President Trump decided to launch “preemptive defensive” strikes on Iran Saturday after determining the Islamic Republic was not serious about achieving a “real deal,” according to senior Trump administration officials who spoke anonymously to discuss sensitive negotiations and deliberations.
A senior Trump administration official said the U.S. saw “clear signs” that Iran had been trying to rebuild its nuclear missile capabilities in their Fordow, Natanz and Esfahan facilities that were “obliterated” last year during the Trump administration’s first strikes on Iran.
“It was made very clear to them that while it’s obliterated, if you start to try to rebuild it — if you start to try to rebuild it, we will have to address it,” the official said.
But while the threat of Iran’s nuclear program was concerning in the long-term, what prompted U.S. military action was short-term concern about the country’s conventional missile capability threatening the U.S. and allies in the region.
Trump ultimately decided he was not going to sit idly and allow U.S. forces in the region to absorb missile attacks by Iran.
“We had analysis that basically told us, if we sat back and waited to get hit first, the amount of casualties and damage would be substantially higher than if we acted in a preemptive defensive way to prevent those launches from occurring,” one senior administration official said, adding the military campaign so far had been “proven quite effective at attriting their launcher capability.”
None of the administration officials cited regime change as justification for launching the full-scale attack on Iran, even though Trump had repeatedly called for the removal of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, who Trump said Saturday “is dead.”
Notably, it was the Israeli military that targeted the Iranian leadership while U.S. forces attacked Iranian military targets and ballistic missile sites deemed to pose an “imminent threat,” according to a U.S. official.
The Trump administration said another reason why the negotiations fell apart — despite positive signals reported by the chief Arab mediator — was that Iran’s refused “at every instance” to address its development of intercontinental ballistic missiles.
“They will not even talk about it,” a senior official said. “They won’t talk about it with us. They won’t talk about it with our regional partners. They will not talk about those missiles at all.”
Omani Foreign Minister Badr Al Busaidi gave a contrasting account in an interview with MS NOW on Friday before the military action commenced, saying ballistic missiles were discussed during indirect talks in Geneva, but weren’t “mandated” as part of the particular negotiations focused on the nuclear issue.
“But those other issues are equally important, and we are developing a certain framework to see how we can address that,” Al Busaidi said at the time.
After negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, approached discussions “with a very, very strong hand” hoping to get a “real deal” out of Iran, they determined the regime showed “no seriousness to achieve a real deal.”
One example of this, the administration officials said, is when the U.S. offered Iran “free nuclear fuel forever” but that Iran declined and instead insisted on enriching their uranium. A senior administration official said while Iran did agree to halt uranium enrichment for a “short period of time,” it was a tell-tale sign they were buying time to enrich uranium.
“The fact that they weren’t willing to take free nuclear fuel was a big tell to us that they were looking to buy time while they’re weak and to get to a place where they, over time, can enrich. There are several other areas in the negotiations that also showed that they were not curious about doing a deal,” the senior administration official said.
The U.S. was also concerned by Iran’s ability to build its own centrifuges to enrich far beyond the levels allowed by the now-defunct Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) agreement struck under the Obama administration.
“If they wanted to have a civil, peaceful nuclear program, we offered them many, many ways to do that, but instead that was met with games, tricks, stall tactics, and that was really the conclusion that we came back with,” one senior official said. “We could have made another short term bad deal, but it wouldn’t have dealt with the long term issue of Iran.”
The senior administration officials also confirmed Iran had struck multiple civilian sites unrelated to military infrastructure targets, including hotels in Abu Dhabi and the airport in Kuwait.
Julia Jester covers politics for MS NOW and is based in Washington, D.C.
Emily Hung is an associate White House producer for MS NOW.