President Trump is considering launching a “targeted strike” on Iran in the coming days that would be followed by a much larger attack, potentially aimed at regime change, if Tehran doesn’t agree to his demands, The New York Times reported on Sunday.
US and Iranian officials are set to hold another round of talks in Geneva this Thursday, and Iran is expected to provide its proposal for a potential deal in the days ahead. But the Trump administration is not signaling it’s really interested in an agreement as it continues to demand zero uranium enrichment, a condition Tehran has made clear it won’t accept, and threatens war amid the largest US military buildup in the Middle East since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The Times report said that Trump may launch a limited attack on Iran to get it to capitulate to US demands, something the president confirmed on Friday. “I guess you can say I am considering it,” he said when asked about the possibility of a limited strike.
Potential targets in the initial attack could include the headquarters of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), nuclear sites, or Iran’s ballistic missile program. But a “limited strike” will likely lead to a major war, as all signs indicate that if the US launches any sort of attack, Iran will not hold back in its retaliation and could unleash its missiles on US bases and warships in the region, which could cause thousands of US casualties.
The Times report said that if an initial attack doesn’t make Iran capitulate, then the US could escalate to launching strikes aimed at toppling Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other media reports have said that the US is considering a “sustained” multi-week attack on the country.
Sources told the Times that Trump met with his senior advisors about the possibility of attacking Iran on Wednesday and that Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, couldn’t provide the same assurances for success that he had about the US attack on Venezuela, which resulted in the abductions of President Nicolas Maduro. The report said that after the meeting, the idea of sending teams of US commandos into Iran has been shelved, at least for now.
Trump officials have not made a coherent case to the American people about why the US should attack Iran, and have reverted to claiming that Iran might try to build a nuclear weapon, contradicting Trump’s insistence that the June 2025 airstrikes “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear facilities. The main US goal appears to be eliminating Iran’s ability to threaten Israel, which would require destroying its missile program or regime change, both of which would require a massive, sustained attack.
