Trump’s Iran – Four days after President Donald Trump declared a “major combat operation” in Iran, the White House shifted objectives and stopped talking about liberating Iranians. What followed has drawn a stark picture from nuclear monitors, analysts, economists, and regio
On Feb. 28, shortly after the United States and Israel launched an extensive bombing campaign against Iran, President Donald Trump appeared in a prerecorded video and declared that a “major combat operation” had begun.
“The hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump told the “great, proud people of Iran.” He added: “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take.”
Four days later. the White House quietly dropped any mention of liberating the Iranian people from its list of stated objectives. In its place, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the U.S. would: destroy Iran’s ballistic missiles and its capacity to manufacture new ones; “annihilate” Iran’s navy; destroy Iran’s ability to fund and arm terrorist proxies throughout the region; and guarantee Iran can never obtain a nuclear weapon.
But the central case for that promise is now colliding with what the International Atomic Energy Agency has found.
Trump’s oft-repeated main objective of the war — preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon — appears to have backfired. “The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran. they can’t have a nuclear weapon. ” Trump said last month. “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation, I don’t think about anybody.”.
A month earlier, he told Reuters he didn’t actually care about securing the uranium. “That’s so far underground, I don’t care about that,” he said.
Now an internal report by the IAEA says Iran is more likely to covertly pursue nuclear weapons now than it was a year ago, before the U.S. and Israel began military strikes.
Before the U.S.-led 2025 bombing of Iran’s principal nuclear sites, IAEA inspectors reviewed Iran’s enriched uranium stockpiles on a weekly basis to ensure they weren’t being diverted to weapons development. That oversight has ceased to be possible.
The IAEA report found that it can no longer “draw any conclusion regarding this nuclear material,” adding: “This gives rise to a proliferation concern as this nuclear material, which the agency was not able to verify, includes a large amount of high-enriched uranium.”
Under the nuclear agreement negotiated by former President Barack Obama, Iran had zero highly enriched uranium. Now, the IAEA said, it has half a ton.
The White House’s updated approach toward Iran’s nuclear file doesn’t appear to confront that deterioration. The memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Iran extends negotiations by an additional 60 days, and says that “pending a final agreement, they will maintain the status quo.”
The memorandum says: “The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States have agreed that the fate of enriched material and the fate of all other mutually agreed nuclear-related issues. including Iran’s nuclear needs. will be adequately addressed in a final agreement.” In other words. the nuclear problem that inspectors can no longer verify is being postponed rather than resolved.
Even where U.S. strikes have landed hard, analysts say the war’s effects are not mapping onto the kind of end-state Trump’s rhetoric suggested.
A Center for Strategic and International Studies analysis says Iran’s navy is battered. Yet the same strikes that damaged Iranian forces also taught Tehran just how much leverage it can hold over global movement through the Strait of Hormuz — and how easily it can apply that pressure.
BBC international editor Jeremy Bowen put it bluntly in an interview with Radio 4. describing a “perverse outcome”: “Far from crumbling. the regime. if anything. has come out of this stronger because they’ve discovered the potency of the Strait of Hormuz weapon. which was always suspected but now they’ve tested it. and it really works.”.
Closing the strait caused economic chaos worldwide. It cut off fertilizers, oil and gas, and industrial chemicals to allies and foes alike.
The World Bank later concluded the Iran war caused “the biggest supply shock in 50 years,” producing the worst global economic growth since the onset of the COVID pandemic in 2020.
Trump, in characteristic fashion, took no responsibility for the economic damage. He blamed America’s allies for not “cleaning up the mess” for him. On social media, he wrote: “You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the U.S.A. won’t be there to help you anymore. just like you weren’t there for us.” He added: “Iran has been. essentially. decimated. The hard part is done. Go get your own oil!”.
The war’s military aftermath also appears to be tightening the U.S. supply chain—especially when it comes to weapons that other partners rely on.
Intelligence assessments in late May said that since the initial bombing, Iran has rapidly rebuilt its military capabilities, and that those capabilities—despite U.S. and Israeli bombardment—were never as degraded in the first place.
About half of Iran’s drones are intact, as are two-thirds of its missile launchers, according to sources cited in the reporting. The same reporting says support from China and Russia has provided missile components, and that Iran is already making more.
That puts pressure not on Iranian production alone, but on America’s ability to keep supplying its own arsenal and allies. The U.S. carried out more than 1,000 strikes in the first 24 hours of the war, before settling into a tempo of 300 to 500 strikes a day in the four weeks that followed.
Israel, which relies on U.S. weapons, also burned through a large number of munitions, stockpiles of which are now described as extremely low.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates it will take until 2030 to replace the U.S. military’s Tomahawk missiles at a cost of $3.5 million apiece, and until 2029 to restock Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) and Patriot missile defense systems.
Those shortages have already rippled into other theaters. In May, acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao ordered a pause on U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan. Ukraine, long since cut off from Patriots by the Trump administration, is now developing its own alternative.
In Yemen, the war’s longer shadow is visible in the persistence of Iran-aligned disruption. A boy draped in a Palestinian flag carried a mock rocket during a weekly anti-U.S. and anti-Israel rally organized by Houthi supporters in Sanaa, Yemen, on May 9, 2025.
Even more telling is what Iran’s leadership has been saying about its reach.
Iran is now far more conservative and militant than before the war, the reporting notes, and it says there is no reason to assume Tehran—set to be flush with cash from the Trump deal—won’t seek to revive the groups it spent decades cultivating and funding.
The reporting points to the Houthis, who are described as still very much active after Trump said they’d been “completely annihilated” and claimed victory over the militia after it developed a knack for downing expensive U.S. drones.
It also cites Hezbollah and Hamas, noting that they remain operational but in a depleted state after sustained military action by Israel.
The human toll in Gaza is also laid out: an estimated 73,000 Palestinians have died in Israel’s assault on Gaza since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack in Israel, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Half of those deaths are described as women and children.
On Monday, Esmail Qaani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force that oversees proxies, appeared on state TV to reaffirm Iran’s support for the groups.
“Bab al-Mandeb Strait is fully in the hands of the guys in Hezbollah, the Ansarallah [Houthis] in Yemen, and even some of the comrades and children of resistance who are not Yemeni,” Qaani said, in a translation provided by Al Jazeera.
Qaani also said Hamas would soon rebuild.
As the war continues, images from Iran’s maritime operations have underscored the leverage described by analysts. In a photo released by Tasnim News Agency. a Revolutionary Guard Navy speedboat approaches cargo ship Epaminondas during what Iranian state media described as the seizure of one of two vessels accused of violations in the Strait of Hormuz on April 21. 2026.
The picture emerging from these facts is not simply that U.S. strikes failed to produce the intended outcomes. It’s that the strategy. as implemented. left Iran with enough room to reconstitute capabilities. enough uncertainty to evade verification. and enough leverage to turn the very arteries of global trade into pressure points—while Washington’s own weapons readiness is shown straining to cover the next round.
And in Tehran, the message is already being prepared for what comes next, as Iran’s hard line does what it has done before: signal that groups backed by the Islamic Republic won’t disappear on a timeline written in Washington.
United States politics Donald Trump Iran war Israel bombing IAEA nuclear weapons Strait of Hormuz Tomahawk missiles THAAD Patriot Ukraine Taiwan Houthis Hezbollah Hamas Esmail Qaani Quds Force