There is some noise that an Israeli and/or U.S. attack on Iran is imminent. I regard this a propaganda which hopes to put pressure on Iran and not as serious war planning.
Israel wants the U.S. to destroy Iran. It would be the last of the seven countries in five years plan of destruction the U.S. had activated, with Israel's prodding, in 2003.
President Donald Trump wants to avoid a war with Iran. He has nothing to gain from it. But he is under pressure by the Zionist lobby. Instead of bombing Iran he would prefer to shut down its civil nuclear program. Its existence makes Iran a latent nuclear weapon state. Iran denies that it is striving to get nuclear weapons. U.S. intelligence has found that Iran has no current program that would lead to weapon capabilities.
It was Trump who in 2018 withdrew the U.S. from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) which had limited Iran's nuclear industry and had put it under strict surveillance. Iran waited a year before it took retaliatory measure by increasing its enrichment of nuclear fuel and by decreasing its cooperation with the inspectors of the IAEA who are supervising Iran's adherence to the JCPOA.
With Trump back in office he set out to push Iran towards a new agreement that would, he hoped, eliminate all enrichment of nuclear fuel in Iran. There is no chance to achieve that. Nuclear enrichment is an inalienable right of all nation under the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty and Iran insists on not being blocked from it.
Trump decided on a two pronged strategy. He would push the IAEA and the European co-signers of the JCPOA to condemn Iran with the perspective of reestablishing UN mandated sanction on Iran. He would also offer Iran a new kind of JCPOA to again limit its nuclear development abilities.
Trump had sent out his envoy Steve Witkoff to push Iran towards a new agreement. He however mangled the constrains Iran should agree to. Witkoff told the Iranians that they would be allowed to enrich Uranium to 3.6% as needed for a civil nuclear reactor. A few days later Trump ordered that to be 0% – i.e. no enrichment at all. This went back and forth several times.
The JCPOA was a very fine balanced and very technical agreement that took many months to conclude. Trumps offer to Iran is a "dollar-store-JCPOA", incomplete and with many clauses Iran would never agree to.
Trump has made negotiations even more difficult when he publicly demanded Iran to surrender completely:
The president outlined his vision for a new agreement during a White House presser on Wednesday, calling for a “very strong document” that would effectively give Washington carte blanche over Tehran’s nuclear energy program.
“I want it very strong – where we can go in with inspectors, we can take whatever we want, we can blow up whatever we want, but [with] nobody getting killed,” he told reporters. “We can blow up a lab, but nobody is gonna be in the lab, as opposed to everybody being in the lab and blowing it up.”
He did not elaborate on those remarks, however, leaving it unclear whether Washington had actually pushed for such major concessions at the negotiating table. The Islamic Republic would be unlikely to accept a deal under those terms.
Iran had answered appropriately (archived):
The Trump administration over the weekend proposed the outline of a deal that would seem to allow Iran to continue enriching uranium, which had been a sticking point in talks — but only temporarily. With talks at an impasse, the proposal was seen as a potential concession that could open a path to compromise.
In his first public remarks since the proposal was reported on, Ayatollah Khamenei said that Iran’s “response to the U.S. government’s nonsense is clear.”
He said in a speech that it would be “useless” for Iran to build nuclear power plants without being able to enrich uranium over the long term, framing the U.S. proposal as an attempt to obstruct Iran’s nuclear industry and self-reliance.
With no prospect of a deal in the making the attention turned to the second leg of Trump's strategy.
The way to reinstate UN sanctions on Iran, as they had existed before the JCPOA, is also a complicate business. But here pressure on the relevant actors has allowed Trump to proceed.
The head of the IAEA regularly reports to the IAEA Board of Governors about its verification and monitoring of nuclear issues in Iran.
In his latest report the IAEA's General Director Rafael Grossi repeated 20+ years old well known facts but came to new 'conclusions' about them:
While many of the findings relate to activities dating back decades and have been made before, the IAEA report's conclusions were more definitive. It summarised developments in recent years and pointed more clearly towards coordinated, secret activities, some of which were relevant to producing nuclear weapons.
It also spelled out that Iran's cooperation with IAEA continues to be "less than satisfactory" in "a number of respects". The IAEA is still seeking explanations for uranium traces found years ago at two of four sites it has been investigating. Three hosted secret experiments, it found.
The IAEA has concluded that "these three locations, and other possible related locations, were part of an undeclared structured nuclear programme carried out by Iran until the early 2000s and that some activities used undeclared nuclear material", the report said.
Iran insists that nothing nuclear ever had happened at those sites and that if any traces of radioactive materials had been found there they must have been planted.
Iran has by the way serious reasons to not trust Grossi:
The Cradle @TheCradleMedia – 11:01 UTC · Jun 12, 2025
BREAKING | Leaked documents released by Iranian media reportedly reveal that International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Rafael Grossi has been fully coordinating with Israel and carrying out its directives.
These files are part of the sensitive intelligence cache Iran recently seized from Israel.
pics
Following Grossi's latest report the U.S. proxies at the IAEA Board of Governors declared Iran to be in breach of its obligations:
The U.N. nuclear watchdog's 35-nation Board of Governors declared Iran in breach of its non-proliferation obligations on Thursday for the first time in almost 20 years, raising the prospect of reporting it to the U.N. Security Council.
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Diplomats at the closed-door meeting said the board passed the resolution submitted by the United States, Britain, France and Germany with 19 countries in favour, 11 abstentions and three states – Russia, China and Burkina Faso – against.
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The text, seen by Reuters, declares Iran in breach of its obligations given a damning report the IAEA sent to member states on May 31."The Board of Governors… finds that Iran's many failures to uphold its obligations since 2019 to provide the Agency with full and timely cooperation regarding undeclared nuclear material and activities at multiple undeclared locations in Iran … constitutes non-compliance with its obligations under its Safeguards Agreement with the Agency," the text said.
A central issue is Iran's failure to provide the IAEA with credible explanations of how uranium traces detected at undeclared sites in Iran came to be there despite the agency having investigated the issue for years.
The chutzpah is strong in this. The U.S., UK, Germany and France accuse Iran of non compliance with the JCPOA which the U.S. had shredded in 2018 and which the Europeans refused to abide to when they kept export restrictions on Iran.
This all because of alleged traces of nuclear material found at places that had allegedly been used more than twenty years ago.
There was no reason for Grossi to put this out now or for the Board of Governors to react to it but pressure from the U.S. to rebuild a path towards UN sanctions.
Iran immediately reacted, as it had previously announced, to the Board's finding:
Iran has condemned a “politically-motivated” resolution adopted by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Board of Governors, saying it will build a new enrichment facility in a secure location.
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The new site will replace the first-generation enrichment machines at Fordow nuclear facility with advanced sixth-generation ones, it emphasized.
The next step is for one of the European co-signers of the JCPOA to push the Board of Governors resolution to the UN Security Council. This could lead to a re-activation of international sanctions on Iran which had been suspended under UN resolution 2231 when it endorsed the JCPOA.
Iran has said that it would respond to such a step by leaving the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. That would allow Iran, after a year, to peruse nuclear weapons without any legal restrictions.
In parallel to the IAEA action a well coordinated information campaign was launched to create the impression of an imminent attack on Iran:
Setting everyone on edge and grasping for insight, the Trump administration issued evacuation orders for non-essential personnel at the U.S. Embassy in Iraq, and its diplomatic facilities in Bahrain and Kuwait on Wednesday.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth also reportedly told FOX News that there would be voluntary departure for dependents of military personnel serving in the Central Command (CENTCOM) area of operations across the Middle East.
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Meanwhile, the UK's Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO), a British maritime security agency, issued its own "unusual" warning, citing “increasing regional tension” that could pose threats to ships in the region.
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By Wednesday night, the media was speculating widely that the administration is worried about an imminent strike by Israel on Iran. Asked about the developments at a Kennedy Center event, Trump acknowledged that U.S. citizens were being moved out of the Middle East, saying “it could be a dangerous place. … We’ve given notice to move out; we’ll see what happens.”“We are watching and worried,” one senior diplomat in the region told the Washington Post. “We think it’s more serious than any other time in the past.”
All this is to give the impression that Israel is out of control:
Israel is considering taking military action against Iran — most likely without U.S. support — in the coming days, even as President Donald Trump is in advanced discussions with Tehran about a diplomatic deal to curtail its nuclear program, according to five people with knowledge of the situation.
Israel has become more serious about a unilateral strike on Iran as the negotiations between the United States and Iran appear closer to a preliminary or framework agreement that includes provisions about uranium enrichment that Israel views as unacceptable.
Details about the Israeli discussions emerged before the International Atomic Energy Agency's board of governors formally found that Iran isn’t complying with its nuclear obligations for the first time in 20 years.
Israel does not have the means to attack Iran. Bombing Iran's nuclear facilities effectively is extremely challenging. Even their destruction would only delay, not hinder Iran from pursuing whatever nuclear program it likes.
The rumors of an attack on Iran are most likely just scaremongering to press Iran into agreeing to Trump's nonsensical demands of restrictions for its nuclear program. Iran is unlikely to fall for this.
Anything Israel might try unilaterally would be for the sole purpose of drawing the U.S. into a war with Iran.
Trump wants lower oil prices and freedom to pursue his domestic agenda. I strongly doubt that he will allow Israel to pull him into a war as there is nothing to win for him.
