{"id":227748,"date":"2026-07-29T13:36:24","date_gmt":"2026-07-29T13:36:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/227748\/"},"modified":"2026-07-29T13:36:24","modified_gmt":"2026-07-29T13:36:24","slug":"while-trump-blusters-and-netanyahu-spins-is-iran-already-on-the-brink-of-the-bomb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/227748\/","title":{"rendered":"While Trump blusters, and Netanyahu spins, is Iran already on the brink of the bomb?"},"content":{"rendered":"

US President Donald Trump wants this war with Iran over. Truly over, not just rhetorically. He wants the regime gone. Truly gone, not just superseded by leaders he can claim are different, nicer and more rational, but who are in fact as dangerous or more so than their predecessors. He wants the Strait of Hormuz open. Genuinely, dependably open, not just purportedly open by dint of him saying often that it is. And he wants Iran\u2019s path to nuclear weapons blocked. Truly and protractedly blocked, not ostensibly obliterated but actually revivable if not already reviving.<\/p>\n

But the Islamic Republic has proved tougher to crack than he had anticipated. Time and again in the five months since he and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opened their war to, euphemisms aside, bring down the regime, Trump has accurately described the colossal damage the joint assault has done to the Iranians\u2019 military capabilities, and highlighted how long it will take them to recover. Time and again he has attempted to will the regime into capitulation, reasonably arguing that, by any normal standards, the Islamic Republic has been soundly defeated.<\/p>\n

But the regime has not been defeated, simply because it is still there. The regime does not look reasonably at its massively depleted war machine, and the devastation it has brought down upon its country with its pursuit of nuclear weapons and its mass-murdering crackdown on internal civilian opposition \u2014 any more than Hamas looks around the ruins of Gaza and rues the day it invaded Israel. Rather, it surveys with satisfaction its tightened hold on power, and the deterrence it has elevated against its own citizenry. And it pokes away at a conflicted, erratic and unpopular American president, deeply reluctant to have his party face the electorate in November\u2019s midterms in the lingering midst of a costly, grinding and inconclusive war.<\/p>\n

Ahead of his meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday, Trump twice publicly slapped the Israeli prime minister down \u2014 determinedly underlining that it is he, and not Israel\u2019s leader, who is setting America\u2019s policy when it comes to Iran, and everything else for that matter.<\/p>\n

On Monday<\/a>, he declared, after Netanyahu had implored the US<\/a> not to sell F-35 fighter jets to Hamas-loving President Recep Tayyip Erdogan\u2019s Turkey, \u201cNobody tells me what we should be selling.\u201d<\/p>\n

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And on Tuesday, just a few hours before the prime minister arrived at the White House, he blasted Netanyahu<\/a> in a Fox News interview for ostensibly trying to push him into attacking Pickaxe Mountain, sniping that \u201cI don\u2019t need Bibi\u201d for intel on the nuclear facility \u2014 \u201cI know exactly what\u2019s going on\u201d \u2014 and fuming that Netanyahu was speaking publicly about what the Iranians were up to there. His interviewers hadn\u2019t even mentioned Netanyahu in their question about Pickaxe Mountain, and Netanyahu has not in fact spoken publicly about what is unfolding there, though two leaks attributed to Israeli sources<\/a> last week claimed Iran last year moved both centrifuges and part of its stockpile of 60-percent enriched uranium to the underground site.<\/p>\n

\t\"\"<\/a>
\n\t\tIsraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrives at the White House on July 28, 2026 in Washington, DC. (Andrew Harnik\/Getty Images\/AFP)<\/p>\n

Trump then chose, atypically, to have Netanyahu enter the White House via a side entrance, and to keep reporters out of the Oval Office \u2014 no questions from the press, not even joint statements from the leaders. Yes, he vouchsafed hours later in a brief Truth Social post<\/a>, they and their teams had had \u201ca very good meeting,\u201d and \u201cobviously, many important subjects were discussed.\u201d Thank you for your attention to this matter. That\u2019s all you need to know right now. I\u2019ve got this. I\u2019m running the show.<\/p>\n

For his part, Netanyahu, having rushed to release smiling photographs even as the talks were going on \u2014 including<\/a> with the adversarial<\/a> JD Vance \u2014 enthused over \u201cone of the best\u201d meetings<\/a> he\u2019d ever had with Trump, and later told Fox their alliance was \u201ca wall of granite.\u201d A key aide, who was not in the room but was briefed by the premier, claimed that there\u2019d been no US pressure to withdraw troops from Syria or Lebanon, no push for progress in Gaza, no expressed concern over violent settler extremism in the West Bank.<\/p>\n

\t\"\"<\/a>
\n\t\tPrime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (left), US President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance (right) meet in the Oval Office on July 28, 2026. (GPO)<\/p>\n

To echo a senior Israeli official<\/a> briefing Israeli reporters immediately after the meeting, \u201cwe are in a critical period\u201d as regards Iran, and Trump will have to \u201cmake a decision soon on where he is heading.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are not pushing him, but also aren\u2019t burying our heads in the sand,\u201d the official said, and went on to convey Netanyahu\u2019s assessment that \u201cthere is no choice\u201d but to attack Iran again: \u201csignificant attacks \u2014 on nuclear facilities, capabilities that have been rebuilt, and sites that weren\u2019t previously hit\u201d and strikes with the potential to \u201cshake the stability of the regime.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is indeed a critical period \u2014 for Israel, the region, and the free world, in the fateful battle against a demonstrably ruthless, spectacularly dangerous regime bent on destroying this country, dominating the Middle East, and exporting its extremist Islamic ideology worldwide.<\/p>\n

\t\"\"<\/a>
\n\t\tPrime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (left) and US President Donald Trump meet in the Oval Office on July 28, 2026. (GPO)<\/p>\n

It is a critical period, too, for the two warily friendly leaders. One is facing an election three months from now which could see him ousted, or triumphally returned for yet another term in which he would aim to complete his grab for all of Israel\u2019s levers of power. The other is indirectly facing an electorate a week later who could immensely complicate his final two years in office by removing his majority in one or both chambers of Congress \u2014 including placing all manner of obstacles to his pursuit of this war.<\/p>\n

Both these men would like nothing more than for the regime in Iran to be definitively defeated ahead of their respective polling days. Netanyahu is almost certainly more optimistic than Trump that this could yet be achieved, but then again, that\u2019s where his personal political interests lie. Come what may, Trump will still be president at the end of this year, and can afford to think long and hard about the timing of an intensified attack on the regime; Netanyahu may be finished if the Islamic Republic is intact on October 27.<\/p>\n

The regime, as was obvious, is exploiting the lax and lousy terms of June\u2019s memorandum of understanding, falsely touted by Trump as the answer to a region\u2019s prayers for peace. It is maneuvering to solidify its hold on the Strait of Hormuz, reviving its military muscle, and predictably avoiding the slightest concessions on its rogue nuclear program, as the MOU\u2019s vaguely envisaged 60 days of negotiations are frittered uselessly away.<\/p>\n

\t\"\"<\/a>
\n\t\tThis handout satellite image courtesy of Vantor shows vehicles at the western entrance of the Pickaxe Mountain tunnel complex adjacent to the Natanz Nuclear Facility near Natanz, Isfahan province, central Iran, on June 21, 2026. (Satellite image \u00a92026 Vantor\/AFP)<\/p>\n

But what really matters is that deep underground, at Pickaxe Mountain \u2014 where the International Atomic Energy Agency has never been given access<\/a>, and where the US, whatever Trump might say, does not have cameras and does not know \u201cexactly what is going on\u201d \u2014 Iran just might have sufficient quantities of 60%-enriched uranium, and the centrifuges to enrich it to weapons grade within weeks or even days. If that is the case, it would still likely be several months from a deliverable bomb, but would have completed arguably the hardest and generally the most visible step on the road to nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n

And then, whatever anybody says or wants to believe, the war against the Islamic Republic would be anything but over.<\/p>\n

Related, June 30, 2025 \u2013 Israel was facing destruction at the hands of Iran. This is how close it came, and how it saved itself<\/a><\/p>\n

This Editor\u2019s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI\u2019s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor\u2019s Notes as they\u2019re released, join the ToI Community here<\/a>.<\/p>\n


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The war with Iran has been draining for all of us in Israel. But when I heard about a high casualty incident \u2013 ballistic missile impacts in Arad and Dimona that left nearly 200 people wounded \u2013 I drank a cup of coffee, packed a bag, and headed south.<\/p>\n

There, I spoke with Shilgit, the head of an after-school program for underprivileged youth. Standing outside her destroyed center, Shilgit said it was a miracle that no children were hurt and spoke about the community coming together in the hours since.<\/p>\n

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