President Donald Trump’s decision Saturday to strike Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities was an extraordinary bet that he could eliminate a nuclear program that has bedeviled multiple presidents while avoiding another long-running Middle East conflict of the sort he and his supporters have long denounced. What happens next will have profound consequences for his presidency. If Iran is sufficiently weakened that it cannot meaningfully retaliate, Trump will have delivered a blow against a longtime adversary that will send a message to China, Russia and other global rivals that he will not shy from using military power when necessary.

But if Iran does not agree to peace on Trump’s terms, the president’s vow that “there are many targets left” opened the door to a much deeper and potentially longer conflict. Already, that prospect is angering some members of his political base.

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Trump’s decision to strike Iran marked an extraordinary turnabout for a president who built his power a decade ago in part on his rejection of the Iraq War. He denounced former President George W. Bush for that war and promised not to drain U.S. coffers for foreign entanglements that cost American lives and, he argued, delivered little to advance U.S. interests. In recent months, Trump appeared so focused on a diplomatic effort with Tehran that he unsettled Iran hawks in his own party.

That came to an end on Saturday, with a long-range and stealthy strike that used one of the most powerful conventional bombs in the U.S. arsenal against Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities, which are buried deep underneath mountains.

In a three-minute address from the White House Saturday night, Trump declared the operation “a spectacular military success.”

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“Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated,” he said.

He gave no indication that he had deployed troops on the ground.

Flanked by Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Trump delivered a clear threat to Iran: “There will be either peace or there will be tragedy for Iran, far greater than we have witnessed over the last eight days,” he said. warning that the United States could still go far deeper down the road of war.

“There are many targets left,” he added. “If peace does not come quickly, we will go after those other targets with precision, speed and skill.”

But Iran has twice the population of Iraq, with a and whose government that for decades has shown an ability to project power far beyond its borders. Should Iran hit back against U.S. troops or citizens, the conflict could quickly escalate — one of the reasons that no U.S. president prior to Trump has attempted a military strike against Iran’s nuclear program.

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“This was a massive gamble by President Trump, and nobody knows yet whether it will pay off,” said Sen. Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island), the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee.

Former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden confronted similar dilemmas with Iran and made a different calculation than Trump, though neither faced a Tehran that was quite as weak as it is now, in the aftermath of the collapse of its proxies in Syria, Lebanon and Gaza. Rather than strikes, those presidents sought a diplomatic pathway to limit Iran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon, fearing the possibility of getting sucked into a conflict they did not desire.

Although Trump said the military strikes were intended to push Iran toward a deal on U.S. terms, some analysts warned that Tehran was unlikely to capitulate under duress.

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“The U.S. is at a high risk of being drawn into yet another regime-change war that could mire the U.S. in the Middle East for decades more,” Rosemary Kelanic, the director of the Middle East program at Defense Priorities, a D.C.-based think tank that advocates for a more restrained approach to U.S. military engagements, said in an email.

If Iran retaliates, “the loss of U.S. lives will only make the drums of regime-change war louder,” she said.

If Iran retains enough of its enrichment capability and stockpile of uranium, the U.S. attack could also cause its government to activate efforts to build a nuclear bomb. It has not done that so far, according to U.S. intelligence agencies.

Public rejection of U.S. war-making in the Mideast played a major role in Trump’s rise to power. Trump’s 2016 Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, voted to authorize former president George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq when she was a senator.

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Vance enlisted in that war and returned from deployment deeply disillusioned.

Yet over the course of just nine days since Israel’s initial strikes on Iran, Trump has taken the first steps toward involvement in a similar conflict — and will now need to show he has a better approach than the leaders he once criticized.

Vance, meanwhile, stood behind Trump on Saturday night, hands clasped and brow furrowed, as the president declared success in the bombing effort.

This spring, Trump dispatched his friend and envoy Steve Witkoff to try to make a deal with Iran’s leaders— upsetting and upstaging Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during an April visit in the Oval Office.

But Netanyahu’s 20-month campaign in Gaza and against Iranian proxies across the region degraded Tehran’s strength to its lowest in generations, and on Saturday, it appeared that the Israeli leader had finally succeeded in convincing Trump to join his battle against Iran.

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The Trump administration let the Israeli government know about the strike ahead of time, a senior White House official said Saturday, speaking on condition of anonymity to speak frankly about internal discussions. Trump and Netanyahu spoke after the strike, the official said. In his speech, Trump referred to the U.S. and Israel as a “team.”

Netanyahu returned the favor. “History will record that President Trump acted to deny the world’s most dangerous regime the world’s most dangerous weapons,” the Israeli leader said early Sunday. “His leadership today has created a pivot of history that can help lead the Middle East and beyond to a future of prosperity and peace.”

Among the most vocal members of Trump’s base, reactions to the strike ranged from concerned supporters giving Trump the benefit of the doubt to others saying Trump had made a grave mistake. The attacks forced some of the president’s supporters, including those who have praised his commitment to avoiding wars in the Middle East, to acknowledge that Trump may have now entered one.

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Top MAGA commentators Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk — both of whom have loudly cautioned against going to war with Iran, and who each privately met with Trump at the White House this week — went live throughout the evening Saturday and sought to gauge their followers’ reactions.

“There are a lot of MAGA that are not happy about this. I’ll just be blunt, we can tell this in the chats right now,” Bannon said, referring to the live trail of comments that angry Trump supporters were leaving on conservative streaming platforms.

“A lot in the chats are saying, ‘Hey, I hear ya, but you know you promised you wouldn’t do this.”

Bannon, like Kirk, urged his followers to give Trump time to make his case — and prove that there won’t be long-term negative fallout for America.

“An interesting talk — I’m not quite sure the talk that MAGA wanted to hear,” Bannon said after Trump’s brief remarks, which he described as “very open-ended.”

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Bannon said the day would go down in history as one where the United States “enters as a combatant in the war between Israel and Persia.”

Kirk said he still trusted Trump’s instincts, calling his track record “phenomenal” and citing Trump’s previous tactical decisions, including authorizing the killing of Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani. Trump had exhausted all of the diplomatic channels, but noted that the situation could end much differently than officials intended.

“When you enter situations like this they can escalate,” Kirk told his listeners Saturday night. “Did this actually take out Iran’s nuclear program completely? We don’t know.“

Kirk questioned “how many Americans might get caught in the crosshairs in response,” and he blasted those Republicans celebrating the bombs being dropped, saying “When you do it, you should not get a thrill up your leg.”

A U.S. official familiar with the operation said the attack included not only B-2 bombers, as widely anticipated, but other aircraft including fighter jets. Numerous 30,000-pound, bunker-busting bombs known in the Air Force as Massive Ordnance Penetrators were dropped, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

All acknowledged that Trump could face backlash with some of his youngest supporters.

“Gen Z very are much saying, ‘Why are we putting another country ahead when we have problems here?’” said Jack Posobiec, another influential right-wing commentator.

Trump, however, has always displayed contradictory feelings about military power. Although he has repeatedly announced his desire to win a Nobel Peace Price and said that he wants to end wars, not start them, he has engaged in a level of martial display in recent days that most recent U.S. presidents have avoided.

Just a week ago, he beamed as he watched a massive U.S. army parade through the center of Washington to commemorate the Army’s 250th anniversary. (It was also Trump’s 79th birthday.) Days before that, he deployed Marines and the National Guard to California to combat protests against roundups of immigrants there.

“There’s no military in the world that could have done what we did tonight,” Trump said Saturday. “Not even close.”