The Morning EditionDonald Trump has accused Israel and Iran of already breaking a ceasefire, in a tirade against both sides as the US President left for a NATO summit in the Netherlands.
Meanwhile, multiple American media outlets are reporting Sunday’s bunker blitz did not destroy Iran’s three key nuclear sites.
So what’s next? And also, how did we get here in the first place?
Today, national environment editor and former US correspondent, Nick O’Malley on the series of events which left Iran dangerously exposed.
From the newsrooms of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. This is the morning Edition. I'm Chris Payne filling in for Samantha Sellinger Morris. It's Thursday, June twenty sixth. Donald Trump has accused Israel and Iran of already breaking the ceasefire that he broke it in a furious tirade against both countries as the President left for a NATO summit in the Netherlands. Meanwhile, multiple American media outlets are reporting that Sunday's bunker blitz did not in fact destroy Iran's three key nuclear sites. So what's next and also how do we get here in the first place? Today, National Environment editor and former US correspondent Nick O'Malley on the series of events which left Iran dangerously exposed. Nick, Iran and Israel have entered a ceasefire orchestrated by Donald Trump. Now, it's quite astonishing considering that just a few days ago, the US bombed three Iranian nucleus sites. So can you bring us up to speed?
Yeah, the US bombs those sites and then Iran struck back, which President Trump almost seemed welcome and suggests a little bit of theater going on there, and now we're in what you might call a shaky ceasefire.
President Trump says Israel and Iran have agreed to a complete and total ceasefire.
It was an announcement made the only way Donald Trump can the US President declaring peace in the Middle East on social media four days.
Of trading blows, hundreds of civilian casualties and America intervening with strikes of its olde. The US president has declared the war between Israel and Iraq will end within twenty four hours.
Trump, and that is extraordinary. It is extraordinary that the US and Israel in Iran have stepped back. But it doesn't really tell us much about the future. I mean, this is still a very very fragile situation. I think it'd only be a brave person who try and predict where we'll be in a month, in six months, or in two years, because nuclear weapons development programs are a long running programs, and this enmity between Israel and Iran and the US goes back decades.
So I just want to ask you about something you said there about the orchestrated nature. Suggests it was orchestrated just to step people back through the timeline of this Sunday Australian time, we get the news that the US has struck a ran Yep. Then in the early hours of Tuesday morning, we learn that Iran has actually retaliated by launching missiles at a US base in Qatar. Donald Trump responds quite quickly saying it's a very weak response, but then seems to almost thank Iran for the heads up and pivots straight into saying, now's the time for peace. What does does that say about the nature of this reprisal.
This was a strike, obviously not against the US in the US. It was, as everybody expected, a limited strike against US base in the region. And Trump's language seems to suggest either there was back channeling formally or informally, or that in this delicate dance, the various players are playing here. That was such a soft response that it signaled to the US, hey, we have to strike. You know, we're a regime. We have to stand up for it. We have to be seen to be standing up to the United States. But it was also signaling de escalation, and that is obviously the way Trump received it, And obviously Trump was then determined to broadcast that he was determined to suggest, Okay, I've done my thing. I've come in with my big stick. Now everyone can step back and Nick.
Can you tell us a little bit more about the timeline of the ceasefire. Trump obviously came out and said it's been agreed, and we didn't hear from Israel and Iran straight away. It was really quite an extraordinary day. Can you tell us a little bit more about how that played out?
Or Trump made his announcement and then he obviously emphasized it on social media, which is the way he speaks to the world. We don't know exactly what Iran and Israel knew at the time, just that this had been announced. And this is obviously the way Trump deals with the world. In domestic affairs, in foreign affairs, he makes pronouncements, he insists, sometimes completely falsely, sometimes correctly, that this is the way the world is. And now he is a man, obviously who wields an enormous amount of power, and the most amount of power at present, perhaps in this region. So therefore, if he is making that pronouncement, banging those heads together, well then maybe that power is real.
Now.
As I said, it didn't become clear until later in the day, who had agreed to what or when. Of course, Iran and Israel both did make announcements that yes, indeed we have agreed to the ceasefire. But then there were accusations from both sides that they had breached the ceasefire deal. This obviously annoyed Donald Trump. I think it's fair to say he exploded with rage overnight.
Tell us what happened, well, this is often the way ceasefires work. There are volleys of missiles or attacks or aggression at that cusp.
Moment is real now ordering the IDF to respond forcefully after claiming Iran violated their ceasefire agreement.
Really hits home the point of just how critical a moment we are in right now and how critical the coming hours are ahead to see if the ceasefire can in fact hold. It is so critical that President Trump has taken it upon himself to appeal to both sides to hold up their end of the deal. A short time ago, the president.
Now Donald Trump, he is keen for a few things. One thing is he wants to rule the roost at NASO. He is going there basically to order them to increase their defense spending domestic. He has a problem as well. His mugger base is split between hawks who wanted him to grasp this moment and seek to knock out Iran's nuclear capacity, and those led by Tucker Carlson, really the former Fox News host, who say no, that the history of the Marga movement is in isolationism. We shouldn't be getting engaged in any event. Trump He's fury is you.
Know, when I say, okay, now you have twelve hours, you don't go out in the first hour. It just drop everything you have on them. So I'm not happy with them. I'm not happy with Iran either.
He's obviously angry that this has happened, and he says, they don't, effie know what they're doing.
Well, we basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what they're doing. Do you understand that?
And then afterwards you get a response from the Israeli government saying, oh, yes, since since you received that message from Donald Trump, we have restrained our aggression. So obviously all the players here are lemons, at least at present, to be seen to be doing what Trump is ordering, to be stepping back from the brink now Iran doesn want to be seen to be doing that, but Israel certainly does. And Iran is playing ball so far.
Even for Donald Trump, seeing him use the F bomb like that, it was pretty extraordinary.
Right, Yeah, And you know, we perhaps shouldn't be shocked by this anymore. I think in his second administration, he's getting a lot looser than he used to be. We're seeing Donald Trump as he likes to be seen. I think he doesn't play by odd school rules. He is not a creature of DC. He speaks in this much so way. I think he kind of enjoys the looseness. I think he enjoys being able to speak like that to the world, unlike any other world leader.
Really, Nick, I want to ask you more about Iran's nuclear capabilities. That's essentially what triggered this twelve day war. When did Israel and the US identify this is a threat and how far back does this go?
I think it's worth going back a little way here to set the scene. Iran for a long time has been wanting to build a nuclear weapon. Nnyahu for a long time has been saying that cannot happen. We will not allow that to happen. In twenty fifteen, the Obama administration, in prolonged two negotiations led by John Kerry at the time, created this deal. It was going to be a deal which was made legal by the UN Security Council, but really was a deal led and negotiated by the United States that they would let in inspectors, that it would continue with the nuclear program. The world would pretend that we agreed this was a civilian program, though the world knew that it was not, and in return for limiting the amount of uranium that it processed and the purity to which it processed it, it would get relief from international sanctions. Trump gets in in his first term and sets about undoing everything the Obama administration had done, including this, and he abandons that deal. Fast forward to two thousand and twenty to twenty one, twenty two, when Trump is back in office. Iran has walked away from the deal. It is processing more and more uranium, but it is still a member of the UN's Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty, which means that the UN watchdog can still get into these facilities, and it is observing that the number of centrifuges that Iran is using to process uranium, has increased the amount of uranium material that it has processed to sixty percent, which is not quite weapons grade but just a step back. Has increased as well, in keeping with the fact that it's building more of these centrifugias and dispersed them across more than one side. And then in the past few months, the IEA says okay, now there's been a really steep uptick, and just last month it actually comes out and says, okay, now for the first time, Iran is in breach of its obligations under the UN treaty, and that is what gives net Yahoo the impetus to strike. Now, we don't exactly know how close it was to making a bomb. Netnyahu said within weeks or months, who has said that many many times, But the UN inspectors were ringing alarm bells. So that's where we were just before, in the cusp of this of this recent crisis.
We'll be right back, Nick. So we know that part of Iran's power and influence in the Middle East is through this network of proxies that it uses to fight its battles. You explored this in a piece recently, But how did Iran, and that network become so vulnerable in the past, say eighteen to twenty four months.
So you're right, short of a nuclear weapon. Its great deterrence was these proxies that almost ringed Israel. They were Hesbala north of Israel in Lebanon, they were Islamic g Had in the West Bank. They were Hamas in Gaza, they were the Sad regime in Syria. They were who Thys in Yemen. And then Hamas launches its massacre, its attack across the border from Gaza. Israel responds ferociously in this tragic ongoing war we see today now. In that period, what it did is it thoroughly degraded Hamas. It annihilated Hamas in Gaza, and then it launched these strikes against Hesbellah in Lebanon. You might remember the incredible attack that it launched against Hezbollah, which became known Grimly I suppose as Operation grim Beeper, when it smuggled in small explosive devices inside pages and knocked out fifteen hundred Hesbllah fighters that way, and it demonstrated that it had mastered its communications. The Huthi regime is it strikes out at shipping in the straits of Homes, and then the US leads an international effort to bomb that so it's degraded, and Assad's regime collapses in Syria. So all of a sudden, this network, over a period of a couple of years, this network of proxies across the region of Aram's proxies is thoroughly weakened. And that freed up net Yahoo to mount his attack, to take his attack to Iran far more directly.
Now, Netna, who had in the last few months been asking the US, asking Donald Trump for help, initially that wasn't coming. At what point did he decide to go this alone.
Look, there's been really strong reporting on this. It appears that Trump was determined not to get involved in another war. As I said mentioned earlier, it is part of the part of the DNA of the MARGA movement to extricate itself from long wars, particularly in the Middle East, and it is how he's defined his administration as being different to both Republican administrations in the past and democratic administrations. But Netna, who freed as he was, appears to have forced his hands, or at least NETNYA, who has decided to go it alone. Now when Netna Who launched his attacks on Iran, it was clear the world already knew that it did not have the weapons, It did not have the capacity to destroy those nuclear plants, particularly the deeply buried one at four Dah. Now he decided to pull the trigger and go. So reporting since then suggests that at first Trump was infuriated, but he was impressed by how effective the strike was going. And there is good reporting from his White House, from people from the White House, from people with good ties, particularly from the New York Times, that he was convinced when he saw how effective it appeared that attack was going, that he thought, okay, if I can get in there and I can launch these strikes, which he had done in his first regime, he had used a bunker buster before. He believed if he could get in there, make this one attack and get out cleanly, he could balance his own base, the hawks and the doves in his ear. There he could look as though he had struck a blow for peace in the Middle East, and he could not lose any skin. So it appears that that's when he decided, Okay, the United States will back Israel, at least to the extent of knocking out those deeply buried sites using B two aircraft and that bunker buster bombs.
So we knew that for Dow was this really challenging environment, this nuclear mountain, it was difficult to reach that only the US military apparently had the capability to knock it out. An expert you spoke to predicted that the US would get involved, they would strike. Indeed they did, but what do we know about how effective that strike was or not, and whether the uranium stockpiles are still there.
Well, even as Donald Trump was claiming that he had totally obliterated the Iranian nuclear program, we were hearing other people in his administration kind of stepping back. In the hours afterwards. You had, after he made that statement we have obliterated nuclear program, you had Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, say we have obliterated Iran's ambition to build nuclear weapons. It's a significant difference in wording. And then in that same press conference where Hegseth made that point, you had the Chairman of the Joint chiefs of Staff say, well, we haven't done battle damage assessments yet. They're difficult, they're complicated. Now it appears that first preliminary battle damage assessment has come in, and it appears that much as these things happened during the first Trump administration, it was promptly leaked. CNN and The New York Times have reported that, well, no, they don't believe with that preliminary assessment that those deep underground bunkers were destroyed. It could be that access to them was blocked. It could be that electricals going in and out of them were destroyed. We also, and you're just alluding to this in your question, we don't know that that four hundred kilograms of sixty percent enriched uranium was actually at the site. In fact, as we reported last week, spy satellites showed trucks, a fleet of trucks at that side in the days before the attack, which easily could have been moving four hundred kilograms worth of uranium, which in one description I read, could be moved in vehicles, in cars. Even so, there's all of that, and then, as I say, this assessment has come out saying well, no, it's not destroyed, it is degraded. One voice in that New York Times story saying, well, we think that it has forced out the capacity to the gap between around deciding to race for a weapon from three months to six months.
Okay, So this is where I ask you to try and predict the future of all this. We've got this ceasefire, albeit a shaky one. We have the US and Israel bo saying, look, we've achieved our objectives as they stand for now. However, we've got this report you've just talked to us about saying maybe those attacks weren't as active as you've been led to believe. Where does this leave us? What might happen next?
Now we get back to known and unknown unknowns. I'm afraid I can't see and I don't think any any credible analysts I have seen anywhere saying that we're at a stable piece. We know that the Iranian regime needs to protect itself, and it is clearly of the view that to protect itself it needs a nuclear weapon. It's clear that net Yahoo will not allow that to happen, and he's already shown a willingness to strike even without US support, at least in the presumption that he was going to get US support. He didn't have it, So those both of those things can't stand. We know Donald Trump will probably want to claim victory and keep out of it. But there appears to be no one suggesting that Iran's capacity to in the near term build a nuclear weapon has been destroyed. And as long as it hasn't been, and as long as that regime stands, then the enmity between those two nations and the US will continue, and the set of circumstances that brought us to this crisis remain locked in place. I read something a comment made by John Kerry, who for two years sat down with the Radiant negotiators to arrive at that original deal. So he probably, he and his team, probably the people in the West who know that regime and its determination as well as any and he said, overnight, you cannot bomb away the memory of how to make a bomb. You can't bomb away the knowledge that they have developed. And I find that pretty chilling.
Nick.
I feel like I've said this before on this podcast, that this situation is complicated, it's fast moving. We really appreciate your reporting on this, and we appreciate you joining us on the Morning Edition.
Oh thank you for having me anytime.
Today's episode of the Morning Edition was produced by Julia Carr Katzel and Chi Wong Our executive producer is Tommy Mills. Tom Kendrick is our head of audio. To listen to our episodes as soon as they drop, follow the Morning Edition on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Our newsrooms are powered by subscriptions, so to support independent journalism, visit the AGESMH dot com, dot au, forward Slash subscribe, and to stay up to date, sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter to receive a summary of the day's most important news in your inbox every morning. Links are in the show notes. I'm Chris Paine. This is the Morning Edition. Thanks for listening.
