Is the U . S . headed toward a military conflict with Iran ?

ualrpublicradio.org · Feb 26, 2026 · Collected from GDELT

Full Article

TERRY GROSS, HOST:This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. President Trump has said he'll use military force against Iran unless its government agrees to U.S. demands that Tehran shut down its nuclear program and pledges to never again pursue creating a nuclear weapon. As I record this this morning, negotiations are underway in Geneva between Iran's foreign minister and Trump's special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, along with Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who doesn't have an official position within the current administration. Are we headed toward a military conflict with Iran? If so, would it be a limited series of airstrikes on select targets? Would the U.S. attempt regime change, resulting in a larger war? My guest David Sanger can't answer those questions, but he can tell us how we got to this precipice and what the consequences might be for the U.S. if the president does use military force. Sanger is a White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times. For years, his coverage has included Iran's nuclear program and U.S. and Israeli attempts to sabotage it. He's also the author of the book "New Cold Wars."Although I'm recording this introduction this morning, we recorded our interview yesterday morning. We started with a clip of what President Trump said about Iran during his State of the Union address Tuesday.(SOUNDBITE OF STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS)PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: They've already developed missiles that can threaten Europe and our bases overseas, and they're working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America. After Midnight Hammer, they were warned to make no future attempts to rebuild their weapons program, in particular, nuclear weapons. Yet they continue. They're starting it all over. We wiped it out, and they want to start all over again and are, at this moment, again pursuing their sinister ambitions. We are in negotiations with them. They want to make a deal, but we haven't heard those secret words - we will never have a nuclear weapon. My preference...(APPLAUSE)TRUMP: My preference is to solve this problem through diplomacy. But one thing is certain. I will never allow the world's No. 1 sponsor of terror, which they are, by far, to have a nuclear weapon. Can't let that happen.(APPLAUSE)GROSS: David Sanger, welcome to FRESH AIR. So I'm sure you're waiting to hear more about Iran. So first of all, were you surprised at how buried it was within the speech and how little he had to say about it, considering we might be on the brink of war with Iran? And then tell us what you made of what he did say.DAVID SANGER: Well, Terry, wonderful to be back on with you. I was a little surprised. I had thought that he was going to set some kind of deadline for the Iranians because the backdrop to the speech, of course, was that he has engaged in one of the largest examples of gunboat diplomacy that we've seen in some time. He's put a huge force of two carrier groups, other ships, fighter aircraft, bombers, refuelers all within reach of Iran. It's the largest buildup of American military forces that we have seen since the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003. So it's a huge military pressure campaign. And I thought he would refer more explicitly to that. He didn't.Instead, what he did was kind of run together a couple of different facts and a few fantasies about the Iranian program. First of all, the problem with the Iranian nuclear program is not that the Iranians haven't said they'll never build a nuclear weapon. They say that every week. They've been saying that for years. The foreign minister of Iran tweeted it out again just before the president spoke.GROSS: Of course, that doesn't mean you can believe them on it.SANGER: No, you can't, Terry. And of course, the problem is not what they say. It is the evidence that has been gathered patiently over 20 years about work they did on weaponization, the conversion of nuclear material into actual weapons that could only be explained by either an active or a once-active nuclear weapons program.Now, for the president, he had a particular hurdle to cross here because, of course, he has said - and said again in that clip that you played - that their nuclear program was destroyed. It wasn't, but the nuclear fuel was buried. And while the Iranians may be trying to reconstitute their ability to enrich uranium, and we've seen some very modest evidence of that, if they don't have the fuel and particularly the fuel that is closest to bomb grade, they can't make a bomb. And there's no evidence I've seen that they are any place close to a missile that could reach the United States.GROSS: Let me play what Trump said on June 21 in 2025, after bombing three major nuclear facilities in Iran. And Israel had attacked Iran in June in a war that lasted around 12 days, and the Trump administration moved forward with bombing those three nuclear facilities. So here's what Trump had to say June 21.(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)TRUMP: Our objective was the destruction of Iran's nuclear enrichment capacity and a stop to the nuclear threat posed by the world's No. 1 state sponsor of terror. Tonight, I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated. Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace. If they do not, future attacks will be far greater and a lot easier.GROSS: And then after praising Israel and singling out Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the U.S. military for their roles in the strike, Trump said this.(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)TRUMP: With all of that being said, this cannot continue. There will be either peace or there will be tragedy for Iran far greater than we have witnessed over the last eight days. Remember, there are many targets left. Tonight's was the most difficult of them all, by far, and perhaps the most lethal. But if peace does not come quickly, we will go after those other targets with precision, speed and skill. Most of them can be taken out in a matter of minutes.GROSS: OK. So Trump seems to be contradicting himself because Steve Witkoff made it seem - one of Trump's negotiators on this. Witkoff made it seem like the bomb is imminent. We - you know, we got to move now. And Trump was saying that, you know, their ability was obliterated. So how do you make sense of this?SANGER: Well, if it sounds contradictory, that's because it truly is contradictory. The attack on those three facilities - Natanz, Fordo and Isfahan - which were the largest enrichment facilities that Iran had, were incredibly successful because they managed to implode the buildings down onto the centrifuges, the machines that spin at supersonic speed to purify uranium and turn it into bomb fuel, and to bury the stockpiles, most of which were in Isfahan, of what's called 60% enriched uranium. And that is to say uranium enriched to a level of purity that's just shy of bomb grade. And it would only take a few weeks to bring that - maybe even a few days to bring that from 60% up to bomb grade, which is 90%. But the fact of the matter is, the Iranians can't get at that fuel now. It is buried down deep. We have not seen any evidence that they've been able to remove any of it. People are watching this site like a hawk, as you could imagine. And so for Mr. Witkoff to step in and say, well, they're just within a hair's breadth of industrial-grade enriched uranium that you could use for bomb fuel, you might have been able to say that prior to the June attack. You can't say it today.GROSS: So what is this about? Why are we possibly on the brink of war with Iran?SANGER: Fascinating question. Because the president has offered four different rationales for the current military buildup there. One of them, the one you heard about the most in the State of the Union address there was the nuclear program. But the precipitating reason for the buildup was that the President promised to come to the aid of the protesters who had been on the streets. And he talked about that a bit last night as well, and he said that there had been 32,000 protesters killed during the uprisings in January. And while there is some dispute about the numbers, that's roughly correct, it seems. And so that would be a second reason to come to the aid of the protesters, though in most parts of the world, the president has not been particularly concerned about the fate of protesters who are going after authoritarian regime.The third reason he's offered, Terry, has been to stop the support of terrorism with Hezbollah and Hamas. But the fact of the matter is, the Iranians are pretty broke right now. They can't spend the kind of money that they did before, and Hamas and Hezbollah are not really in shape right now to be conducting large operations. And the fourth reason he's mentioned were the missiles. So he sort of jumbled those all together in the State of the Union address. But he didn't really explain at any point what his objective is. Is it simply to set back the nuclear program and the missile program, what the Israelis call mowing the lawn? Is it instead to topple the regime? To basically seize the moment?Because Ayatollah Khamenei is at his weakest point. The economy is reeling. The military suffered huge setbacks during the 12-day war with Israel. The protesters are on the streets. In which case, the president may be thinking about a preventative war, which is to say a war when you're strong and your adversary is weak. That's different than a preemptive war when you see that your adversary is getting ready to strike you and you strike them first. Preemptive wars are considered relatively legitimate. But preventive war has generally been considered under the rules of just war to be illegal.GROSS: Especially without the consent of Congress.SANGER: And it's interesting that in the State of the Union, he did not even briefly raise the question of whethe