Will Trump pull the trigger?

If you’ve been waist-deep doomscrolling monitoring the situation, we feel you. Six months into Trump 2.0’s pledge to bring peace to the Middle East, another war now rages.

In the last few hours

• Israel has struck ~40 more sites across Iran, including the Arak heavy water reactor and the Natanz uranium enrichment plant

• Meanwhile, Iran's own dwindling launches have still hit several sites across Israel, including a hospital in Beersheba (dozens reported injured)

• Iran has lodged a complaint at the UN's nuclear watchdog claiming Israel's strikes are "contrary to international laws that prohibit attacks on nuclear facilities"

• And Yemen’s Houthis say they’ll help their Iranian sponsors, while Putin (who just signed a security pact with Iran in January) is instead implausibly offering to mediate, even as his latest attacks on Ukrainian cities leave dozens more dead.

But the big question is… will the US get involved? 

Why that question?

Israel’s rationale has always been that Iran is developing nukes, and Bibi pulled this latest trigger barely hours after the UN’s nuclear watchdog called foul on a) Iran’s secret activities, and b) its rapid build-up of uranium enriched way beyond civilian needs.

But while Israeli strikes have now ruptured Iran’s nuclear production line, Iran’s vast underground nuclear bunker at Fordow still seems untouched (and little is known about the other fortified facility Iran’s been building over at Pickaxe Mountain).

Israel has no known weapon capable of hitting targets that deep, though it feels implausible a) not to have been working on something over the decades, and/or b) to kick off this latest round of conflict without a way to destroy Fordow.

So Bibi is either hiding something up his sleeve (rumours abound in either direction), or he was always banking on the US delivering the coup de grace once Iran’s air defences fell.

So that’s where the US comes in (at least theoretically) with its purpose-built GBU-57 bunker buster, each weighing ~13,600kg (30,000lb), measuring 6m (20ft), and portable only by the US B-2 stealth bomber.

So… will Trump use America’s GBU-57 for the first time in history?

On the military front, imagery and air-scanners make clear the US Air Force is ready if he does pull the trigger, and word is he’s approved the Pentagon’s plan, just hasn’t given the order. But that could all still just be posturing to force the ayatollah to give up.

On the intelligence front, Trump’s own spymaster assessed in March that Iran “is not building a nuclear weapon”, though that was a) public, b) three months ago, c) caveated that Iran could change its mind, and yet also d) released by an intelligence community with a history not only of false positives (Iraq) but also false negatives (Syria’s Al-Kibar).

Meanwhile, Iran’s foreign ministry is tweeting that, while the UN’s watchdog raised the alarm, those UN findings didn’t conclude that Iran was actually now building nukes.

But on the political front, big rifts are emerging within Trump’s base as we wait, like

• Yesterday’s yelling match between a hawkish senator (Cruz) and an isolationist influencer (Carlson, who Trump then called “kooky”), or

• The president’s rift with his own spymaster after she dropped a video dunking on US elites and warmongers (before the Israelis hit Iran).

And that all kinda reflects the tensions at the heart of the president’s own statements, which have spanned everything from classic US isolationism (let’s avoid foreign entanglements) to classic US primacism (we’ll never allow a nuclear-armed Iran).

As for the ayatollah? The 86-year-old is still talking tough, but while that’s been his brand for decades, his ability to back any of that up now looks limited, and his foreign ministry seems to be sending signals that Tehran is willing to talk.

But that feels a stretch now that his latest missile has wasted a major Israeli hospital.