SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
President Trump has indicated he will make a decision within the next two weeks as to whether to join Israel in attacking nuclear facilities in Iran. He's also left open the possibility of a diplomatic solution. Shashank Joshi is defense editor at The Economist - joins us from London. Thanks so much for being with us.
SHASHANK JOSHI: Good morning.
SIMON: What - we're now more than a week into that war. What's your assessment of where it stands?
JOSHI: Well, Israel has done enormous damage to Iran's conventional military forces, to its high command and to many of its nuclear sites. But in a way, the central question right now is over a place that it has not bombed, and that is something you will have been discussing, I'm sure, over previous days - the deeply buried underground enrichment facility in Fordo, which...
SIMON: Yeah.
JOSHI: ...Is near the city of Qom. And really, we are all waiting now to see whether or not the United States will intervene to use its strategic bombers, which may be the only forces capable of carrying the weight of munition necessary to cause lasting damage to the deeply buried caverns inside that mountain. There are B-2 bombers on the way. I think they're roughly heading towards the U.S. island of Guam at the moment. But that now is the focus of much of what is going to happen in the coming days.
SIMON: And how does that affect any strategic assessment that Israel makes at this particular point? I'm - they've, I guess, more or less said publicly they can't do it on their own, haven't they?
JOSHI: They suggested that. You would never count the Israelis out, given what you see from them in the past, which is remarkable resourcefulness when it comes to conducting attacks on their enemies, whether that's the pager attacks against Hezbollah last year or the use of drones smuggled into Iran at the outset of this conflict. And so I don't completely exclude the possibility they will still attempt a solo attack on Fordo, or even the insertion of ground forces, which is something that they did against Syria last autumn, you might recall, to destroy an underground missile production facility.
But from Israel's perspective, I think the other interesting concern here is what is their end game? Is it to simply inflict as much damage as possible on Iran's nuclear program? Is it to conduct damage to force the Iranians to accede to a new nuclear deal that will bind them in more stringent ways? Or - and I think, you know, one has to be open to this possibility given the rhetoric coming out of Israel's leadership at this stage - is it to change the regime in Iran, or at the very least destabilize it in a way that increases the likelihood of an uprising? And I think that that is a very real possibility at this point.
SIMON: That regime change would be a real possibility in Iran?
JOSHI: Well, absolutely. We saw the Israeli defense minister, Israel Katz, say just a day or so ago that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, must not be allowed to exist. We've also seen that he has authorized attacks on political regime targets. We are seeing attacks on the Iranian police, which, to me, has very little military utility in clearing the way for strikes against a nuclear program but has obvious utility if the aim is to destabilize the Iranian regime.
Now, it could be that all of this is simply designed to psychologically disorient the regime and make it more likely that they will accept a complete dismantlement of their nuclear program through the talks that began in Geneva this - in the last couple - yesterday. But it could quite easily also be the case that this is a bigger effort - regime change.
SIMON: In the 45 seconds we have left, could U.S. involvement at the same time simply make the regime in Iran more popular, or at least persuade Iranians it's a time to defend their nation?
JOSHI: I think it could. And just to be clear, there's no guarantee that a U.S. attack on Fordo completely puts the facility out of use in perpetuity. So there is an element here of a gamble.
SIMON: And how do you assess that two-week deadline? For real?
JOSHI: I'm not sure it is necessarily real. I think that if the talks look like they're collapsing - and they didn't go that well yesterday - there is every possibility that Donald Trump will choose to launch an attack well before that two-week deadline is out. So I would not take it completely literally.
SIMON: Shashank Joshi from The Economist. Thank you so much for being with us.
JOSHI: Thank you for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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