According to the American outlet CBS News, citing two informed sources, Donald Trump told Benjamin Netanyahu during their December meeting at Mar-a-Lago that if negotiations between Tehran and Washington failed to produce an agreement, the United States would support an Israeli attack on Iran’s ballistic-missile facilities. The report also refers to Trump’s subsequent remarks that if Iran were to rebuild its nuclear program or missile capacity, another military step by the US could also be considered. The significance of this news lies not only in its content but in its timing and coincidence with the new round of Iran-US negotiations in Geneva. Notably, highlighting the military option immediately before talks is not necessarily a sign of confidence.
In many cases, such behavior indicates doubt about the ability to reach a favorable agreement through diplomacy. When negotiation tools are effective, military threats are usually pushed to the margins, not elevated to headline status. From this perspective, the CBS report signals less the imminence of war than a dead end in the logic of pressure without cost.
The CBS report should be understood within the framework of “pre-negotiation messaging”, not as a declaration of a war decision. The leaking of such claims through a media channel, relying on unofficial sources, reflects a familiar pattern: applying pressure without accepting formal responsibility. In this model, the threat must appear real enough to influence the other side’s calculations, yet remain ambiguous enough to avoid legal and political costs for the decision-maker. The report’s focus on Iran’s missile program also carries strategic implications.
Unlike the nuclear file, which is defined within legal and negotiating frameworks, the missile sphere is deliberately portrayed as an open, rule-less domain so as to enable maximum pressure. This shift in the center of threat is in fact an attempt to redefine the negotiating agenda and add new components to the bargaining equation.
The key part of the story, however, lies in the hidden assumption behind the threat: that Israel could strike while the United States remained merely a “supporter”. Strategically, this assumption does not align with battlefield realities or the nature of modern warfare. Any effective attack on Iran’s strategic infrastructure — especially in the missile domain — would require a complex network of intelligence, logistics, weapons support, and defense coordination. Structurally, such a network cannot function without direct or indirect US involvement.
Under such circumstances, the distinction between an “attacking Israel” and a “supporting America” is more a media and legal construction than an operational reality. If the US participates in arming, intelligence guidance, logistics, and even defensive planning to manage possible retaliation, it is effectively part of the conflict — even if its forces do not pull the trigger directly. In strategic logic, participation means accepting risk, not merely offering political backing.
This is where the issue of “immunity” emerges as the central analytical knot. Washington’s implicit strategy in this narrative suggests it can generate military pressure through Israel without incurring the direct costs itself. In other words: attack with others’ hands, manage the crisis from afar, and remain shielded from retaliation. While this notion may be expressible at the media level, at the strategic level it is highly unrealistic.
Because in the event of conflict, the opposing side’s response is shaped by the reality of participation, not by media narratives. If the US plays a role in designing or supporting an operation, it will struggle to define itself as outside the response equation. This is not a declaration of targeting or an explicit threat, but rather a description of a simple rule of deterrence: an actor present in a war, even indirectly, cannot expect full immunity.
The CBS report should therefore be seen as part of a complex perceptual game in which Washington seeks both to keep the military option alive and to distance itself from its consequences. The strategic reality, however, is that once the threshold of conflict is crossed, such a separation will not hold. Low-cost proxy war is less a sustainable strategy than a calculative illusion — one that, if used as a basis for decision-making, could expand the crisis beyond what its designers anticipate.
NOURNEWS