and regional aggression. Trump’s deal repeats that error, accepting Iran’s missiles as the price of nuclear promises, and it goes beyond anything Obama did by affirming Iran’s right to the weapons rather than merely tolerating them. An adversary that hears it may keep the weapon it just used has every reason to rebuild it and little reason to show restraint.

The president must reverse his support for Iran’s missile program by fwarning that its expansion will resume American strikes and the naval blockade. Any deal must cap Iran’s missile stockpile and ban missile production, as well as open Iran’s missile and drone sites to inspectors. Destroying Iran’s missiles and its capacity to build them was a declared aim of the war, and Washington should secure that rather than bargain it away.

A president who went to war to take Iran’s missiles away should not end that war by guaranteeing Iran can rebuild them. The deal does not make America or its partners safer. It grants Iran permission to restore its strongest weaponry on its own schedule.

Ari Cicurel is the associate director of foreign policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA).

Click here to read the original piece in JNS.

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Epic Fury Ends With a Flop

Yoni Tobin — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 18:07:34 +0000

Excerpt Below:

In 38 days of war, beginning on Feb. 28, the United States and Israel decapitated Iran’s leadership, and pummeled its missile and drone arsenals, defense industry, air defenses and navy. The Iranian regime was on its back and in disarray, and CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper sought to continue another 10 to 14 days of attacks.

But then, Trump agreed to a ceasefire, and the regime in Tehran was saved.

It marked the beginning of the erosion of American leverage over Iran to get a decent deal. Iran was less likely to make concessions when the bombing stopped than it was during the war. Indeed, its leaders didn’t even abide by the ceasefire.

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Read the full piece in JNS.

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Trump Is Stuck and His Iran Leverage Is Spent

Nolan Judd — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 13:56:11 +0000

On Thursday morning, President Donald Trump threatened to hit Iran “VERY HARD,” seize its main oil export terminal at Kharg Island, and take “total control” of its energy industry. By the afternoon, he’d canceled it all on indications that Iran had approved “discussions and final points” toward a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and constrain its nuclear program. In the space of a few hours, the war’s depressing denouement was compressed into a single news cycle: Trump blusters, Trump retreats, Trump desperately seeks a face-saving exit ramp.

The fact is that Trump is stuck. Militarily, he fears that a return to all-out war would carry even more damaging military, economic, and political costs for his presidency than he’s already suffered, with no assurance of corresponding strategic gain.

Diplomatically, the “very good deal” that he’s promised for months — restoring freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz and ending Iran’s nuclear program — has failed to materialize, stymied by Iran’s insistence that Washington first enrich it to the tune of billions of dollars and Trump’s mortal fear of appearing weak after repeated assurances that Iran’s capitulation was at hand.

But no amount of spin will obscure the emerging truth. There will be no Iranian unconditional surrender, much less the installation of a pliant Delcy Rodriguez of Persia. With or without a deal, when the fighting ends, it will almost certainly reflect a harsh new reality that Trump’s ill-conceived war has exposed: The security commitments that stood at the heart of America’s deterrence in the Gulf for decades have been proven hollow.

Before the war, U.S. deterrence rested on a simple proposition: Any Iranian attempt to close the strait would be suicidal. The Islamic Republic’s rulers constantly had to worry that challenging freedom of navigation through the world’s most critical choke point would trigger not just a military campaign to reopen the waterway, but a devastating assault to end the regime itself. The fear of those consequences — an untested but credible Sword of Damocles hovering over Iran’s calculations — was the essence of Washington’s deterrent, constraining not just Iranian behavior in Hormuz but across multiple domains, including whether to cross the nuclear threshold.

That proposition now lies in ruins.

Forced into a fight for its existence by a U.S.-Israeli war that made regime collapse a central purpose, Iran’s new leadership, convinced it had nothing to lose, threw caution to the wind. It closed the strait and has successfully held the global economy hostage for three months.

Confronted with what had always been its worst nightmare — a full-scale war against the United States and Israel — the Iranian regime not only survived, it asserted control over one of the world’s economic lifelines while holding at risk the well-being of America’s Gulf partners. And contrary to all pre-war assumptions, Washington had no good military answers to either challenge. That’s the sound of deterrence crumbling.

Yes, Iran has paid a horrific price. Its conventional military power has been smashed, its nuclear timeline extended, a generation of leaders killed, its already-battered economy in freefall, and its industrial capacity to reconstitute its missile arsenal — the force intended to shield its eventual dash to the bomb — degraded by as much as 90%. The U.S. and Israel have bought important time against the Iranian threat — an extremely valuable commodity that should not be gainsaid, especially given the Islamic regime’s ongoing crisis of legitimacy with the Iranian people.

But nor can it be denied that the war has also cost the U.S. dearly, and in coin that may be far more strategically significant. Iran’s path to rebuilding the foundations of its broken military and economy may be long and difficult, but relatively straightforward. U.S. deterrence, on the other hand, once shattered in the crucible of a war that found the credibility of American threats wanting, could prove far harder to reestablish.

Trump attacked Iran with the intent of demonstrating America’s overwhelming power and ability to defeat its adversaries. Instead, his gambit ended up highlighting the limits of Washington’s capacity to impose its will on a much weaker enemy. You can bet the lesson will not be lost, either on America’s friends nor its foes.

The war will end eventually, but Iran’s proven ability to shut down Hormuz, threaten catastrophic harm against U.S. allies, and live to tell the tale will remain lodged in the world’s collective memory — an extraordinary shift in the balance of global leverage that the U.S. will be hard-pressed to reverse.

It’s a bell that, once rung, will be difficult to unring, and almost certainly not at a price that the American people seem prepared to pay.

John Hannah, the Randi & Charles Wax Senior Fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, served as national security advisor to former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Originally published in the Washington Examiner.

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