It was clearly a covert operation. Trump specifically emphasized that a full payload of bombs was dropped on the primary site, Fordo, the heavily fortified underground facility that Israel supposedly could not penetrate alone. All pilots and aircraft are safe. They’re out of harm’s way. The operation was a success with President Trump declaring that there is not another military on the planet that could have done this. Now is the time for peace. So the operation involved multiple B2 bombers that had been positioned across the Pacific in recent days. Again, all US aircraft have safely exited Iranian airspace.

This is obviously American military strength in action. Unprecedented military strength in Trump’s tone is obviously very triumphant. Again, you got to hand it to him. I mean this was strategic ambiguity at its finest. You had no idea what he was going to do. It keeps the enemies off balance. They have no idea how to respond. He gives them two weeks. He lures them into a false sense of complacency and then boom. Now we’ll get more word on the specific effects of this military campaign in the days ahead. Now we did get word yesterday that multiple B2 stealth bombers departed Whitman Air Force Base in Missouri heading west toward the Pacific.

These aren’t routine training flights. We knew that, you know, these are the only aircraft in the world capable carrying the 30,000 pound bunker buster bombs needed to destroy Iran’s underground Fordo nuclear facility. Defense officials were being very careful with their words, but the message was pretty clear. Trump was positioning America’s most advanced military assets within striking distance of Iran. The USS Ford, our newest and most powerful aircraft carrier, had also moved toward the region. It’s there now. And we’ve got word behind the scenes that diplomatic efforts collapsed. Trump and Turkish President Erdogan attempted to arrange secret negotiations in Istanbul, but reportedly Iran Supreme Leader Khomeini is currently in hiding for fear of assassination.

He couldn’t even have been reached to to approve the talks. And as representatives were basically saying that they had nothing to say to the United States and that their nuclear program was non-negotiable. So needless to say, it does appear that their nuclear program is either no longer existent or it’s been bombed to relative irrelevance. Again, we will see in the hours ahead. Now, I found the military historian Victor Davis Hanson’s analysis very helpful here. This was from earlier today, but he outlined three distinct scenarios for how American intervention in Iran could unfold and the implications of each.

And he began with what he called the pessimistic scenario. In other words, he starts in effect with sort of the bad news. So his logic is this. If we strike Iranian nuclear facilities, that will not be the end. It will only be the beginning. Iran has spent decades building a global network of proxy forces and they’re going to activate every cell they have to target American diplomats, American soldiers, American civilians worldwide. We’re talking about, you know, potential assassination attempts on President Trump himself. And to make this even worse, the military reality is even more sobering.

So as Hanson notes, even if we successfully destroy Iran’s most prominent nuclear facilities, there’s no guarantee they can’t be rebuilt quickly. So, of course, we’ve seen this movie before. We tried regime change through airstrikes with Saddam Hussein in 2003, with Gaddafi during Reagan’s presidency with Milosevic and the Balkans. None of these efforts succeeded through air power alone. The pessimistic assessment concludes that even eliminating Iran’s supreme leader would not necessarily collapse the government or guarantee that whatever replaces it would be better. Instead, the pessimists are better what we call the non-interventionists like we talked about yesterday in our live stream.

They’re advocating instead for renewed negotiations, bringing back nuclear monitors and using the current destruction by Israel to buy three to four years of breathing space for diplomacy. So obviously that’s off the table. Now that’s history. That’s not happening given Trump’s announcement. So then let’s examine the optimistic scenario, which frankly sounds almost too good to be true. But the optimists do believe we’re witnessing the systematic dismantling of Iran’s military capability in real time. Israel’s already destroyed 50% of Iran’s mobile missile launchers, and the number of missiles reaching Israeli territory decreases daily.

Here’s where it gets interesting. According to this view, Israel’s eliminated an entire generation of nuclear physicists. They’ve wiped out military command structures filled with experienced officers in their 50s, their 60s. Supreme Leader Khomeini is isolated and vulnerable, especially after his forces struck an Israeli hospital which could justify targeting him directly. The optimistic scenario predicts that Khomeini’s elimination would trigger a popular revolt. Iranian people freed from decades of oppression by leaders who are now dead or hiding would rise up and demand change. The new Iranian government would voluntarily dismantle the nuclear program, making American military intervention ultimately unnecessary in terms of tanks.

So this scenario assumes that destroying the regime’s leadership structure will cause the entire system to collapse like a house of cards. Finally, or thirdly, Hanson’s realistic scenario is the most nuanced and frankly the most likely. President Trump, he thought at the time, would wait at least a week to see if Israel could develop creative solutions to destroy Iran’s underground nuclear facilities without direct American intervention. In the meantime, Trump has largely addressed the MAGA base’s concerns by promising that any American intervention would be absolutely limited, no extensive boots on the ground, no troops, no tanks, no long-term occupation, just a decisive one and done operation.

And it does, it appears that this is the course that Trump has chosen. He’s making it clear that this bombing was one and done as far as he’s concerned that Iran needs now to come to peace negotiations and end this thing. And I’m sure he’s extending some major carrots to get them to negotiation table as we speak. That said, regarding great power competition, because we are in a multi-polar, civilizationalist world, that said Hanson’s analysis is very interesting here. He does not think Russia is going to get involved in this at all and that’s because it’s just Russia’s just completely consumed by its own war, the Ukraine war.

They’re just not in any position to get involved. Meanwhile, Russia actually benefits from Middle Eastern chaos because it drives up oil prices, which of course is a big concern for Trump and his commitment to get inflation across the living expenses down. China, they’re not going to intervene either, but for opposite reasons. They depend on Middle Eastern oil and they want regional stability, not conflict. So China is already in a trade war with America and it’s not going to risk any kind. It doesn’t want to escalate the tensions. And then finally, Hanson argues that from his vantage point the war appears to be going actually quite well for Israel.

They’ve largely taken out 50% of Iran’s military capability. The regime might fall of its own weight. However, there’s only a 25% chance that whatever replaces the current regime would actually be better. Regardless, what we just witnessed was really a master class in Trump’s strategic ambiguity. He’s maintained the credible threat of overwhelming force while signaling that he was allowing for our ally to exhaust diplomatic and creative military operations over the next two weeks, which seemed to distract Iran away from an imminent U.S. strike, which we now know just occurred and was, according to President Trump, very successful in accomplishing its mission.

Again, we will have to see. So stay vigilant, stay in prayer. History is being written right before our very eyes. God bless. [tr:trw].

See more of Dr. Steve Turley on their Public Channel and the MPN Dr. Steve Turley channel.