The Daily - Will the U.S. Join Israel’s War With Iran?

Episode Date: June 18, 2025

In the growing conflict between Israel and Iran, one questions now looms over Washington: How far will President Trump go to entangle the United States in a new war?Jonathan Swan, who covers the White House, discusses Mr. Trump’s shifting stance on U.S. involvement, and the options he is now weighing.Guest: Jonathan Swan, a White House reporter for The New York Times.Background reading: Mr. Trump has shifted on Iran under pressure from Israel.The president’s choice: last-chance diplomacy or a bunker-busting bomb.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Photo: Kenny Holston/The New York Times Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. In the growing conflict between Israel and Iran, one question now looms over Washington. How far will President Trump go to entangle the United States in a new war? Today, my colleague Jonathan Swan on Trump's shifting stance on U.S. involvement and the options that he has now waned. It's Wednesday, June 18. Jonathan we're talking to you at about 4 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday.

And as of now, there's growing evidence that President Trump is seriously considering joining Israel's bombing campaign in Iran. Which that's something that Trump has said, long said, that he has not wanted to do. He has been very opposed to pulling the US into more war. So can you just explain to start us off how and why has Trump's position on this shifted? Look, it's not a simple story. It took place over a period of months.

And yes, it's true, Donald Trump said, I'm not going to get you into another endless war, Middle East war. But he's also said consistently that Iran cannot be allowed to have a nuclear bomb. So basically what happened was Donald Trump leaves office in January 2021 and according to the Justice Department, the Iranian government hired hitmen to kill Donald Trump. People forget that. This was revenge for, supposedly, for his killing of a top Iranian general in early 2020.

And the Iranians also hack the emails of some of his top aides, including his now chief of staff, Suzy Wiles. Iran, of course, denies all of this, but this created a conventional wisdom that God help Iran if Donald Trump gets elected again, because he will rain fury upon them. And from the Israeli perspective, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for a long time has wanted to undertake a military operation to take out Iran's nuclear program. And in his first term, Donald Trump gave Netanyahu virtually everything he wanted.

So it was this confluence of events. You had Trump returning to the White House, supposedly filled with desire for vengeance, and then you had Netanyahu. And now he had the thinking went, a president who was going to be more full throated in support of this Israeli policy. But that's not what happened. When Trump got into office, one of the first things he did was he empowered Steve Witkoff, who is a billionaire, real estate developer, friends with Trump for many years, no experience in foreign policy.

Trump appointed him special envoy to the Middle East. And pretty early in the administration, Trump said to him, I want you to try to get a deal with Iran. I don't want to go to war. He wanted diplomacy. A hundred percent. He wanted diplomacy. There's this BS kind of revisionist history going on right now. You see it sort of seeping out in kind of like anonymous officials and stuff, you know, from Israel, some here saying, this was all a brilliant ruse. Donald Trump was in on it all along. He was pretending to be interested in diplomacy, but really he was always supportive of this

effort. Total nonsense. Trump was really serious about getting a deal, but at the same time, Donald Trump was very clear with his advisors early on in the administration. He did not trust Benjamin Netanyahu. He thought that Netanyahu was trying to drag him into a war on Netanyahu's timeline. Trump wanted to be given the space and time to try to find a diplomatic solution, because in his view, that is preferable to war.

But his baseline was actually always the same, which is Iran can't have a nuclear weapon. So really what you had was this dual track. You had Trump authorizing his team to pursue diplomacy, but Netanyahu determined to go ahead with a military operation. And when you talk to people around Trump, it was always a case of trying to hold Netanyahu at bay for long enough to try to get to a deal. So tell me more about what Netanyahu is up to while Trump is pursuing this diplomatic path. to, while Trump is pursuing this diplomatic path? Well, Netanyahu is of course dealing with a war in Gaza and he's going after Iran's

proxies in the region, including in Lebanon, where exploding pages killed scores of Hezbollah operatives and wounded thousands. And then in early February, Netanyahu makes his first visit to the Trump White House in the second term. And he's clearly thought very carefully about what to say to Trump to persuade him to get on board with this military mission to take out Iran's nuclear program. So he brings along with him a gift for Trump, and it's a gold-plated pager, the same device that Israel secretly packed with explosives and sold to unwitting Hezbollah operatives.

So he's like commemorating this attack with this gift. Correct. And Trump was kind of weirded out by it. He told someone afterwards that he thought it was just really weird and kind of disturbing. But in that meeting in the Oval Office, Netanyahu walks Trump through a visual presentation, a slide presentation of Iran's nuclear sites. And he's starting this argument that time is short, we have this historic window, this historic opportunity, Iran's air defenses have been battered, we have them where we

want them. This proxy force, Hezbollah, was decimated. So now is the moment. And with that, he is hoping that the US will join them in a mission. There's not like one simple ask. There's a whole range of things that the United States could do, from covert support and intelligence to things that Israel doesn't have the capabilities to do. So for example, you have bunker busting bombs that weigh 30,000 pounds

that would be needed to destroy a nuclear site named Fordo deep underground. The US has these bombs, Israel doesn't. So one of Netanyahu's objectives was to try to convince Trump to provide these weapons to go after Iran, but he failed in that moment. What do you mean he failed? How does Trump respond to this? Well, Trump sends him home empty handed. He's not ready to give him the bombs. He's not ready to commit to America doing a joint mission with Israel.

He says, we are going to try diplomacy. We're going to try to make a deal. And that's the method we're using. So it sounds like at this moment in time that you've described, Netanyahu and Trump have at least one goal that is the same, which is that neither of them want to allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon, but they disagree on the means to achieve that end. Trump wants diplomacy, Netanyahu wants force.

What happens after this meeting? Well, after this meeting, Trump starts to put out feelers to Iran. Mm-hmm. And Iran had already put out its own feelers to the US, so about half a dozen countries or so were, you know, sending messages, the Iranians are interested in talking, back channels, all that kind of stuff, including the Omanis, who often play that role. But Trump himself decides to send a letter to the Ayatollah.

Is that unusual? Well, it's very Trumpian. You know, it recalls his letters to Kim Jong-un of North Korea in his first term. So in early March, a source of mine, you know, sees Trump. And Trump's new kind of thing at that moment was he would wave around this letter that he'd sent to the Ayatollah. Like a copy of it. It was a copy of it, yeah. And he'd say, I wrote the most beautiful letter to the Ayatollah.

Do you want to hear about it? And he would give these like live renditions of the letter. Wow. What did the letter say? I have not seen the letter, but one visitor who was treated to one of these live renditions told me the letter's basic message was, I don't want war. I don't want to blow you off the map. I want a deal.

So very classic Trump message, which is, you know, I want diplomacy, but also I might remind you that I could completely annihilate you. Not subtle stuff. Right. So that happens. So that's March, April, the negotiations start. So Steve Witkoff and the director of policy planning at the State Department, Michael Anton, they go over to Oman and they start these negotiations.

And you know, they spend hours and hours over a number of different rounds over a couple of months negotiating with the Iranians what could you live with what could you not live with and finally at the end of May the US side actually presents a proposal a written proposal that says that ultimately there can be no enrichment but here are these ideas for how you can have civilian nuclear power. And Steve Witkoff was telling Trump, we're on the cusp of a deal. For a while, Trump was saying, I think we're doing better with Iran than we are with Russia.

I think we could get a deal. They really want a deal. They're really weak, et cetera, et cetera. Jonathan, while these talks are happening, and looks, at least for a time, like the US and Iran are inching closer to a deal, how does Netanyahu feel about all of this and the negotiations? Not good. He comes in visits in early April, comes to Washington, and that was not a good visit.

He again reiterated they want to get the bunker busting bomb. But Trump is very clear. No, you are to do nothing while we're still negotiating. And after that meeting, Trump's entire team reinforced that message to the Israelis, don't do it, don't do it. And did the US officials who were saying that feel like they were being listened to or that Israel would do what they said? At the time they did, they think, well, the US Trump team thinks, well, I think they got

the message. But in May, the US intelligence community picks up intelligence showing that it's highly likely that Netanyahu is going to strike Iran with or without American support. And this was a very unwelcome discovery. I mean, discovery is probably too strong a word because they knew how badly he wanted. This is not some surprise. But the clarity of, oh, he's really going to do this, really dawned upon them. What is this here?

What is the extent of the attack that they're learning about? Well, it was quite expansive. So it wasn't just an attack that would be narrowly targeted at this facility or that facility. It was an attack that could potentially imperil the regime itself. But as you've been saying, Jonathan, these are not new goals for Netanyahu. So I'm just sort of wondering why he's choosing now. Well, the Israelis say that Iran is on the cusp of having a nuclear bomb. In all of our conversations with senior Trump administration officials found that they were

unaware of any new piece of intelligence showing that the Iranians were rushing to build a nuclear bomb. So we did not find evidence on the US side to support that, but there are a number of people at the senior level of the Trump administration who nonetheless believe that Iran is too close for comfort to being able to get to a nuclear weapon. Regardless, once this information came through, once they had this intelligence that Israel was very likely to move ahead with an attack, the Trump team had a conversation and they basically said, if this is going to happen, if this is very likely to happen, we need to be prepared.

So they explore a range of options from what can we do to restrain Netanyahu all the way up to full-throated American military participation in a regime change war. So that's all happening. But meanwhile, Trump is getting really frustrated with the Iranians. Why? He keeps saying, take the deal. It was almost like they weren't understanding that his threat was real. And then two Fridays ago, I was on Air Force One with President Trump

flying from Washington to New Jersey because he was spending the weekend at his golf club in Bedminster. And the Ayatollah had made a comment during the week, which basically, it was really rejecting the Trump team's proposal. It was saying, we are going to have enrichment. We must have enrichment. So I asked Trump on the plane about this. I said, what did you make of the Ayatollah saying this? And he was adamant.

No enrichment. We're not having it. And I could just see, I just, like what, you know, he's really serious about this. And I could just tell there was a shift. There was not the optimism that I was detecting from him and his team a couple of weeks earlier. I could tell that he thought that these guys might not actually be serious about a deal and that

this was potentially going in a different direction. We'll be right back. So Jonathan, last week you were on Air Force One with the President before the attacks had occurred. And you start getting the sense that something might be shifting, there might be something in the works. Can you walk us through what you learned next? So the next day, it's a Saturday, we learned that Trump has changed his schedule. We were expecting to fly back on Air Force One to Washington on Sunday afternoon.

And we get this notice from the White House saying, he's actually going to go to Camp David on Sunday. And that was very curious to me because Donald Trump does not voluntarily go to Camp David after a weekend playing golf in New Jersey, went to the UFC on Saturday night. He doesn't like Camp David. It's a very rustic, wooded retreat. So that made me think, well, something's up. And I still didn't know I was making phone calls, talking to sources.

I actually, at that point, couldn't establish what was happening. But what we've learned in the last week reporting with my colleagues Maggie Haberman, Mark Mazzetti, Ronan Bergman and others, is that John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, and Dan Cain, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave a presentation. It lasted about two and a half hours. And Ratcliffe laid out the CIA's assessment that it was highly likely that Netanyahu was moving ahead with this military operation with or without American participation. But they still don't have a briefing from, it's not like the Israelis said, here are our war plans, here's what we're doing.

The next day, any remaining doubts are dispelled. Trump has a phone call with Netanyahu, and Netanyahu is unequivocal. They're doing it. The mission is a go. And he gives Trump pretty high level overview of what they're doing, talks about some of the aspects of the military campaign. Trump did not exert substantial counter pressure. He did not, as far as we've been able to ascertain, lean in to do not do this, you should not

do this. The message the Israelis had after that was there's no daylight between us. After that call, he said to some of his advisors, we might have to help them with this. So how does Trump decide to have America participate in that initial attack on Iran? Well, we don't actually know that yet. Interestingly, he authorized certain support from the U S intelligence community. And because of the nature of national secrets, we still haven't got the full picture

of what America has done so far. But it's not nothing. And at a minimum, it's intelligence sharing, but I expect that we'll find out that it's more than that. But he's still telling people, I think I told him not to do it. Even on the day of the strikes, he was very, very ambivalent and was still eager to see if they could get a deal with Iran. He's still trying to put a little bit of distance between the US and Israel in this attack.

A hundred percent. And you saw that, I mean, that evening when the bombs start flying, it's about eight o'clock. Trump has just been at the congressional picnic. He goes down to the White House Situation Room. They're all watching this unfold, getting intelligence updates. And everyone's wondering, when's Trump gonna make a statement?

What's he gonna say? And certainly in my memory, anytime Israel's at war, US stands with Israel, right? And the administration put out a pretty extraordinary statement. Its first statement that it put out was from the Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Nowhere in that statement did it say, we stand with Israel. In fact, the entire statement was basically built around distancing the United States from this military operation and warning around, do not go after us, America. So even though we know that secretly they were helping in certain ways that are not completely clear to us yet, publicly they were distancing themselves. And Trump said nothing for at least a couple of hours.

He just was uncharacteristically silent. They basically wanted people to think they had nothing to do with it. That was what they were projecting and putting out there. But as the night unfolded, and certainly that first wave of attacks appeared stunningly successful. Israel was doing precision strikes, killing Iranian military leaders, hitting strategic sites. People around Trump are like, oh, this is actually pretty impressive.

And Trump's favorite TV channel, Fox News, is broadcasting wall to wall on Israel's military genius. And it was really interesting. You could see it happen in real time. Trump basically thinking, I need some credit here. And the next morning, he does this series of phone calls with different reporters, where he's saying this is excellent, this operation is brilliant, and hinting that he had much more to do with it than people realized. Starting to take ownership of it publicly. Because it's being hailed as a success.

I can't get inside his motivations, but those two things are true, right? Like, this looked like a great success and Donald Trump starts claiming credit for it, whereas, you know, just hours earlier, they were distancing themselves from it. And then we were hearing from sources that Trump was very seriously considering escalating America's involvement in a serious way. So we can start to see his position about what the United States involvement should be shifting in real time and very quickly it sounds like. Yes, so Sunday night he flies to Canada for the G7, he's there on Monday And then he cuts his trip short and really starts to

signal that he was now moving towards potential military options. So he says, you know, people are saying I want to go back to DC to work on a ceasefire between Israel and Iran, wrong. They have no idea. It's much bigger than that. It's fake news that I'm doing peace talks, fake news. And then his messages start to get more and more menacing to the point where today, we're recording this on Tuesday afternoon, but earlier today, Trump posts, I mean, it's just, it is extraordinary that we're watching a commander in chief do this in real time. He posts, we now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran.

And then the next message, he's directly threatening the Supreme Leader. He says, we know exactly where the Supreme Leader is hiding. He's an easy target. We're not going to take him out, at least not for now, but you better not shoot missiles at civilians or American soldiers. And then his next message is just all caps, unconditional surrender. So people around Trump that I've spoken to believe that he's already made the decision to drop this bomb. I don't know if he has or he hasn't that I've spoken to believe that he's already made the decision to drop this bomb. I don't know if he has or he hasn't. I've given up on trying to put declarative

statements around Donald Trump's decision making. Of course he could change his mind, but that's where things stand right now. I just want to make sure I'm clear on this, Jonathan. So it is possible that we might see these 30,000-pound bombs being dropped at some time in the not-so-distant future on this nuclear enrichment facility that's buried deep underground. Yes. And the one thing we do know from our reporting is that he is seriously considering actually leaning toward, was what we wrote in our article based on some of the comments he's been making to people, bombing Fordow, the deep underground

nuclear site in Iran. To what extent is the moment that we're in now a result of Trump changing his mind about the likelihood that a negotiation would produce a deal versus this being a story about how Benjamin Netanyahu figured out a way to bring Trump onto his side, maybe even without Trump's willing participation at times. In other words, is this a story of Benjamin Netanyahu basically outmaneuvering Trump into this? I think that's part of the story for sure, but I don't think it's as simple as that. Donald Trump was always of the view that Iran could not have a nuclear weapon.

He was never as isolationist, anti-interventionist, pick your adjective, as some of his supporters wanted him to be. So I do think that Donald Trump was left in a position where he was not driving events. So in that sense, you could say, yes, absolutely. Netanyahu was driving this train. Trump was reacting to events. And the fear, of course, has always been that if Israel hit Iran in this way, and particularly if the United States got involved in the way that you have reported Trump is considering getting

involved, that it could spiral out of control in some fashion and engulf the entire region into another war. And as you said, Trump is a passenger on this train with Netanyahu in the driver's seat. The fact is, no matter what messaging Trump or the White House put out, America is now engaged in a war. Right now, at 5pm on Tuesday, it's a fairly limited engagement. But if Donald Trump drops the Bunker Buster bomb, the door has opened to a much larger range of possibilities. I have to say, Jonathan, if the US gets involved in another war in the Middle East where there's

this big question of whether or not a country has a weapon of mass destruction, where regime change is at least on the table, that's going to sound very, very familiar to people who lived through the Iraq War. And I think, understandably, people are going to have a lot of questions about whether the United States should be involved at all, just given our collective experience. And I just sort of wonder what you think about that feeling. Well, it's a very understandable feeling. Donald Trump has made clear, even in the last few days,

that he has no desire or interest in sending American troops into Iran and engaging a ground force. And he certainly hopes, I believe, that this will be a matter of dropping a bomb and staying out, letting Israel take care of the rest. And maybe it turns out like that, but maybe it doesn't.

And unfortunately for Trump, he doesn't have the only vote in deciding that. Netanyahu drove this war. He drove towards this military campaign. And Iran has a vote too. And America has bases in the region and a lot of soft targets here at home that, God forbid, Iran might try to strike. So we are heading down a cycle of uncertainty that we're gonna have to confront. Jonathan, thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. The likelihood of growing U.S. involvement in the conflict between Israel and Iran has reawakened a long-dormant debate on Capitol Hill about whether Congress should have more power to declare war. In the House, a Democrat and a Republican teamed up on Tuesday to introduce a resolution that would require congressional approval before U.S. troops could join the attacks against Iran, while Senator Tim Kaine introduced a similar resolution in the Senate.

Both proposals, however, face steep uphill battles. And House Republicans plan to cut taxes and slash federal safety net programs would add about $3.4 trillion to the national debt, according to new findings from the Congressional Budget Office. The group concluded that the minor gains in economic growth under the bill would not offset its full fiscal impact, which includes slashing anti-poverty programs, including Medicaid and food stamps, to fund a set of tax cuts that are set to expire.

Today's episode was produced by Claire Tennesgetter, Olivia Natt, and Ricky Nivetsky with help from Anna Foley. It was edited by Maria Byrne and Paige Cowitt, contains original music by Dan Powell and Rowan Niemisto, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brumberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. Special thanks to Ronan Bergman. That's it for the daily. I'm Rachel Abrams.

See you tomorrow.