Trump’s Midnight Hammer

The US has declared an uncertain and messy end to its attack on Iran. Trump announced a ceasefire some hours before it was acknowledged by Israel and Iran, and later said both sides had violated it (‘they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing,’ he complained). Overall it seems likely to hold, for a while at least.

On 22 June, the US moved from aiding and abetting Israel’s reckless attack on Iran to joining it directly. Seven B-2 stealth bombers took off from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, on the edge of the Great Plains, and flew seven thousand miles before dropping their payloads on Iran. According to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Caine, the B-2s dropped twelve GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators on the nuclear facility at Fordow and two on the facility at Natanz. Simultaneously, American Ohio-class submarines fired thirty Tomahawk missiles on the nuclear research facility at Isfahan.

Moving heavy bombers over such distances is a major endeavour. The Pentagon claims the raid, codenamed Midnight Hammer, involved 125 aircraft including fighter jets and aerial refuelling tankers in support of the B-2s. While the strike team was flying east across the Atlantic and Mediterranean, a second set of B-2s was sent west towards Guam as a diversion.

For the US military this was an exuberant celebration of American power. The B-2, originally designed to penetrate the Soviet Union’s radar network, is the pride of US strategic bombing. As the house journal of the USAF put it a few years ago, the main utility of the B-2s was to ‘display national intent and resolve’ and represent America’s ‘overwhelming strength’. What could be better than using them to attack Iran with bombs larger than any other state has ever built?

Exuberance aside, what were the practical effects of American aggression? Trump immediately claimed that Iran’s nuclear sites were ‘completely and totally obliterated’. But the level of damage is uncertain. In a briefing on 23 June, General Caine said the initial assessment was that ‘all three sites sustained extremely severe damage’. The centrifuges at Fordow may well be damaged or destroyed. But at Natanz large parts of the underground facility were not even targeted. Nor were the tunnels at Isfahan. Iran has another enrichment facility at an unknown location, which the International Atomic Energy Agency was scheduled to inspect before the US-Israeli attack. That will not happen now.

As for the 400 kg of highly enriched uranium that was supposedly the reason for the US joining the attack, neither Israel nor the US knows where it is, and they don’t much care. Since Israel’s attack on 13 June it has been obvious that Iran’s nuclear programme – which in the assessment of both Israeli and US intelligence is not an active weapons programme – was a diversionary justification rather than an actual motive. Both the US and Israel have wanted to strike at Iran for a long time for quite other reasons. In Israeli security circles an attack was pushed for even more strongly after 7 October 2023. Yet the US isn’t only fighting Israel’s war: decades of American policy have also helped lead to this moment.

On 23 June, Israel continued to target what the defence minister, Israel Katz, called ‘governmental repressive bodies’. The IDF claimed it had struck ‘command centres’ of Iran’s internal security apparatus and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, including the headquarters of the Basij paramilitary force and Evin prison.

Israel also continued to strike IRGC missile facilities – including the Imam Hussein Strategic Missile Command Centre in Yazd, which is thought to house Khorramshahr long-range ballistic missiles – as well as civilian sites in Tehran, including the state broadcasting building and a power station. The civilian casualties caused by these strikes appear not to have been recorded, let alone announced. What are they compared with the daily slaughter in Gaza?

The air campaign against Iran, in other words, was not focused on nuclear targets but involved a broader targeting of the Iranian state. Iran has no weapons-grade uranium (over 85 per cent U-235) and no weaponisation programme. American, Israeli or European politicians say there is no civilian use for Iran’s stock of uranium enriched to 60 per cent U-235. That is inaccurate. It has no use in civilian power stations, but it has an obvious strategic use in being tradeable for relief from years of brutal US sanctions.

Had the US cared about Iran’s uranium enrichment programme, it could have returned to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the nuclear deal signed by Iran in 2015, which reduced enrichment almost to zero. The JCPOA was itself an instrument of American power, but Iran observed its stipulations even after Trump withdrew from the agreement in 2018. Biden declined to reinstitute the deal, choosing instead to persist with a blockade of the Iranian economy.

Before this morning’s ceasefire, Iran conducted its official response to the US bombing raids. It fired nineteen missiles at al-Udeid base in Qatar, the most important US airbase outside America. Seven of them were easily shot down over the Gulf. Another eleven were shot down by air defences at the base and one landed harmlessly in the desert. Zero casualties. Al-Udeid had been partly evacuated. Trump thanked Iran for giving notice.

This was not the smallest possible response from Iran (that would have been to strike empty and irrelevant US forts in rural Syria or Iraq), but it was close to it. Al-Udeid is enormously important but Qatar is also the most flexible US protectorate in the Gulf. If Iran had chosen a more desperate option, it could have fired its short-range missiles, without informing the US, at the major Gulf bases or even at regional oil installations. Fortunately, Iran decided it was in no position to fight the empire.

For Iran this war is certainly an inflection point. It has proved itself vulnerable to attack from the air. Even if it was able to strike back at Israel, and cause some damage, it was unable to prevent Israel from taking control of the skies. The prestige of the Iranian system has taken a serious blow. Even before the war, Iran was more isolated than it had been for a long time. Yet the Islamic Republic has survived decades of external pressure; it is not the kind of state that can be wished away.

The focus remains on decisions taken in Washington. In January, Russia and Iran signed a comprehensive strategic partnership, and Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, travelled to Moscow on 22 June. But Russia has played no real part in the conflict. China, despite briefly showing interest in a settlement between Iran and Saudi Arabia in 2023, was absent.

The UK, France and Germany essentially supported the attack, and remain in denial of the open criminality of their greatest ally and its well-protected regional arsonist. In a joint statement following a meeting with their Iranian counterpart in Geneva on 20 June, the foreign ministers of the UK, France and Germany spoke of the need for negotiations and de-escalation, with the mandatory expression of their ‘firm commitment to Israel’s security’. But Iran was already negotiating. On 23 June, the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, apparently quite happy for his foreign minister to have been used as a decoy in Geneva, said there was ‘no reason to criticise what Israel began a week ago’ and ‘no reason to criticise what America did’.

What is remarkable is the carelessness of all this. Official discussion of the war is completely incommensurate with the gravity of the moment. For a number of commentators this war has been another opportunity to declare the end of the US-led global order – which had already been pronounced dead with the withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and again with Gaza in 2023.

But the American empire is still here, and still very dangerous. The shifts in the international system have not altered these facts. The illusion of order was always an illusion. And Trump’s aggressive policy towards Iran is another respect in which he stands in the tradition of his predecessors. The US is still a unipole, behaving as a rogue superpower, swinging a wrecking ball from an unstable structure it constructed for itself.