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.
Click here to read the original piece in JNS.