President Trump’s public statements, Israeli assessments, and the shifting of military assets are indicating America will soon join the Iran war and assist Israel in ending the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program and other military capabilities. 

Mr. Trump and members of his top security team convened at the Situation Room at the White House Tuesday after the president’s abrupt early exit from a meeting of world leaders in Canada on Monday. The military planners reportedly decided that joining Israel’s Operation Rising Lion, in an effort to hasten the war’s conclusion, is “on the table.” 

One target America could quickly hit is the nuclear facility at Fordow, near the holy city of Qom. The deeply dug facility at a mountain site is widely seen as the crown jewel of the efforts to end the Iranian nuclear aspirations, and sustained attacks there by the Israelis could take much longer than an American effort.  

“I think we’re headed towards military action,” the policy director at United Against Nuclear Iran, Jason Brodsky, tells the Sun. Until now, America’s participation in Operation Rising Lion has been mostly confined to supporting Israel by delivering arms, sharing intelligence, and helping intercept the hundreds of ballistic missiles the Islamic Republic has lobbed at Israel.

“We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social on Tuesday. His post echoed Israeli officials, who have made that statement repeatedly since Sunday. “Our planes have total freedom to fly in Iran,” the Israel Defense Forces’s spokesman, Effie Defrin, said Tuesday in a press briefing.

“Unconditional surrender!” Mr. Trump wrote over one of his multiple postings, which threatened to go after Iran’s top ayatollah, Ali Khamenei. “We know exactly where the so-called ‘supreme leader’ is hiding,” the president wrote. He is an “easy target, but we are not going to take him out (kill). At least not for now.”

As Mr. Trump is making public threats, American military assets are being dispatched to the region in an ever-faster clip. “I directed the deployment of additional capabilities” to the region, the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, said. The Nimitz air carrier is on its way to the Gulf, as are refueling ships and planes. In addition to B-52 bombers that are already stationed at Diego Garcia, B-2 stealth bombers are said to be ready to reach Iran quickly. 

The B-2 payload, the precision-guided 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator, is widely seen as a way to quicken the dismantling of Iran’s deepest-dug nuclear facility at Fordow. Israel doesn’t possess B-2s or such bombs, known as “bunker busters,” and a successful American utilization of them against Fordow could decide the war’s endgame. 

“The operation will not end before the facility at Fordow is hit,” Israel’s national security adviser, Tzachi Hanegbi, said, adding that “Israeli military plans include Fordow.”

Those plans reportedly include a sustained bombing with smaller ordnances than the American bunker busters. Israeli commandos could assist by conducting ground operations at the facility. A military official told the Sun that Israel could also use bombs to block access to the site, trapping anyone who is under the ground there and rendering it forever unusable. 

Yet, time is of the essence. The war is already taking its toll on Israeli civilians. American opposition to a “forever war” is likely to become increasingly vocal if Mr. Trump’s efforts in helping Israel take weeks or months. A decisive American blow to Fordow, in contrast, could hasten the war’s conclusion. 

On the first night of the Israeli operation, its planes hit Iran’s largest uranium enrichment facility, at Natanz. After initially underplaying the damage, the International Atomic Energy Agency now says the loss of electricity supply to the plant damaged its 15,000 enrichment centrifuges. “Our assessment is that with this sudden loss of external power, in great probability the centrifuges have been severely damaged if not destroyed altogether,” the agency director, Rafael Grossi, said Monday.  

Israel also went after Iran’s efforts to weaponize its stocks of enriched uranium. “While enrichment facilities often receive the most media coverage, Israel is carrying out a concerted campaign to lengthen the time Iran would need to build the nuclear weapon itself,” a former nuclear inspector who founded the Institute for Science and International Security, David Albright, writes on X.