President Trump is scheduled to meet with his national security team in the Situation Room to discuss resuming major strikes against Iran, after posting on social media that the clock is ticking and telling Axios that Iran is going to get hit much harder if it fails to offer a deal consistent with American terms.
Steven Bucci, thirty-year Army Special Forces veteran and former top Pentagon official, now a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to assess the Iran decision, a significant counterterrorism operation in Africa, and escalating tensions in the Western Hemisphere.
Bucci said he shares the growing impatience with the extended ceasefire period. He said Ray Charles could see the Iranians are not going to cut a deal, at least not on terms the United States can accept, and that the logic of continuing to extend the pause is exhausted. He said what Iran responds to is force and strength, not negotiation from a posture of restraint, and that the administration has given Tehran ample rope. He said when strikes resume they should be precise and targeted but delivered with a degree of spectacular effect, enough to get the attention of both the regime and the dissident population inside Iran and potentially tip the internal political balance toward the kind of collapse that ends the standoff definitively.
He said the Gulf States, particularly the UAE which has been taking incoming Iranian fire and has launched its own retaliatory strikes inside Iran, are almost certainly pressing the administration to re-engage with serious American firepower. He said they cannot accomplish what needs to be accomplished alone, know it, and are in his assessment giving Trump some negotiating flexibility while making clear they need the United States back in the fight in a meaningful way.
Trump announced over the weekend that American forces working with Nigerian military executed a complex mission eliminating Bilal al-Sudani, described as the second most active terrorist in the world and a senior ISIS figure operating in Africa. Bucci said the operation serves both a direct counterterrorism purpose and a broader messaging function. He said George W. Bush was correct that eliminating Islamist terrorism would take decades, and that the threat never fully disappeared even as ISIS’s organizational capacity was severely degraded. More importantly for the current strategic moment, the operation sends a clear signal to Iran, China, and other adversaries that American surveillance and targeting capability never went dormant during the ceasefire period. He said the message is that a few months without visible American action does not mean adversaries are free to expand their mischief unobserved and unpunished.
On Cuba, Bucci addressed an Axios report that Cuba has acquired more than three hundred military drones from Russia and Iran and has been discussing plans to use them to attack Guantanamo Bay, American military vessels, and potentially Key West. He said CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s recent visit to Havana likely included a direct communication to Cuban leadership that executing such an attack would be catastrophically stupid. He said Cuba’s reliance on Russian and Iranian drone technology is not a particularly strong foundation for a deterrence strategy given how thoroughly American forces have demonstrated the ability to defeat those systems in the Iran campaign. He said autocratic leaders sometimes develop a dangerous detachment from reality based on the propaganda they generate about themselves, and that Cuba’s leadership needs to understand very clearly that this is not an adventure that ends well for them.
On the report that the Justice Department is preparing to unseal an indictment of Raul Castro for allegedly ordering the 1996 shootdown of two planes flown by the Miami-based humanitarian group Brothers to the Rescue, Bucci said the move at minimum puts a Maduro-style operation on the table with equivalent legal justification. He noted that when critics challenged the Maduro extraction by calling it the capture of a legally elected official, Marco Rubio was quick to respond that Maduro was an indicted criminal who was illegally holding power and was arrested accordingly. Building the same legal predicate around Raul Castro does not guarantee an operation will follow, but Raul does not know it will not, and that uncertainty itself carries strategic value.
On the Beijing summit, Bucci said the most telling aspect was the disappointment on the American left, which had expected Xi to humiliate Trump into accepting weak-sauce agreements just to claim a diplomatic win. That did not happen. He said Trump came away with more than the Chinese did, including Xi’s acceptance of American oil purchases, which shifts a valuable commodity from adversaries to American producers. He said Xi’s statement that he would be happy to help reopen the strait if there is anything he can do is best understood as a polite formulation that commits him to nothing, but that Xi’s failure to actively interfere with American operations is itself a form of success. He cautioned against over-estimating Chinese leverage over Iran, saying China is Iran’s benefactor but not its puppet master, and that expecting Xi to simply turn off Iranian behavior on American request misunderstands the actual nature of that relationship.