No imminent threat: Experts dispute Trump admin claims for striking Iran
Senior Trump administration officials briefing reporters hours after US and Israeli strikes began on Iran Saturday made a troublingly flimsy case for military action against Iran that lacked proof of any imminent Iranian military threat to the United States, experts said.
The officials also made arguments that suggested Trump’s negotiators may not have had the expertise or experience to understand the Iranian proposal to curb its nuclear program recently discussed at talks in Geneva.
Trump, in a Truth Social post tonight saying Iran’s 86 year old Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been killed in an Israeli air strike today, said that US bombing of Iran “will continue, uninterrupted, throughout the week, or as long as necessary to achieve our objective.”
US claims Iran could have struck first, so it had to strike first
“The threat from Iran is ultimately their ambition to acquire nuclear weapons; but in the short term, it is the conventional weapon, the conventional missile capability, that they have, particularly in the southern belt, that pose a threat to the United States and our allies in the region,” the first senior Trump administration official, speaking to reporters on the background call Saturday afternoon, said.
The official made a confusing case that, because Iran might have used its missiles to preemptively-- or simultaneously--attack US forces gathering in the region to attack Iran, Trump decided to preemptively attack Iran.
“We had indicators that they intended to use it potentially preemptively, but if not, … simultaneous.. with any actions against them, immediately against our threats,” the first official said. “And the President decided he was not going to sit back and allow American forces in the region to absorb attacks from conventional missiles.
“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,” the first official continued. “And if we acted in a preemptive, defensive way to prevent those launches from occurring, and that is the focus of the campaign right now, and so far, it’s proven quite effective at treating their launcher capability, and hopefully that path will continue.”
Missiles
The official also said that Iran has refused to negotiate about its ballistic missiles, though there have been other statements that the US and Iran had agreed to discuss the nuclear issue first, then move on to other issues. (In the talks that led to the 2016 Iran nuclear deal, Iran agreed voluntarily, unilaterally to limit the range of its ballistic missiles to 2000 km, which it has abided by, though they do not concede that was a ‘negotiated’ outcome.)
“In the negotiations, they refused at every instance, and consistently have refused to address ballistic missiles,” the first Trump administration official claimed. “And for us, that was also an unacceptable situation to be in. So the President, frankly, had no choice. We cannot continue to live in a world where these people not only possess missiles but the ability to make 100 of them a month, in perpetuity to overwhelm any potential defenses.”
Trump admin claims lack evidence of Iran imminent threat
The senior Trump administration officials provided no evidence or claim of an imminent Iranian military threat to the United States from either Iran’s ballistic missiles or its nuclear program, a top arms control expert said.
The briefing “provided absolutely no evidence or claim of any imminent military threat to the United States from long range ballistic missiles, [or] from Iran’s nuclear program,” Daryl Kimball, president of the Arms Control Association, said in an interview Saturday. “And what they posed as the threat they were trying to preempt—an attack by Iran against US forces–is so extremely implausible, it is also laughable.
“So this is a war of choice, in the middle of negotiations, that were making serious progress, according to neutral mediators,” Kimball said. “This is the flimsiest excuse for initiating a major attack on another country without Congressional authorization, in violation of the UN Charter, in many decades.”
The Trump administration is also making claims that are not substantiated by US intelligence assessments briefed to the Gang of Eight Congressional leaders last week, or by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Kimball said.
“There’s no additional intelligence from the US intelligence community or the IAEA that Iran was rebuilding the [nuclear] facilities that were severely damaged in [US strikes on Iran] in June of 2025,” Kimball said. “There was no evidence that they were moving the 60% enriched material …which the IAEA in its latest report strongly suggests was at Isfahan.”
Trump negotiators did not seem to understand Iranian proposal
Two other senior Trump administration officials made assertions about the recent negotiations with Iran that suggested they did not have the expertise or experience to understand the Iranian proposal, or why Iran would not have accepted elements of the US proposal. They therefore claimed Iran was not serious about the negotiations, which seems to be a misunderstanding.
The Trump administration officials, for instance, described an Iranian refusal to accept an offer of free nuclear fuel from the United States for their civil nuclear program as a “big tell” that Iran had nefarious motives, when Iran has historical reasons to not trust western supplies as reliable.
It’s “inconceivable” that the Iranians “would trust the United States, over a long term, to continue supplying enriched uranium for their energy needs,” former US nuclear negotiator Robert Einhorn said on a panel hosted by the Center for the National Interest last week.
Long ago, the Iranians invested in a French uranium enrichment consortia, Einhorn said. They were expecting enriched uranium, he said, but the French cut them off, and they were told they were not going to be receiving enriched uranium, or their investment back. “This soured the Iranians on that kind of situation,” Einhorn said.
“Basically, there’s several elements that… showed us that there was no seriousness to achieve a real deal,” a second senior Trump administration official said in the briefing Saturday. “We went through why they needed enrichment capabilities, what they needed fuel for, their claim, which is that it was for civil abilities. ….
“One of the things we offered them was, we said we will give you free nuclear fuel forever,” the second official said. “And they basically said that didn’t work for them. They needed to enrich uranium. And we basically said, well, that that makes absolutely no sense. And so they agreed for a short period of time to not do enrichment.
“But the fact that they weren’t willing to take free nuclear fuel was a big tell to us that that they were looking to buy time,” the official said.
The Trump negotiators seemingly not understanding why Iran would not accept the US promise of fuel for their nuclear program “reflects a profound lack of knowledge and depth regarding the long history of Iran’s nuclear program and its experience with the West,” Kimball said.
“It is a laughable proposal for the United States to suggest that it would provide Iran with fuel for nuclear energy production, given that the Trump administration pulled out of the [2016 Iran nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] JCPOA, [and] given that Iran had fuel sources in the 1970s that were from Europe, that were removed after the revolution,” he said. “So that was an insincere and cynical offer.”
Expert: Trump negotiator evidently did not understand Iran offered to suspend enrichment for years
The third senior Trump administration official, discussing the recent negotiations with Iran, also revealed a profound lack of experience or expertise to understand the issues involved, including claiming-- bizarrely--that the Iranians thought the US negotiators, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, would somehow never bother to read their proposal closely.
“One of the things that we said to the Iranians is we wanted to see… some sort of plan from them as to how they would address our enrichment demands,” the third senior Trump administration official said. “They brought with them a seven page plan, which, interestingly enough, they wouldn’t leave it with us, but they did hand it to us and allowed us to read it, thinking that we would never actually spend the time in reading it. Jared read it from throughout, went through every piece of it, as did I. So we have an intimate knowledge of what was in there. They basically premised their program on their internal needs, and then had a flow chart at the back that showed what their internal needs would be.”
“The third briefer did not seem to understand the value of Iran’s proposal to suspend enrichment for a period of several years,” Kimball said. “And to agree, as the Omani foreign minister said they were ready to do, not to stockpile the uranium that they might enrich in the future.”
“If you recall, the JCPOA limited Iran for a period of 15 years to accumulate no more than 300 kilograms of material enriched to no more than 3.5%,” Kimball continued. So the agreement the Omani foreign minister said the Iranians had proposed last week, “if verified by the IAEA , would have been a tremendous breakthrough that would have, for all intents and purposes, prevented Iran from enriching uranium to levels that could be used to produce bomb grade material.
“So that was something the United States could have and should have seized as a negotiating issue to lock in effectively an enrichment halt for a much longer period of time,” Kimball said.
**
Madness.
Is there a transcript of the briefing?