In the early hours of Saturday morning, President Donald Trump announced that the US had launched military strikes on Iran.
In an eight-minute video statement posted to social media, he said the US was undertaking a “massive and ongoing operation” to end the Iranian threat and he called for regime change in Tehran.
“It’s a very simple message,” the president said from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. “They will never have a nuclear weapon.”
The BBC’s State Department correspondent Tom Bateman and Washington correspondent Daniel Bush break down the president’s words line by line to explain how he is justifying the action and assess the risks ahead.
Trump’s basis for strikes
“Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime, a vicious group of very hard, terrible people. Its menacing activities directly endanger the United States, our troops, our bases overseas, and our allies throughout the world.”
The key words here are “imminent threats”. The commander-in-chief knows he has to justify why this attack – which does not have formal international backing nor the authorisation of Congress – is happening now.
Trump makes three cases here: that Iran has been an imminent threat to America ever since the Islamic Revolution in 1979; that it is close to developing intercontinental ballistic missiles that could reach the US – a claim which is not supported by US intelligence assessments; and that it is on the verge of developing a nuclear weapon, even though Trump had said these capabilities were “obliterated” after the US strikes last summer.
The reality over the timing is that Trump and Netanyahu view the Iranian leadership as at its weakest point domestically for years with its allied militias in the region decimated after the Gaza war. Tehran’s brutal crushing of this year’s protests started a stopwatch. They believe this is the moment to strike – Tom Bateman.
Time for negotiations over
“We sought repeatedly to make a deal. We tried. They wanted to do it. They didn’t want to do it again. They wanted to do it. They didn’t want to do it.”
Trump’s case here is that the US had no choice but to strike because of a recalcitrant Iranian regime that played Washington’s outreach to negotiate an end to its nuclear programme. He said on the eve of the attack Tehran wouldn’t “give us what we have to have”.
Over recent weeks Trump equivocated over the extent of his demands, at times saying a deal had to include an end to Iran’s conventional missile capabilities, other times suggesting it did not. But his red line converged on the demand for zero nuclear enrichment.
Tehran saw this as a humiliation. Mediated talks between the US and Iran were due to continue next week, with mediator Oman claiming on Friday a breakthrough was within reach with Iran offering no stockpiling of nuclear material. But Trump balked at this.
However, the reality remains it was Trump in his first term who unilaterally pulled the US out of the Obama-led 2015 nuclear deal between world powers and Iran. Trump said the deal was too weak. But Tehran always used this as evidence to claim it was him not them that took the path of violence over negotiations – Tom Bateman.
