Feb. 14: Is Israel Planning to Hit Iran?

Trump meets Modi; Arms control with Russia?; Poso goes to Europe

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The Big Story

Over the past week, there has been a series of stories in the American press, all sourced to leaks within the U.S. national security establishment, about the possibility of an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported on two recent U.S. intelligence reports, one delivered during the “final days” of the Biden administration and the other shortly after President Donald Trump took office. Both concluded that Israel is “considering significant strikes on Iranian nuclear sites this year” to “take advantage of Iran’s weakness” and that Israel intends to lobby the Trump administration to back those strikes, viewing the new president as more likely to support them than Biden had been. A more detailed article was subsequently published in The Washington Post, which specified that the early January report came from the intelligence directorate of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Defense Intelligence Agency (i.e., the Pentagon) and concluded that “Israel is likely to attempt a strike on Iran’s Fordow and Natanz nuclear facilities in the first six months of 2025.” Following the Post tradition of publishing specific Israeli operational details leaked from the U.S. national security bureaucracy, the report also included details on two strike scenarios, quoted below:

A distance attack, known as a standoff strike, would see Israeli aircraft firing air-launched ballistic missiles, or ALBMs, outside of Iranian airspace, the intelligence report said. A more risky stand-in attack would see Israeli jets enter Iranian airspace, flying near the nuclear sites and dropping BLU-109s, a type of bunker buster. The Trump administration approved the sale of guidance kits for those bunker busters last week and made a notification to Congress that it had done so.

A third report, which appeared Thursday in CNN, added that one of the intelligence reports assessed that Israel is “still pursuing the broader goal of causing regime change in Iran.”

Finally, on Thursday afternoon, Post columnist David Ignatius addressed this spate of recent reports in a column. As longtime readers of Tablet’s Lee Smith will be aware, Ignatius has, for the past decade, served as a trusted sounding board for the Obama and Biden White Houses and has been the regular recipient of leaks from highly placed Democratic national security officials intended to bend Beltway foreign-policy discussion in the direction of Obama-Biden messaging campaigns. Ignatius was, for instance, the original recipient of the leaked foreign intelligence intercepts of conversations between Trump’s then National Security Advisor Mike Flynn and the Russian ambassador, which kicked off the “Russiagate” scandal in early 2017. All of that to say—Ignatius is primarily useful as a bellwether for how the Obama faction in government (i.e., “the deep state”) is attempting to frame the issue. Here’s Ignatius (emphasis ours):

Trump, who ran on a promise to stop wars around the world, surely doesn’t want another Middle East conflict. But he’s being pressured by Israel, which sees Tehran at a period of maximum vulnerability after the defeat of its allies in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria—and the devastating Israeli attack on its air defenses and missile production sites in October.

Israel wants to seize the moment, American and Israeli officials told me. If Iran won’t agree to a Libya-style abandonment of its nuclear facilities, Israel is prepared to bomb those facilities—with or without U.S. support, the officials said. The Biden administration had weighed in its final days whether to support this Israeli ultimatum but decided against it, officials said. Now it’s at the top of Trump’s inbox.

On the off chance anyone failed to grasp the implication, Ignatius summed it up (emphasis ours):

Trump’s sledgehammer approach to negotiations—disrupt and then deal—has been the central feature of these first weeks of his second term. But threatening kinetic action against Iran is a reach, even for Trump. He clearly doesn’t want a war. But the final decision-maker here may be Netanyahu, not Trump.

There is, we’re sure, some truth to the idea that there’s some behind-the-scenes haggling over whether or not to hit Iran. Trump has clearly stated he would like to explore negotiations before resorting to force. Israel, for its part, would be stupid not to at least be considering scenarios for striking Iran at the moment, and the nature of such strikes necessitates discussions with the United States—not because the strikes would lead to “all-out war” or U.S. boots on the ground in Tehran, but because, in addition to whatever support the United States might need to provide (aerial refueling, etc.), Washington would need to prepare its assets in the Persian Gulf for any potential Iranian reprisals. The Israelis are not—at least, if they are sane—going to surprise the most powerful man in the world right now with the news that they have flattened Fordow and that the Iranians may or may not be lighting Saudi Arabia’s oil fields on fire within the next hour. That would be impolite.

The “messaging” aspect—which seems tailor-made for the members of MAGA who believe that Trump’s first-term foreign policy was hijacked by “Zionists” and turned into an “America Last” debacle—is the implication that the tail is wagging the dog; in other words, that Bibi and the bloodthirsty Israelis are the ones really in charge here and that what they want is a “war” that will require Trump to send American boys to go die in the desert for Jews. Indeed, poor, poor, pitiful Trump, who has spent the past month throwing around his foreign counterparts like rag dolls, may simply be powerless to stop Bibi from launching a war that would undermine his “America First” policy. And what’s America First, in this telling? Détente with Iran! MAGA! In other words, what we’re seeing is a continuation of the messaging op we described in December as “Obamaism from the Right.”

In the real world, there’s a snowball’s chance in hell that Bibi launches major strikes on Iran over the objections of the man who just forced him to accept a cease-fire deal he’d been resisting since May.

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The Rest

→Trump told reporters Friday that “if it was up to me, I’d take a very hard stance” on Hamas, but “I can’t tell you what Israel is going to do.” Apparently, what Israel is going to do is ignore the president’s ultimatum from earlier this week demanding the release of all hostages by noon Saturday and accept a return to the terms of the previously agreed cease-fire. Per those terms, Hamas will release three living hostages tomorrow, of the nine living hostages scheduled to be released during phase one of the agreement.

→President Trump met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the White House yesterday, and together they agreed to make the United States the biggest supplier of India’s oil, replacing Russia. According to Reuters, the agreements were made mere hours after Trump lambasted Indian tariffs that he believes limit American businesses’ access to the robust Indian market. A joint statement by both countries after the meeting welcomed India’s steps toward lowering tariffs on American goods and increasing market access for American farm products while declaring hopes to establish a trade deal between the two countries by the fall of this year. Trump also said in his joint press conference with Modi that India hopes to increase its purchases of American weaponry by billions of dollars, even promising to supply India with F-35 stealth fighters.

→At a press conference before the meeting with Modi, Trump also floated meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping “when things calm down” and expressed an interest in reaching an arms-control agreement. “When we straighten it all out, then I want one of the first meetings I have [to be] with President Xi of China, President Putin of Russia. And I want to say, ‘Let’s cut our military budget in half,’” Trump said. The president was particularly interested in denuclearization. The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which went into effect in 2011 and caps the number of strategic nuclear warheads that can be deployed by the United States or Russia, is set to expire next year. “We already have so many [nukes], you could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over,” Trump said in the press conference. “China is trying to catch up because they’re substantially behind, but within five or six years, they’ll be even.”

→In other Russia-related news, The Wall Street Journal reports that Vice President J.D. Vance said the United States could use “sanctions and potentially military action” to compel Russia to end the Ukraine war, and Ukrainian membership in NATO was “on the table.” (Vance has since said the paper “twisted my words”; a transcript of the Q&A showed he had spoken of “military tools of leverage” and said, when asked directly about Ukrainian NATO membership, that the president has been very clear that he doesn’t like the idea of Ukraine moving into NATO” but that “everything is on the table.”) Those remarks were echoed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday, in what was widely interpreted as a cleanup of his categorical remarks to NATO on Wednesday that Ukrainian NATO membership was unrealistic. “These negotiations are led by President Trump. Everything is on the table,” said Hegseth.

Trump offered a semi-endorsement of Hegseth’s Wednesday statements on Thursday, but couched it as a description of the Russian position, saying, “I don’t see any way a country in Russia’s position could allow [the Ukrainians] to join NATO.” While ruling out Ukrainian NATO membership is probably a simple acknowledgment of reality, the whole episode is a good reminder that the pronouncements of Trump’s subordinates don’t necessarily carry any policy weight. It’s Trump alone that matters.

→Tweet of the Day

As was reported by The Washington Post, Hegseth has brought along an unlikely travel buddy for his trip to Europe: the MAGA influencer Jack Posobiec. Posobiec, an unwavering MAGA loyalist who has been controversial for peddling conspiracies like that of the Pizzagate fame, may have reportedly disturbed Pentagon officials concerned about “the military being dragged into partisan warfare,” but one can’t deny that he’s been capturing some phenomenally candid images of Hegseth enjoying his first European trip as defense secretary.

→Yesterday, we discussed Todd Bensman’s Daily Wire piece about the high likelihood that Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum is using the political pressure placed upon her by President Trump to her advantage to wage war against the cartels. Now, the Trump State Department plans to designate more than a half-dozen cartels and criminal groups in Latin America as terrorist organizations, according to The New York Times. The move follows Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order demanding a crackdown on cartels. The order directly named Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and Salvadoran gang MS-13, but the State Department also plans to name Columbia cartel Clan del Golfo and five Mexican cartels: Sinaloa cartel, Jalisco New Generation cartel, the Northeast cartel, the Michoácan family, and the United cartels, according to officials. By designating these organizations as terror cells, which means they pose a national security threat greater than that traditionally posed by organized crime, the United States could impose broad economic sanctions on them. As Bensman’s Daily Wire article noted, cartel leaders are pragmatic capitalists, and financially squeezing them through sanctions could force their hands in forgoing aspects of their business, like fentanyl trafficking, if the sanctions make those trades nonprofitable for them. Furthermore, squeezing their fentanyl business also forces the cartels to come into direct military conflict with the Mexican military.

→Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin said on Wednesday that his team has located $20 billion that the Biden administration allegedly wasted, according to Fox News. In December, James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas published a video of a Biden-era EPA adviser, Brent Efron, admitting to a hidden camera that the EPA under Biden was squandering taxpayer dollars as an “insurance policy” against Trump winning: “Get the money out as fast as possible, before [the Trump administration] comes in. … It’s like we’re on the Titanic and we’re throwing gold bars off the edge.”

Zeldin suggested that it was the Biden administration’s goal to rush the money out to “far-left climate activist groups” with minimal oversight before Trump and his people came in to turn the spigot off. He plans to claw back those funds.

Relatedly, The Washington Examiner’s Gabe Kaminsky found that, in his last days as president, Joe Biden issued $1 billion in grants to hundreds of nonprofits. One of those nonprofits in particular raises eyebrows. The Department of Energy issued $50 million to a little-known New Mexico charity called the Tribal Energy Consortium. That payment has not yet been handed out and is under investigation by the Justice Department. The charity, which listed only $50,000 in revenue in 2022 and 2023, was issued the grant beneath the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature 2022 spending law that, as The Scroll’s Park MacDougald explained in a Tablet article last year, was also used to dole out $50 million in federal grant money to the Climate Justice Alliance in November 2023. In an X post on Thursday, Zeldin said he had canceled the $50 million to the CJA.

→Border czar Tom Homan spoke with Laura Ingraham in an interview on Fox News yesterday and suggested New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might have “crossed the line” when she published her “Know Your Rights with ICE” live web event on Wednesday, which advised illegal migrants about their rights in case they are visited by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents during their deportation raids. Ocasio-Cortez discussed “ruses” she says ICE agents use to trick migrants into allowing them to search their homes, and suggested migrants record ICE agents as they search their homes. Homan suggested to Ingraham that he had forwarded the webinar to the Justice Department so it could possibly investigate whether or not Ocasio-Cortez had broken the law.

→Video of the Day:

In this clip from the inaugural hearing of the Subcommittee on Delivering on Goverment Efficiency Thursday, Pennsylvania Republican Congressman Scott Perry alleges that USAID funded terror groups including Boko Haram, Al-Qaeda and Isis.

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