Suzanne Maloney

It's something that I think the regime is leaning into at this point in time.

That's a really important point.

The Iranians want to ensure that they don't face yet another round of attacks.

One of the concerns that they have about a potentially preemptive end to this war is that it will just be the prelude to another set of strikes.

This is what they experienced in June of 2025.

And they were waiting for the next round.

They understood it was coming.

They studied the war in June, and they have studied how the United States has prosecuted its wars in other parts of the region, particularly in Iraq.

And so they were very much prepared this time.

And what they want to do is ensure that the pain level is high enough that the United States and the Israelis will be dissuaded from taking further action so that they can rebuild, so that they can reconsolidate their power again.

without the fear that there's just another set of strikes lurking around the corner.

I think we are still some ways away from ensuring that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon.

And that is simply because Iran still has the technical expertise and it still has potentially large quantities of highly enriched uranium, which would enable it to move quickly.

This current state of the war, this current round of strikes has done even more significant damage to Iran's nuclear infrastructure than was done during the June war.

And so it has compounded the technical challenge that the Iranians will have to reconstitute the program.

But as long as they have the expertise, as long as they have the potential fuel and they have the know-how to build the machines and create the infrastructure,

They can get there again.

And, you know, what we know is that Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader who was killed, was in fact one of the sources of some constraint on the decision to move forward or not with a weapons program.

Iran had a weapons program which it put on ice in 2003 after the U.S.

invasion of Iraq.