Iran’s flex of long-range ballistic missiles vindicates Trump, may change European calculus

With Iran’s launch of two long-range missiles on Friday, putting nearly all of Europe in striking distance, the regime showed that it possesses a capability that President Donald Trump previously cited as a key justification for the U.S. conflict with the Islamic Republic after years of denying it publicly. Iran fired the intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) at the joint U.S.-U.K. airbase on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, more than 2,000 miles from Tehran, on the same day that the British government gave the United States the green light to use the facility to launch strikes on Iran.

"It could probably hit Paris, maybe London," security expert says
Neither missile struck the base. One failed in flight and a U.S. warship fired an interceptor missile at the other, though the U.S. military did not say whether the interception was successful.
“This whole conflict changed when Iran fired intermediate-range ballistic missiles at Diego Garcia, proving that it could probably hit Paris, maybe London,” Fred Fleitz, former Chief of Staff of Trump’s National Security Council during the president’s first term, told the John Solomon Reports podcast on Monday.
Besides its nuclear program, Iran’s conventional missile program was one of the primary motivations for the Trump administration’s decision to strike Iran earlier this year. In his State of the Union Address just days before the military action, the president told Congress that the regime is developing missiles that would one day be able to reach the United States. “They’ve already developed missiles that can threaten Europe and our bases overseas, and they’re working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America,” Trump said in February. “They were warned to make no future attempts to rebuild their weapons program, in particular nuclear weapons.”
Though U.S. intelligence assessments show that Iran is about nine years away from developing a missile that could reach the United States, officials allege that Tehran’s growing space program provided the vector for achieving such a breakthrough.
Before the ballistic missile launch targeting Diego Garcia on Friday, Iranian leaders claimed their arsenal was limited in range and primarily for the purpose of deterring other countries rather than strikes abroad. In an interview with NBC News earlier this month, the regime's Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said that Iran had intentionally limited the range of its ballistic missiles to below 1,250 miles “because we don’t want to be felt as a threat by anybody else in the world.”
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