Editorial Board: Will U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear sites be an end or just a beginning?

Opinion editor’s note: Editorials represent the opinions of the Minnesota Star Tribune Editorial Board, which operates independently from the newsroom.

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The United States has entered the war between Iran and Israel. On Saturday, President Donald Trump ordered U.S. warplanes to drop bombs on three sites, an effort that Trump — during a brief address to the nation — said had “completely obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capacity in those places. The address was blustery and short on specifics, like a professional athlete’s after a victory. The extent of success will require confirmation on the ground.

The action, for which authorization from Congress was not sought, also raises questions of constitutionality.

As always, we stand behind the men and women wearing this country’s uniform, as well as those fighting for our ally Israel.

But there are no guarantees on the scale and scope, let alone the outcome, of the conflict.

Despite its weakened state, including the degradation or destruction of Iran-backed groups like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, Iran still has extraordinary capacity to inflict chaos and casualties in direct conflict with U.S. forces as well as asymmetrically through attacks on American interests and individuals throughout the world.

Statecraft is always preferable to warcraft. And to its credit, the Trump administration was engaged in negotiations regarding Iran’s nuclear program. While the dialogue had not yet been successful, it had not outright failed. In fact, despite Iranian intransigence and Israel’s aerial success in gaining de facto control over Iran’s skies, a diplomatic off-ramp still existed. But that may now be blocked as the theocracy engages in what it may now consider an existential battle with Israel, if not the U.S., especially after Trump recently called for Iran’s “unconditional surrender” and made a direct threat to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameni, writing on social media that “we know exactly where he is” but that “we are not going to take him out (kill!), at least for now.”

Israel’s initial success in the escalating conflict came from its clear military superiority, made possible in large part by U.S. weapons and economic support. But Israel did not have the one weapon and delivery system it claimed it needed to finish the job: the GBU-57, or Massive Ordnance Penetrator, a 30,000 pound “bunker-busting” bomb capable of piercing Iran’s mountain-fortified Fordo nuclear site. Israel also does not have a B-2 bomber necessary to deliver such extraordinary ordnance. So the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, pressured in part by his extreme right-wing coalition needed to keep him in power (let alone out of prison from multiple corruption charges), determined that Iran was so close to deployment that it had to take action — an assessment repeatedly made by Netanyahu for more than a decade and one that was not recently shared by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard — an intelligence conclusion contradicted by Trump, who appointed her to that position.

To be sure, it is in the world’s best interest that Iran does not develop nuclear weapons. Geopolitically, Shiite, Persian Iran achieving nuclear status would likely lead Sunni, Arab states like Saudi Arabia to dash for deployment too. And even with conventional arms Iran has engaged in regional malevolence that has killed scores and immiserated millions. Meanwhile at home the theocracy has defiled the faith its based on by compiling a human-rights record so heinous it’s resulted in several waves of protest that have only been quelled with brute force.

So it’s understandable that not just Washington but Western and Mideast capitals would want to not only thwart Iran’s nascent nuclear program but end its archaic government too. But especially after Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. should be out of the regime-change business; that should be up to the Iranian people.

But now that the U.S. has bombed Iran those options — and more profoundly, a diplomatic solution, even one as imperfect as the 2015 Iran nuclear deal — may not occur. That 2015 pact, officially the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, fell short on many fronts and was vilified by then candidate Trump in the 2016 election. But once he became president even his administration conceded that Iran had not developed a nuclear weapon. In 2018, however, Trump scrapped the agreement anyway. And now, in 2025, the U.S. has entered a war with unknown consequences.

War, in the enduring words of military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, “is politics by other means.” Unfortunately, geopolitics, as well as domestic dynamics within Iran and Israel — and even in the U.S., where Congress is sidelined once again — have once again embroiled America in a Mideast conflict. Iran warns that the U.S. has crossed a red line into war, but Trump, along with allies, should continue the pursuit of peace.