Israel-Iran conflict: After the ceasefire, some questions that loom large for the Americans

* Where is the highly enriched uranium (enriched to 60 per cent) that seems to have been moved out of Fordow before the US strikes took place Sunday?

* And, does the calling of the truce, which at least the Iranians and the Americans seem to have wanted way more than the Israelis at this stage, deter the Iranians, or actually push the regime in Tehran towards making a bomb as an extreme deterrence measure?

When the dust settles, there might be a few more questions that need to be addressed: What was the intelligence input that the Trump administration relied on before it decided to bomb Iran. Or was it more a Weapons of Mass Destruction-style witch hunt of the sort that the US pursued against Iraq in 2003?

This question is significant, given that the US intelligence community still assesses that Iran has not restarted their nuclear weapons programme, which they suspended in 2003, and there has been no contrary claims by the Trump administration that the US intelligence has changed on that count at all.

Even if the Iranians were moving ahead with enriching more uranium, they still were far away from actually being able to get a nuclear warhead. So, what really was the trigger for the US to actually carry out these strikes, other than pure opportunism? An emerging view is that the Americans simply took advantage of the fact that Iran was much weaker now.

The Lebanon-based Hezbollah, the Houthis of Yemen and the Palestinian militant group Hamas (known as Iran’s “Axis of Resistance”) are badly degraded, and Israel had taken out most of Iran’s air defences. A strike on a badly weakened foe, even when it was perhaps not needed, is not new to the Americans. Just ask the Iraqis, or the people of Japan.

And, finally, what are the diplomatic efforts that would push Iran to not develop a bomb and does Trump’s claim of a “forever truce” really stand? Those are still big, looming questions.

Way forward

According to the Washington DC-based Arms Control Association, a nonpartisan membership organisation dedicated to promoting public understanding of effective arms control policies, effective diplomacy is the only viable option for sustainably reducing Iran’s proliferation risk.

And for this, unless Trump and his negotiating team need to demonstrate willingness to accord more flexibility and realism regarding the future of Iran’s nuclear activities, the proliferation risk will continue. Uranium enrichment is really the key point of contention.

In the run up to the conflict, early comments from Steve Witkoff, the American Special Envoy for the Middle East, seemed to suggest Iran could retain a limited uranium enrichment program under strict monitoring. Reports on a written proposal the United States shared with Iran in June, quoted by the Arms Control Association, also seemed to indicate some flexibility on the question of enrichment: that Iran would retain limited domestic enrichment, which would phase out with the creation of a regional enrichment consortium.

Trump’s subsequent utterances and public rhetoric, though, presented a more maximalist approach to a deal: the demand for the complete elimination of the Iranian enrichment programme. That is unlikely to lead to any progress on future negotiations.

While Trump claimed after the strikes on Sunday that Iran’s uranium stockpile was “obliterated”, the International Atomic Energy Agency (the global nuclear watchdog) has said that the claim could not be verified at this stage and that it is not sure of the whereabouts of Iran’s official stock of 400kg of highly enriched uranium, concentrated to 60 per cent purity.

If Iran has hidden enrichment centrifuges, it could make weapons-grade fissile material (usually 90 per cent) relatively quickly. That would be enough for around ten bombs. Iran can also make bombs using the 60 per cent enriched uranium, but these would be cruder and will have to be much bigger in size. For all practical purposes, intelligence inputs are actually very important for ascertaining all this, and even the IAEA assessment is predicated on intelligence inputs.

What is also clear is that after the “12-day War”, the attempt for regime change in Iran, and repeated invocations of this by Trump and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, is still a pipedream.

According to Arash Azizi, visiting fellow at Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, while Israel’s relentless war on Iran is likely to fundamentally reshape the trajectory of the latter’s history, this is not likely to be a regime change as it’s typically imagined — a swift replacement of the Islamic Republic with a democracy. “More plausibly, the war will accelerate a process that was quietly underway long before Israeli jets took off on June 13 to bombard Iran. In this transformation, Iran will turn from an ideological actor to an interest-focused authoritarian state,” Azizi wrote in a article for Foreign Policy.

Also, America’s record on regime change in West Asia is quite patchy, whether in Iraq or Syria or Libya. It is easy to carry out military strikes and dismantle regimes, but the big challenge is what happens in the days and weeks, months and years afterward.

For the record, one of the reasons Trump’s MAGA base voted for him was his promise of ending wars and not getting into fresh ones. A prolonged engagement in Iran, with American boots on the ground, is the last thing Trump needs at this point in time. The only problem in all of this is that Israel, which was the last to agree to the ceasefire deal, is pretty much setting the agenda for the region and has pretty much lassoed the Americans into it.

It remains to be seen if the Trump administration can extricate itself out of its blinders-on strategy on West Asia, orchestrated and conducted by Tel Aviv.