U.S. President Donald Trump was triumphant Saturday night during his Oval Office address but within the administration the mood was less sanguine as officials braced for a potential Iran counterattack.
The decision to send American B-2 bombers to attack Iran, the most significant military action of Trump’s presidency, threatens to inject the United States into another Middle East conflict, the kind that Trump and Vice President JD Vance have long promised to avoid.
“We don’t know how much this is going to get us into something protracted,” said an administration official, who like others was granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberation. “Right now the message is we want to get rid of the nuclear capacity and focus on negotiations.”
Trump over the last few days had become increasingly convinced that he had a rare opportunity to take out Tehran’s nuclear capability with minimal risk to U.S. personnel, according to a senior White House official.
Plans for the attack, which Trump deemed “very successful” shortly after it was completed, were already in the works when the president said he’d decide “within two weeks” whether to join Israel in its efforts to destroy the Islamist regime’s nuclear sites, according to a second administration official and a person close to the White House.
But even as the president offered hope for deescalation he was weighing military options, the first Trump administration official said.
“He looked at various strike packages and selected a narrow and tailored one,” the same official said.
The senior White House official earlier this week telegraphed that a “surgical” strike, one that didn’t put boots on the ground or directly jeopardize American lives, would not run afoul of the president’s pledge to avoid the kinds of long and costly wars that dogged previous administrations, “which are the sort of main thrusts of the things that a majority of Americans, would oppose in the medium to long term.”
In a brief speech on Saturday, Trump appeared to suggest that U.S. strikes on Iran were over, for now. Thanking U.S. service members who carried out the strikes, he underscored that he hoped their services would no longer be needed.
At the same time, the president urged Tehran to make peace, warning that if they did not, Iran would face tragedy “far greater” than it has seen over the past eight days, as Israel has struck military and nuclear facilities across the country.
Much will now depend on how Iran responds to the attack. There are more than 40,000 U.S. troops and defense department civilians stationed in the Middle East who could be targeted if Tehran opts to retaliate.
The administration has increasing confidence that Iran and its proxy network in the region have been sufficiently weakened by Israeli military action in recent weeks, so that Tehran would be limited in its ability to respond and spark a wider war. A U.S. official said it was a “realistic possibility” that Iran would either cave after the American strikes or take a limited response that would leave room for a short diplomatic off-ramp.
“This is really uncharted territory for Iran,” the official said. “The regime has been attempting to prevent a U.S. attack since its inception.”
Yet within Trumpworld, there remains consternation. “There’s a lot of risks here for escalation,” said one person familiar with debates inside the administration. If there is a mass casualty event that involves Americans stemming from Iran’s response, the person said, “there’s going to be more pressure on the United States to get involved.”
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “is going to feel pressure and somehow prove that the strikes are as successful as Trump claimed they are,” the person added, saying that the Pentagon assessed this year that the U.S. military would need to do 30 days of sustained strikes to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities, owing to their underground depth and spread out layout.
The White House gave both Republican and Democratic congressional leadership a heads up about the Iran bombings, a senior White House official said.
But Democrats, including the ranking members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, pushed back, saying that they were not briefed ahead of the strikes. “According to the Constitution we are both sworn to defend, my attention to this matter comes BEFORE bombs fall,” Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn), the top democrat on the House intelligence panel, posted on X.
Shortly before the announcement, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer received a perfunctory notification without details.
On Saturday, the administration also informed NATO allies Britain and France of the planned strikes, according to diplomats from both countries.
While Trump’s decision to strike Iran’s nuclear sites came together over the past week – a throughline in his foreign policy thinking for several years has been an insistence that Iran not be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon. “I decided a long time ago I would not let this happen. It will not continue,” Trump said in his remarks on Saturday.
Paul McLeary, Sophia Cai and Amy Mackinnon contributed to this report.
