David Sanger

That would be ideal or the closest to ideal you could be.

And the president could argue that he got more than Barack Obama got in 2015.

And that really weighs on his mind because having denounced the Obama agreement, if he's going to find a way out of this box, he's got to declare that he's gotten more than Obama did.

The second option might be some kind of a surgical strike against the missile capabilities, some other nuclear sites, and maybe some of the military units that have been suppressing the protests on the street.

that would leave the Iranian regime wondering whether President Trump was willing to come back for more if they continued to kill protesters on the street.

But that would require maintaining that military posture off of Iran for a long period of time.

And that certainly does not fit with either our current budgets or our current national security strategy, which barely mentioned Iran.

The third option would be the all-out bombing campaign, the president deciding, I'm just going to go for it.

I'm going to go down in history as the president who solved the Iran problem once and for all.

No American presidents dealt with these guys straight up and down since the 1979 revolution, and I'm just going to go do it.

And there are some like Lindsey Graham in Congress who are basically in the president's ear arguing that that's the right course to go take.

But that's expensive.

And the longer you are there, the higher the chances that you suffer some kind of significant casualties or that something goes wrong.

And one would hope that the president's advisers are at least laying out those options.

And frankly, Terry, that's what worries me about the shrinking of the National Security Council, because the NSC over history.

has been all about coming up with scenarios and options and laying out for the president what could go wrong, what are the worst case scenarios, so that you're thinking about them before you act rather than tripping into them.

I think the concerns about that are a little bit overblown.

That was certainly the concern after the October 7 attacks, right, and that there would be additional attacks that would take place that would bring in the Arab states and Iran.

I think the Arab states here are holding back.

They do not see an imminent threat from the Iranians.