The Decibel - Threat of wider war looms after U.S. bombs Iran nuclear sites

Episode Date: June 23, 2025

This weekend, the U.S. struck three Iranian nuclear facilities, as it warned Iran about its nuclear capabilities and attacks against Israel. U.S. President Donald Trump called the bombing mission “a spectacular military success” and threatened “future attacks” if a nuclear peace deal was not made.The Globe’s international affairs columnist, Doug Saunders, joins The Decibel. He explains how the U.S. got involved in this conflict, what’s at stake for the leaders of the U.S., Israel and Iran, and why there are concerns this could become a wider war.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Over the weekend, the U.S. bombed three nuclear sites in Iran. The strikes were a spectacular military success. President Donald Trump addressed the attacks on Saturday. Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated. Iran the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace. If they do not, future attacks will be far greater and a lot easier. The bombs the US used are called bunker busters. They're designed to penetrate targets underground. One of Iran's nuclear sites is located 80 meters beneath the surface.

The US is the only military with bombs capable of hitting such heavily fortified targets. Iran confirmed the strikes, but also said nuclear activities would continue and there were no signs of radiation. They vowed retaliation and promised everlasting consequences. These attacks by the US follow Israel's strikes vowed retaliation and promised everlasting consequences. These attacks by the US follow Israel's strikes on Iran earlier this month.

The first series of Israeli airstrikes targeted nuclear and military sites, top generals and nuclear scientists. As of Saturday, more than 650 people have been killed in Iran. That's according to a Washington-based Iranian human rights group. Thousands are wounded. Iran retaliated with missile and drone strikes on Israel. Some bypassed its air defense system, killing 24 Israelis and wounding many others.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had repeatedly asked the U.S. to get involved. After the U.S. strikes on Iran, he thanked Trump. Congratulations, President Trump. Your bold decision to target Iran's nuclear facilities with the awesome and righteous might of the United States will change history. Both Trump and the Israeli government said the sites targeted in Iran could be used to quickly build nuclear weapons.

But that contradicts the U.S. administration's own intelligence. In March, it determined Iran is not building a nuclear weapon. Before the strikes, the U.S. and Iran had been discussing a nuclear peace deal. And on Sunday, Prime Minister Mark Carney asked for both sides to return to the negotiating table. But Iran's foreign minister argues diplomacy is what the US and Israel have now interrupted. We were in the middle of talks with the United States when Israelis blew it up. And again, we were in the middle of talks and negotiations with Europeans happened only two days ago in Geneva, when this time Americans decided to blow it up.

Today Doug Saunders is here. He's the Globe's international affairs columnist. He'll explain how the U.S. got involved in this conflict, what's at stake for the leaders of the U.S, Israel, and Iran? And why there are concerns this could become a wider war. I'm Maynika Ramen-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Doug, thanks so much for being here on a weekend.

A real pleasure. So of course, this past weekend we saw the US strike sites in Iran. Do we have a sense of what the mood in Iran is like after these strikes? Well, on Saturday night after we learned about the US bombings in Iran, I tried to get in touch with anyone I knew in Iran. And I reached out to some people.

And notably on Sunday morning, I got a text from a guy who's been involved in some of the dissent and protests against the regime in the last couple of years. So he's no fan of the Islamic regime in Iran, but who lives in Tehran, and who asked the question, should I innocently assume that this will now end the war, Hiroshima style? Hiroshima style. Hiroshima style, which is a slightly distasteful question

on its face. I mean, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the only instances of nuclear war to actually occur, and they killed huge numbers of civilians. But it's quite an interesting question on a couple other levels, in that, first of all, was this a case of the United States, and specifically President Donald Trump, saying to the Israeli government,

to Benjamin Netanyahu, we are going to use these advanced so-called bunker buster munitions with our B-2 stealth bomber to hit these Iranian nuclear sites that you can't hit. And that's going to be one and done. We want to stop all attacks with this. That's the one question. And of course, the other implication of the Hiroshima analogy is the question of will this

now cause the Iranian regime to fold, to surrender, or at the very least to return to the negotiating table. But certainly a lot of people in Iran do hope on some level that this will cause the regime to collapse. A lot of them also told me that they're fearing that this will actually do the opposite, that the attacks from Israel and the United States will make the regime more self-destructive and will cause it to actually pursue a nuclear weapon,

something it has not done since 2003. OK. So it sounds like things could go in different directions here in kind of waiting to see how these different motivations essentially play out on a national level. Earlier this month, when Israel launched strikes on Iran, Trump said that the US wouldn't get directly involved. So let's talk a little bit about the motivation

from the American side here, Doug. Do we have a sense of what actually changed from then to now? Right. So of the three players in this, Iran, Israel, and the United States, the most surprising and frankly unpredictable and unstable is President Donald Trump. Mr. Trump came into office on promises

to be the president of peace. He denounced the Democrats and Kamala Harris and Joe Biden as being warriors, which is a strange portrayal in that the only period this century that the United States has not been at war anywhere is the period beginning in August of 2021 after the United States withdrew from Afghanistan. Yeah, Trump was campaigning on this idea of no more kind of involvement in foreign wars. No more forever wars, no more foreign wars. He was a nationalist isolationist.

And he repeatedly said this. He said he could end the Russian invasion of Ukraine in a few days. He said that he could bring peace to Gaza, which still hasn't happened. And his approach to Iran was to realize, perhaps not in this language, but realize that the way to keep the Islamic regime in Iran stable and non-threatening to the region and the world is to negotiate the type of deal that Barack Obama did when

he was president in 2015, which was to negotiate an agreement in which Iran agrees to commit heavily to the United Nations Non-Proliferation Treaty, which it's a signatory of, and to be inspected on a near daily basis by the UN to assure this in exchange for which sanctions are removed from Iran and Iran is normalized as a part of the world economic system. Yeah, this was a big deal for Obama to bring Iran into this nuclear deal. Yeah, and that deal worked. There had not been an Iranian nuclear program since 2003,

but that deal made it so that they subjected themselves to pretty intensive monitoring, and it was widely seen as having been a success. Donald Trump, in his first term, withdrew the United States from that pact, because he'd campaigned against it and so on. And that caused all sorts of chaos. Remember, it wasn't an agreement between the United States and Iran. It was an agreement between the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council,

including China and Russia and so on, and the European Union and Iran. But without the United States imposing sanctions, it didn't really mean anything. So it's been kind of swinging in the air since then. Trump began, I think, in March to negotiate with Iran with mixed results. Iran, they are not great players to negotiate with. And Donald Trump doesn't have a lot of patience as a negotiator.

The Obama negotiations took more than two years to reach the 2015 deal. Trump. They've only been negotiating a few weeks, then, it sounds like, here. I think less than nine weeks before, you could say, President Trump allowed Israel to launch large scale attacks on Iran. Now Israel, over the last decade, has engaged in strikes against specific figures in Iran, against particularly nuclear scientists in Iran,

and some leaders of the branch of the Iranian government that is responsible for the nuclear program. But these have been targeted assassinations. And sometimes they've invited reprisals from Iran, but it's been kept to a low level. This was all out warfare. This was, of course, major attacks on major figures. Yeah. Just sticking on the US for another moment here, Doug, because as you said, you

know, Trump talked about not wanting to get involved in more wars. I'm wondering how this is playing out domestically here. So people who have supported Trump maybe for those reasons, how is this all being perceived? Yeah, the future of this is going to depend on the domestic aspirations of Donald Trump and of Benjamin Netanyahu and of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. This is the leader of Iran, yeah. The self-declared supreme leader. In the case of Donald Trump, he is walking a very fine line.

We don't really know how he got talked into agreeing to bomb Iran. There's always been a branch of the Republican Party that has wanted to bomb Iran. But that's not the Trump MAGA branch of the Republican Party. They are, most of them, very much opposed to any sort of US involvement in wars in the Middle East. And in doing this, he was risking

losing a very large part of the coalition that brought him to power and that keeps him in power. And particularly in Congress, if he wants to get his big, beautiful bill passed, he's going to need a number of senators who are adamantly opposed to U.S. involvement in wars in the Middle East. AMT – And of course, he didn't actually do these strikes with congressional approval. JS – That's right. So he will need to convince them, and he's been using this language in

the last 48 hours, that this is not the United States going to war in Iran. This is the United States launching a few B-2 bomber attacks on specific targets on behalf of Israel and that that's all. He's kind of saying this is the extent of US involvement then essentially? He's suggesting that at the same time saying if Iran hits back at US forces in the region, the US has more than 40,000 troops within striking distance of Iran, that they will suffer grave consequences.

So then it becomes a question of, A, is Iran going to fire back to an extent that will force the United States to be fully involved in a shooting war? And will President Trump and his cabinet rise to that bait and escalate it? I mean, two ways of looking at Donald Trump's psychology right now. One is that he thought he could play a game where he gives Israel the gift of using these very advanced bunker buster munitions on its behalf,

and then gets out of there, and is seen as having helped. But the other way of looking at this is he's realized he can engage in warfare now and be admired by a lot of people, and he can be a war president, and that feels good for him. You could say, what if he's tasted blood and he likes it? You know? And we don't know, and he's not very predictable.

At the beginning of this weekend, Donald Trump's, of course, said, I'm going to take two weeks to think about it. Most times, he's used the two weeks phrase over the last 10 years and he uses it a lot. It usually is Trump language for I'm not going to do this thing. Yeah, because he was saying I'm going to take two weeks and decide if America is going to get involved here. Yeah. In this case, he was being a little bit tactically tricky because he was using that phrase as

cover to move the B-2 bombers into place to carry out this raid. I wouldn't count on Donald Trump being that clever a player in the next move ahead. He's sort of trapped between a rock and a hard place right now. And nobody wants to be predicting anything right now, but there are strong forces acting against him wanting to get engaged in a larger war, including his own military. We'll be back after this message. So Doug, we've just talked about things from the American side. Let's now look at Iran and Israel. Do we have a sense of how Iran could respond here?

There are really two courses possible in terms of how the Tehran regime and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei are going to respond to this, one of which is that they will maintain what they've done for the last 25, 30 years, which is a sense of self-preservation and a realization that in order to stay in power and to remain legitimate within Iran, they need to step away from the brink and return to the bargaining table. There's also a possibility though that they will decide to give it all up and respond angrily to the United States to launch attacks on US assets in the region,

to launch attacks on the Strait of Hormuz and its shipping lanes in this devastate the international petroleum economy, to launch attacks potentially on Gulf states, to empower terrorist armies in the region that it finances and supports, to launch attacks on everybody on Israel, on the Gulf states, on Arab states, on the United States potentially, and even to withdraw Iran from the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, which it's been party to all along, and which is, you know, it's a regime that says we're not going to develop nuclear weapons and our nuclear programs are going to be monitored regularly by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

And this is a treaty that most countries have signed on to, including Iran. Well, North Korea and Israel are two nuclear powers that are not party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Iran has always complained about this fact and said, we're party to it. We're opening ourselves to investigators.

The investigators have said, I mean, this year, they reported that Iran is not providing it sufficient information, that it's fallen afoul of the requirements of the Nonproliferation Treaty. But significantly, there's not any talk from Tehran about either ending its place in the Nonproliferation Treaty or in canceling the idea of negotiations

toward a peace deal with the United States. Even despite the attacks from both Israel and the United States, although Tehran has canceled specific talking engagements for peace talks, they haven't actually withdrawn from the entire process as of the point where I'm saying this, and they could do it. So there is what you could call a scorched earth approach that they could take where they withdraw from the NPT, they develop a nuclear weapon, which they could do despite having all of these sites bombed or by one,

and they become a real threat. That would cause the United States and its allies to enter full-scale warfare. That would cause a level of reprisal that would be, first of all, would actually wipe out the regime. It would cause considerable levels of death and destruction in this country of 90 million people. And it probably would take a very long time for things to stabilize. It would prevent a peaceful transition from the dictatorship that's controlled Iran since 1979 to anything

that comes next, and would probably prevent that from being any kind of a decent process. So even though the odds are against it, we don't know what's inside the minds of Ayatollah Khamenei. All we know is that in the past he's always returned to the bargaining table, he's always stepped back from that brink and he's avoided attacking either Israel or the United States to the extent that would cause the end of his own life or the total end of his regime. All right. So Doug, in terms of these three countries, we've talked about the U.S. and Trump. We've talked about Iran and Khamenei. Let's talk about Israel and Netanyahu. Is this a success for Netanyahu to now have the U.S US involved in this conflict with Iran? It's a success in the sense that he has been able to control the behavior of the United

States militarily in this context, rather than having the United States control him. Can you explain that a little bit more? Netanyahu first publicly suggested that we should be bombing Iran and that we should be engaging in large-scale warfare against Iran, probably most famously in 2012. During a speech he gave to the United Nations General Assembly, I think everyone remembers it because he brought a giant cartoon picture of an atom bomb and suggested that Iran was within a very short time of being able to produce one. That very short time of being able to produce one hasn't really changed since then.

And he was, we now know, really on the edge of launching large-scale military attacks until the United States under President Obama talked him down from it. So in that example, the US stepped in and basically deescalated that. And I think lots of accounts have suggested that there have been a number of occasions where the United States has stepped in and prevented that. The United States is generally not interested in having a large scale war in the Middle East. Most US presidents from Obama onwards have been trying to get the United States out

of the Middle East. And it seemed that Donald Trump actually was going to continue that tradition of holding back Israel. He certainly did during his first few months. And certainly the fact that he was engaged in negotiations with Iran around a new nuclear peace deal suggests that he was trying to pursue that tactic.

He wants to be seen as the big deal maker. And he did, him and his administration did talk India and Pakistan out of a conflict that was apparently in danger of turning into a nuclear war. Yeah, we just saw that a few weeks ago, right? That's right. And that was done by basic horse trading, probably by promising various things to Pakistan, which is whose military-led rulers are in pretty precarious financial shape,

and probably by working with India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is an ideological supporter of Trump. AMT – So with all of this, like how is Netanyahu, I guess, able maybe to convince Trump and America to get involved if that's what happened? JS – That's an interesting question because we don't really know. Because Benjamin Netanyahu is not the most important partner to Donald Trump in Donald Trump's mind. He has very close relationships with Saudi Arabia and with Qatar.

And none of the Arab states are going to be very happy at the prospect of a big war between Iran and Israel involving the United States happening in their region. There's one level at which they would be happy to see the demise of the Iranian regime in that in theory, it would stop Iran from being the major influential regional power, which it kind of isn't anymore anyway, and it would allow them to step in. But the war itself and the ensuing chaos would not help anybody's cause. So President Trump had a lot of people

talking to him on the phone and saying, don't do this. And then he probably had Netanyahu and a few people in his cabinet who liked this idea, saying, you can just let them use a few of your Bunker Buster bombs. You'll be a hero. You can get out of it, and you'll be safe. So I think in his mind, he was entering a win-win transaction. Whether he knows how to actually act on this, whether he will counter-strike against

any Iranian response and escalate this into a long war is a problem. He doesn't want to have another Iraq war. He probably also has various people in the White House telling him that we have a new Iranian regime in waiting that we can put in, which was the case in 2003 with the White House in Iraq. There were various Iraqis talking to the White House and saying, don't worry, we have a democratic regime that we can bring in in a few weeks once you depose this guy. You have in the United States the family

of the late Shah Reza Pahlavi, who live in Los Angeles and who have a powerful lobby organization telling the White House, don't worry, people will welcome us back once the Ayatollahs are gone, which is nonsense. Nobody in Iran wants back the regime that ruled the country before 1979. That was a terrible, torturous dictatorship, much as the current one is. But there's a whole faction in the Republican Party that believes this. Okay. So is this about regime change then, Doug? If it was about regime change, we would see different things happening. Israel certainly

had the potential to kill most of the leaders of the Iranian regime, from Aitola Ali Khamenei on downward. And Khamenei was so sure that this was gonna happen that he appointed successors, which is something that's supposed to involve a complicated committee process and so on, and he just went and did it, because he fully expected his own bunker to be hit.

So neither President Trump nor Prime Minister Netanyahu sought regime change in the actions they carried out. I think most American and Israeli leaders now know at this point that so-called decapitation strikes where- Taking out the leaders. You kill the leader of a country, backfire. First of all, it's actually hard to actually hit the leader. Think about how long it took them to get Saddam Hussein in Iraq and how pointless that

was by the time they actually did. And also it turns you into a country that has engaged in a type of warfare that means you're caught up in it. Because there's always the possibility the transition is going to be to somebody worse if you're using warfare to bring about the transition. The people who are leading the protest movements in Iran, much like the people who are leading protest movements in Egypt 15 years ago, are not in a position to have a new government come in immediately. And in the chaos of the huge level of bombing and military action that would be required to unseat the regime there, it won't work. So there probably are a lot of cooler heads, certainly in the United States, maybe in Israel, saying stop it now,

let the people carry their course, let the regime return to the bargaining table, let the weakened regime face the wrath of the people. And that's the path to a better future for Iran rather than embroiling it in a generation of warfare. Whether those cooler heads are being listened to is an open question that we can't answer right now. Just lastly here before I let you go, I think honestly a lot of people are probably pretty worried about these developments, right, with the US getting involved directly now in this conflict.

How concerned should we be that we might see this situation escalate into something bigger? We should be concerned because the cooler heads do not always prevail. We should be concerned because what's happening involves the inner psychologies of three leaders, all of whom are on some level rational actors concerned with their self-preservation. It doesn't mean they're morally right actors, whether Khomeini or Netanyahu or Trump, but it means that they are rational in the sense of tending to follow the course that keeps them in power. But they are also unpredictable and unstable figures who have tended in the recent past to defy expectations.

And they are all figures who have been known to respond emotionally to provocations. So it wouldn't take a lot to unseat rational processes that say that this is going to resolve itself soon and cause it to explode into a regional conflict that will last a very long time in spite of everyone's interest to the contrary. Wars have a way of defying the ways that leaders wish the wars to proceed. So we can hope and we can say it's most logical for this to resolve itself in the near future with the return to negotiations and everyone talking themselves away from the precipice. But I would warn against putting hope ahead of probability.

Anybody would be foolish to predict any particular ending right at the moment. Well, Doug, I'm glad we could hear from you on this. Thank you so much for taking the time to be here. Thank you very much. That was Doug Saunders, the Globe's International Affairs columnist. That's it for today.

I'm Maynika Ramon-Wilms. Our producers are Madeline White, Michal Stein, and Allie Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer and Matt Fraynor is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening and I'll talk to you tomorrow.