Editor's Note: (Samantha Vinograd is a CNN national security analyst. She is a senior adviser at the University of Delaware's Biden Institute, which is not affiliated with the Biden campaign. Vinograd served on President Barack Obama's National Security Council from 2009 to 2013 and at the Treasury Department under President George W. Bush. Follow her @sam_vinograd. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion articles on CNN.)
(CNN) While US news feeds are dominated by unspeakable tragedies and trivial Trump pursuits, a series of events unfolding in Iran warrants close attention.
Over the last few weeks, as the world has grappled with the Covid-19 pandemic, multiple explosions and fires have occurred at Iranian nuclear military and industrial facilities.
Alleged cyberattacks have targeted other sites in Iran — including a port — and standoffs with Iran are happening in other theaters, including at sea.
Some analysts suspect the United States and its ally Israel, which have reportedly carried out cyberattacks against Iran before, may have played a role in these recent explosions. Unsurprisingly, neither country has publicly taken responsibility, but a New York Times report cites a Middle Eastern intelligence official claiming this month's explosion at Iran's Natanz nuclear complex was caused by an explosive planted by Israel.
Whoever might be responsible, these incidents serve as an important reminder that Iran's ongoing nuclear and military activities are deeply dangerous for US national security.
Almost four years into his term, President Donald Trump has expressly failed to mitigate the threats from Iran. Instead, he's exacerbated them.
Even if the recent explosion at Natanz did in fact set back Iran's nuclear program, Iran is still closer to a nuclear weapon than when Trump took office.
After the President withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA) and reinstated crippling sanctions on Iran in 2018, Iran proceeded to restart a range of nuclear activities that it had curtailed or slowed when all parties were abiding by the deal.
Iran has, for example, reportedly increased its stockpile of enriched uranium significantly and increased the number of machines used to enrich uranium. After blowing through JCPOA-related safeguards, analysis indicates that Iran has now halved the time it would take to breakout to a nuclear weapon.
With this threatening reality facing the administration, there are only so many tools in the tool kit to address the possibility of an increasingly dangerous and nuclear-armed Iran. Finding a diplomatic off-ramp is the obvious choice, but the administration shot itself in the foot on that front two years ago.
By withdrawing from the nuclear deal — despite the fact that Iran was meeting its commitments — the administration painted itself as an unreliable party. If another deal were on the table, Tehran would have good reason to doubt whether the administration would abide by it.
Second, the administration adopted unrealistic prerequisites for a new deal. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo laid out an onerous set of 12 steps that Iran would have to meet for the administration to lift sanctions and establish full diplomatic and commercial relations with Tehran.
With diplomacy more of a pipe dream than an achievable goal, economic pressure has been a weapon of choice for Trump. President Barack Obama — as well as many other foreign leaders — used sanctions to bring Iran to the negotiating table in the run-up to the JCPOA.
President Trump has doubled down on that approach by implementing severe sanctions on Iran targeting key sectors, businesses and regime officials.
While employing economic tools, Trump has used US military assets to pursue his agenda against Iran, including military force. Trump authorized a targeted attack that killed the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander Qasem Soleimani in January — a move that an Iranian ambassador warned was tantamount to starting a war.
The administration has also utilized various covert action capabilities. In June 2019, Trump reportedly ordered a successful cyberattack against an IRGC database after saying he'd called off imminent air strikes. The goal of the attack was said to be to prevent IRGC attacks on oil tankers.
The new allegations that the US and potentially Israel are using covert programs to sabotage Iranian nuclear and military facilities seem to be an escalation on this front. Earlier this month, an explosion rocked a building used to assemble machines for uranium enrichment at the Natanz industrial complex.
Natanz was reportedly the target of a previous US covert action program — codenamed Olympic Games — during the Obama administration. As the New York Times reported, the attack "temporarily took out nearly 1,000 of the 5,000 centrifuges Iran had spinning at the time to purify uranium."
In late June, an explosion occurred at an Iranian missile facility, which Iran falsely claimed occurred at a different facility. (Iran said it was a gas explosion.) US and Israeli officials denied involvement in that incident. Another explosion hit a power plant and shortly thereafter a chlorine gas leak made a number of people sick in southeast Iran.
And that's just within Iran — there have also been ongoing strikes against Iranian sites outside the country too, including against a senior Iranian official in Syria, and against Iranian-backed militias in Iraq.
There is no evidence that the explosions are linked, but they are leading analysts to suggest that they may have been acts of sabotage designed to slow down Iran's nuclear and military activities.
While denying involvement in these recent blasts, Israel has acknowledged involvement in previous covert action operations. In 2018, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly acknowledged one such operation that resulted in Israel retrieving an archive of information on Iran's nuclear activity.
The specific impact of the Natanz explosion on Iran's nuclear program is not crystal clear, but there is a real risk that, in light of these alleged sabotage attacks, Iran could take its nuclear activities underground to protect itself from more attacks going forward. That would make it harder to monitor Iran's activities and, if necessary, to disrupt them.
So, when it comes to Iran, the question that everyone should be asking President Trump is quite simply: Where are you going? Using the tools in the diplomatic tool kit should be a means — namely the implementation of a well-informed strategy — to restart negotiations and to mitigate Iranian threats overall.
Instead, what these latest incidents expose is what appears to be a President blindly authorizing operations without having any end game.
In 2018, Pompeo called the JCPOA a "loser" bet that didn't pay off for the Obama administration. Now, two years later, it's abundantly clear that Trump's a loser when it comes to constraining nuclear activity — whether it's in Iran, North Korea, Russia or China.
Absent a U-turn in the US approach, implemented by a potential change of president if former Vice President Joe Biden wins the election in November, the US may be careening toward disaster by continuing to toss matches into a volatile region.
And we shouldn't be surprised when it starts a raging fire.