There is an ongoing heated debate about the positives and negatives of US President Donald Trump's new deal with Iran - a debate that will likely be resolved by whether a few major nuclear issues are properly resolved in the next several months.
But on Wednesday, Trump thrust himself into a major and unnecessary unforced error, actually proactively endorsing Iran keeping its ballistic missile program.
To understand why this statement was so much worse than anything else which has happened to date related to the deal, one needs to understand that the main reason Israel went to war in February of this year was not because of regime change (which was long shot), and not even because of the nuclear threat (which was already hammered in June 2025), but to get Tehran to back off an existential ballistic missile threat.
To clarify further, if the problem were just Iran having one or two missiles, as Trump seemed to be implying, there would be no problem.
Iran had 2,500-3,000 missiles for decades, and Israel was ready and able to defend against such an arsenal.
But in late 2024/early 2025, Iran learned how to hyper-speed up its ballistic missile production pace to 200-300 per month, something which could have gotten it to 4,000-6,000 missiles in 2026 and 8,000-10,000 missiles in 2027-2028.
Long before 2027, it appears that Iran would have hit a volume of missiles that Israel could not have defended sufficiently.
When Trump said that missiles can hit one target, but cannot destroy the world, he is either showing shocking ignorance or is trying to aggressively pull the curtain down over the public's eyes.
The power of an Iranian ballistic missile
Israelis saw up close that one Iranian ballistic missile - as opposed to a weak Hamas or Hezbollah rocket - can destroy eight homes at once, wound dozens of people, and damage hundreds of nearby residences with the shock wave.
Iran fired around 550 missiles at Israel with around a 90% shoot down rate, leading to around 50 getting through and dozens killed, thousands hospitalized, and close to 30,000 property damage claims.
Imagine if it fired 5,000 missiles and "only" 10% got through, meaning 500 or 10 times what got through during this war.
Would Tel Aviv and Haifa be half-destroyed? Would thousands or tens of thousands be killed, and a much larger number wounded?
Preventing this is why Israel went to war in 2026.
Iran is down to 500-1,000 missiles right now and cannot rebuild in large numbers, probably for a couple of years - one of the biggest successes of the war.
And the Islamic Republic was never going to give away those 500-1,000 missiles, and it did not need to.
But there should have been a clear and unequivocal "opening the gates of hell" threat if Iran dared to try to cross a volume of missiles that would be more than Israel can handle.
Hopefully, at the negotiation table, Trump and his team will take a harder line on missiles, even if they do not remove them, by setting a cap.