How a once-resistant Trump decided to back Israel’s attacks on Iran

Graham applauded the Trump administration’s handling of the nuclear issue without people getting killed.

“Yeah, we’re trying," Trump said about the sputtering negotiations with Tehran. “But sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do," he said.

Graham took that remark to mean Trump was referring to the possibility of an Israeli strike on its longtime enemy.

The encounter came midway through a week that would see Trump go from trying to head off an Israeli attack to backing its sudden campaign of airstrikes targeting Iran’s nuclear facilities and senior military civilian leaders, an abrupt shift he executed after Israel spurned his appeal to delay its military operation.

Trump said Friday that he had been aware of Israel’s attack plans and argued that the punishing operation make a nuclear deal even more likely, though Iran said they were pulling out of a sixth round of talks scheduled for Sunday.

“They should have made a deal and they still can make a deal while they have something left—they still can," Trump told the Journal.

Trump had seemed far less optimistic earlier in the week.

On Sunday, he summoned his national security team to Camp David and told them during a discussion on the Middle East that he was increasingly pessimistic Tehran would agree to a deal, according to U.S. officials.

Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were due to speak the next day, and the president said he would tell the Israeli leader to delay any attacks until special envoy Steve Witkoff’s diplomatic effort had run its course, U.S. officials recounted.

In a letter to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in March, Trump had set a two-month time limit once talks got under way to reach a deal, a deadline that was due to expire this week. But Khamenei rejected a U.S. proposal to allow Iran to temporarily continue uranium enrichment in the country if it agreed to eventually halt its domestic centrifuge operation.

Always in the background was Netanyahu’s push to launch strikes against Iran’s nuclear sites, a threat that loomed ever larger.

In a call Monday with Netanyahu, Trump said he wanted to see diplomacy with Tehran play out a little longer, according to U.S. officials. But even Trump was losing faith in his strategy.

Netanyahu raised his oft-expressed objection that Iran wouldn’t make the deal Trump wanted and that Israel needed to keep preparing strikes, the officials added.

Trump seemed to internalize the message.

“I’m getting more and more—less confident about it," he said of the prospects for a nuclear deal with Iran in a New York Post interview published Wednesday. “They seem to be delaying, and I think that is a shame, but I’m less confident now than I would have been a couple of months ago."

Netanyahu had been seeking to head off a U.S.-led negotiation with Iran over its nuclear program for years, arguing that only the destruction of its vast enrichment centrifuges and other facilities could guarantee Tehran wasn’t secretly developing a bomb.

The Israeli leader rejoiced when Trump in his first term tore up the 2015 nuclear deal brokered by then President Barack Obama, and he recoiled when Trump pushed for a tougher agreement during his second term in office.

U.S. intelligence agencies concluded in January that Israel was considering strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. The intelligence analysis concluded Israel would push Trump’s new team to back the assault, viewing the incoming president as more likely to join an attack than former President Joe Biden. The Israelis, according to the assessment, believed the window for halting Tehran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon was closing.

In a sign of mounting concern about an Israeli attack and Iranian response, the State Department on Wednesday ordered the departure of all nonessential personnel from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and authorized the departure of nonessential personnel and family members from Bahrain and Kuwait. At the same time, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth authorized the voluntary departure of military dependents from across the Middle East.

Army Gen. Erik Kurilla, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, canceled a congressional testimony scheduled for the next day and returned to Central Command’s headquarters in Tampa.

As anxiety grew in the Middle East and Washington, Trump was enjoying the performance of his favorite musical at the Kennedy Center, joined by Graham and other supporters.

When Trump and Netanyahu spoke again on Thursday, the Israeli leader told Trump that it was the last day of his 60-day timeline for Iran to make a deal. Israel could wait no longer, Netanyahu said, according to officials familiar with the call. Israel had to defend itself and enforce the deadline Trump himself had set.

Trump responded that the U.S. wouldn’t stand in the way, according to administration officials, but emphasized that the U.S. military wouldn’t assist with any offensive operations.

At the White House, Trump told reporters he wouldn’t describe an attack as imminent, “but it is something that could very well happen." While the U.S. and Iran were close to a deal, he claimed, Israeli strikes could “blow it."

Israel launched its operation as Trump was at a picnic Thursday evening on the White House grounds for members of Congress. He later joined Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Hegseth, and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and other senior officials in the Situation Room to monitor events.

Israel had acted unilaterally and the U.S. played no role in the attack, Rubio said in a statement that acknowledged Israel notified Washington before the operation began.

That was the only comment from the U.S. as the attack unfolded. Bombs struck and damaged a key Iranian nuclear facility at Natanz, and senior military leaders including Major Gen. Hossein Salami, commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, were killed.

In all, Iran claimed that Israel’s first attack killed 78 people and injured around 320 more in multiple waves of Israeli strikes. Netanyahu pledged that the operation would last for as long as necessary.

Trump, who began the week resistant to an assault on Iran, quickly embraced it as a successful campaign that could boost his diplomatic effort.

“Iran must make a deal, before there is nothing left," he posted on social media Friday, “and save what was once known as the Iranian Empire."

Write to Alexander Ward at alex.ward@wsj.com, Meridith McGraw at Meridith.McGraw@WSJ.com and Anat Peled at anat.peled@wsj.com