What will Donald Trump do with the colossal armada deployed off the Iranian coast? What will it do with its aircraft carriers saturated with aircraft ready to take off, with its destroyers clad in missiles, with its submarines armed with heavy torpedoes or with those famous Tomahawks which were, and still are, so lacking in martyred Ukraine, in short, with this firepower capable, in a few hours, of striking the regime in the heart and helping the Iranians?
Will he be content with surgical bombings on a few symbolic targets before, as last June, proclaiming “mission accomplished” and breaking camp?
Will he use it as a threat, an argument for blackmail or bargaining, a means to obtain from the mullahs, as he keeps repeating, a “better deal” than that of a reviled Barack Obama, who has become his obsession and, until recently, caricatured as a monkey in a message, ultimately deleted but vile, posted on his social networks?
And would this deployment of force have no other purpose than to resurrect, barely tweaked, the 2015 nuclear agreement that he himself had torn up, during his first mandate, because he found it too weak, too permissive for Iran and giving it time to become even more offensive?
Many signals point in this direction.
Commentators are already marveling at a tactic where they see a peak of his famous “art of the deal”.
This would, I believe, be a tragic mistake.
First of all, the central question today is no longer just that of nuclear power, it is also that of missiles.
It already was, of course, in 2015.
Israel and the Gulf monarchies had already stressed that one did not go without the other and that there was no sense in forcing a rogue state to remain on the threshold of the bomb if it was given, in the same breath, the freedom to manufacture the vectors which, the day the threshold was crossed, would make the weapon immediately operational.
And Obama’s great mistake was to have given in on this point and to have decoupled two issues which, strategically, formed one and the same node.
But Iran has since crossed a decisive threshold in this area too.
Its missiles have become more precise, more reliable, more deadly.
They have, in some cases, the reach necessary to reach the countries of south-eastern Europe.
By their number, their dispersion, the possible simultaneity of their fire, they have acquired the formidable capacity to overwhelm the defenses of the country attacked, including the Iron Dome of Israel.
And, if the “twelve-day war” in June destroyed half of their stocks, it seems that the mullahs have restored their sites; resumed their tests in secret or, sometimes, in North Korea mode, in full view of everyone; and, with a production capacity estimated at 2,000 or 3,000 machines per year, reconstituted most of their arsenal.
This is what Benjamin Netanyahu is saying in Washington.
He has just repeated that, if there must be a deal, he cannot exclude, this time, missiles.
And, on this point, he is right.
But, above all, should there be a deal?
Is it reasonable to “deal” with men who killed 30,000 of their compatriots in two days and threaten, if the demonstrations resume, to transform their country into a cemetery?
Can we be satisfied with “sanctions”, “pressures”, “concessions” extracted and immediately diverted, when we know that the Russian ally has long found the means to flood Tehran and its proxies with the necessary resources to, if they obtain sufficient respite, sustainably continue their enterprise of destruction?
And is there a possible compromise with fanatics who, like Daesh, claim that they prefer the apocalypse to defeat and that, if there were to be an apocalypse, they would without hesitation drag their near and more distant neighbors into it?
I hope the American administration knows this.
I hope she understood that the era of containment is over, that deterrence does not work in the face of a State which has made internal terror, regional destabilization and the end of the world a mode of government and a program.
And I hope that the American armada deployed in the Red Sea, in the Gulf of Oman and at the entrance to the Persian Gulf is not a simple negotiation setting, a pure bargaining lever or a communication expedient, but that it is, as I write, in the process of identifying its targets, of identifying the faults in the enemy’s defense infrastructures, of mapping the nerve centers of power – and that, beneath the exterior of immobility calculated, it is, in reality, preparing to strike.
The time for regime change has come.
This is what America, when it announced that help was “on the way”, promised to the women and men who, with their bare hands, at the risk of their lives, are defying this murderous regime and, if the free world wants it, on the verge of collapse.
date: 2026-02-09 22:31:00
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