President Donald Trump and top surrogates of his 2024 campaign — people like JD Vance and Tulsi Gabbard — said "America First" means sidestepping the quicksand of foreign intervention and stanching the flow of Americans' blood and money to faraway conflicts in which they have no obvious stake. Or did it actually signify a Great Power willing to exert influence for itself and its ally Israel by dispensing with all-but-imaginary international law and the pearl clutching of academics and middle powers about a rules-based international order?

Prescribing what to think about the U.S.-Israel mission would violate our own. But you should have all the facts.

Some may dispute the choice to begin this timeline in February 2025, rather than in 2024 when the Department of Justice revealed a plot by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to assassinate Trump; or in 2018, when the first Trump administration ripped up the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA); or in 490 BC, when the Persians battled the Athenians. But every timeline must have some discrete start date, and ours was chosen for simple practicality. Trump's announcement of the death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei provides the other bookend. – Emily Kopp, Editor-In-Chief

MAXIMUM PRESSURE: February 5, 2025 – June 12, 2025

February 5, 2025

President Donald Trump signs a National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM) to put "maximum pressure on Iran" by imposing sanctions without exception and aiming to choke off its oil exports to zero. Iran's oil exports had reached $53 billion in 2023.

The U.S. articulated its terms, which reached beyond nuclear ambitions: "Iran should be denied a nuclear weapon and intercontinental ballistic missiles; Iran's terrorist network should be neutralized; and Iran's aggressive development of missiles, as well as other asymmetric and conventional weapons capabilities, should be countered."

March 2025

Israeli intelligence teams begin working to create an Iranian target bank based on "centers of gravity," including Iranian firepower, air superiority, nuclear developments, personnel buildup, economy, governance, and the military industry. The preparations were compartmentalized, and some top generals reportedly were unaware of it. IDF officials had previously accelerated plans for a campaign against the Islamic Republic in Oct. 2024.

March 26, 2025

Gabbard, newly confirmed as director of the U.S. intelligence community, briefs Congress on an annual threat assessment mostly informed by intelligence products authored by the Biden administration.

"The IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khomeini has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003," she said, while adding that, "in the past year, we've seen an erosion of a decades long taboo in Iran on discussing nuclear weapons in public, likely emboldening nuclear weapons advocates within Iran's decision-making apparatus."