Iran Nuclear Strike: Will Trump Hit Iran After the Midterms?

Yes. Donald Trump is preparing to strike Iran again once Americans vote on Tuesday, 3 November, and he will do it whether the Republicans hold Congress or lose it. On Saturday, 31 October, he spoke by phone with Benjamin Netanyahu in a call described as tough and direct, with the Israeli prime minister pressing him to resume the strikes and Trump asking for more time for talks. Trump made the same call before the war began in February. The call is a signal that the war is coming back.

If diplomacy fails, our judgment is that the next American strike will be a nuclear one. Nothing short of a nuclear weapon reaches the facilities Iran has buried under its mountains, and the only lawmaker who has seen the Pentagon’s plan says it would break America’s commitment to international law. While Washington prepares, Saudi Arabia has taken Türkiye (Turkey) and Pakistan to Tehran to persuade Iran to step back before Israel’s war reaches the rest of the region.

• Trump spoke with Netanyahu on 31 October, and Washington has told its Gulf allies to prepare for strikes as early as 4 November, the day after the midterms.
• The new strike has no defined target, and strikes that do not change Iran’s behaviour have already failed three times. When this one fails, Trump will blame Pete Hegseth, Gen. Dan Caine and Adm. Brad Cooper.
• Senator Chris Murphy, briefed on the plan, called it insane and said it would break America’s commitment to international law. The weapon that could do that and reach Pickaxe Mountain is a nuclear one.
• On 26 October Saudi Arabia’s defence minister, Pakistan’s army chief and Turkey’s intelligence chief told Iran’s security chief that after Iran, Israel will come for Turkey and then Saudi Arabia.

Hegseth has given Trump reasons to doubt him. Since he took over the Pentagon, roughly two dozen generals, admirals and senior officers have been fired, forced out or have left. Twenty generals cannot all have been at fault. Some of those dismissals were personal, and some were bad judgment. In July he announced mandatory annual testosterone screening for every service member over 30 and then backed away from it. Meanwhile the American military has not delivered the war the White House was promised.

The latest firing shows the problem. Lt. Gen. Brett Sylvia, a respected commander who led troops in Afghanistan, ran the Joint Staff’s strategy, plans and policy directorate, the J5. Two of America’s largest newspapers had published precise figures on how fast US stocks of air-defence interceptors and long-range missiles were being used up, numbers that could only come from inside the military. Investigators polygraphed about 50 Joint Staff personnel. A senior Pentagon official says Sylvia failed three polygraph exams, and a Pentagon report says he admitted passing classified information on the Iran and Ukraine wars to two reporters. Hegseth fired him in late October. Why Sylvia was fired matters less than what Trump said about it. Asked by reporters on 29 October, he answered: “She’s got problems.” Sylvia is a man. Trump is watching the Pentagon from the outside, and what he sees is generals being fired while the war goes badly.

Vice President JD Vance has been warning Trump that Hegseth will take him down with him. When the next strike fails, Trump will dismiss the defence secretary, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the head of Central Command, Adm. Brad Cooper, the three men who presented him with the strike options at the White House last week. Then he will say the war was their failure, not his.

Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has been briefed on what the Pentagon intends to do in Iran. He came out shocked. Last week he called the plan “insane”, and he has described it as a “devastating escalation” that would prolong and widen the war and break America’s commitment to international law, especially if it hits civilian sites and infrastructure inside Iran. He said he could not give details.

Read that warning carefully. America has been at war with Iran for nine months. What could it do now that crosses a line the war so far has not? Hitting power stations and bridges is part of it. But no amount of conventional bombing reaches the bases under Iran’s mountains: drop every bunker buster in the arsenal and Pickaxe Mountain still stands. The only weapon that can destroy it is a nuclear one. Murphy never said the word nuclear. If diplomacy with Iran fails, that is where this plan leads, and Tehran is already preparing for it: on 1 November Mohsen Rezaei, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said Iran is debating whether to keep its ban on nuclear weapons if the war resumes.

America would rather have a deal. The real question is whether Iran wants one, and it does. The American blockade of Iran’s economy is working and it hurts. Iran’s leaders insist they will not negotiate under pressure, but when a hardliner like Rezaei, a former commander of the Revolutionary Guards, says the letter he received from Vance is a good sign and that Washington’s “tone has shifted completely”, the pressure is producing results. Iran wants to talk. It wants to talk from strength.

Iran also cannot carry a new war. Almost everything it has has been bombed. If America destroys its underground nuclear sites and the bases under the mountains, there is no Iran left as Tehran’s rulers know it, and no Revolutionary Guards.

The visit that opened Iran up came on 26 October. Saudi Arabia’s defence minister, Prince Khalid bin Salman, travelled to Tehran with Pakistan’s army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, and Turkey’s intelligence chief, Ibrahim Kalin, the first joint visit by the Mecca pact’s states. They met President Masoud Pezeshkian and Rezaei.

Rezaei himself has described what they told him, in an interview with Iranian state television on 1 November. Khalid bin Salman did not come to talk about Yemen. He warned that after Israel finishes with Iran, it will go after Turkey, and then Saudi Arabia, and that this is in nobody’s interest. Kalin told him the Israeli danger is real, and that the Saudi minister was not exaggerating. Munir spoke of the Israeli threat and of the ties being formed between Hindu nationalists in India and Israel against Muslims and against Pakistan.

The three were speaking to Iran in the language it understands. The message was that Islam is in danger, and that Iran’s war is draining the Muslim states rather than defending them: it strengthens Israel instead of weakening it. Rezaei found the argument convincing and said his guests had real information. The four sides agreed to keep consulting.

Here is the problem. America is convinced Iran needs a deal urgently. Iran is convinced America needs one even more. That is not a recipe for agreement. Anwar Gargash, diplomatic adviser to the UAE president, put it plainly at the Manama Dialogue in Bahrain this weekend: “This is a situation where we are witnessing what is called the fog of war. A lot of rumors about what happens next, but we all really don’t know what will happen next. We know that the rules of logic tells us that the Iranian stand and the American stand are far apart, and if these positions are not bridged then we have to worry about the worst.”

Pickaxe Mountain, known in Iran as Kuh-e Kolang Gaz La, is an underground complex tunnelled into a mountain beside the Natanz uranium enrichment plant in central Iran, about 225 kilometres south of Tehran. Iran began digging there years before the current war, and the International Atomic Energy Agency has never been allowed inside. Satellite imagery analysed this year shows more construction and road traffic at the site in 2026 than at any point in its history.

The site matters because of its depth. America’s largest conventional bunker buster, the 30,000-pound GBU-57 dropped by B-2 bombers, was built for targets like Fordow, and Pickaxe Mountain is thought to be buried deeper. Analysts doubt that even repeated strikes in the same hole would reach its halls. Trump said in July that the area was on America’s target list and that the United States would be “hitting that area, probably pretty soon”. Iran’s foreign ministry said on 22 July that there is no nuclear activity there. Either way, it is the target that defines the next war: whoever wants to end Iran’s programme has to reach under that mountain.

The Middle East is heading down one of two roads. The first is a deal. It would calm things, but it will be hard to keep; do not expect it to last into next year. It would buy the region a breathing space without ending the war, and the attrition would go on. The second is a nuclear war, and that is a catastrophe. The Gulf would suffer from it, and keep suffering, for a very long time.

For the Arabs, this war has been the first real outside test of what we can do, and it exposed how much we can do alone: very little. Every country liked to say it needed no one and could win a war by itself. It turned out we all need each other. The one good thing to come out of the war is that it has brought the Arabs closer together. Egypt and the Gulf have drawn closer, the tone of superiority on every side is gone, and we know who our enemies are. We paid a high price, economic and military, to learn it. Trump will have his generals to blame when his strike fails. The Arabs have learned that they have only each other.