Donald Trump promised a safer and saner world while running for president last year. The world hasn’t cooperated. Trump famously said he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in a day, yet the war rages on with no end in sight.
He also vowed to end the bloodshed in Gaza, where Israel is trying to eradicate the Hamas terrorist group. Instead, that conflict has escalated into an all-out war between Israel and Iran, Hamas’s godfather, that could metastasize into the most tumultuous development in the Middle East since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Trump’s campaign bluster was silly, but now he faces the sort of complex predicament that can make or break presidents.
Israel’s attack on Iran comes as the Islamic theocracy appears to be on the threshold of developing nuclear weapons. Israel directly targeted Iran’s nuclear facilities in its opening salvo on June 13, along with other military targets. It also assassinated several leaders involved with Iran’s military and nuclear program.
Oil prices jumped, as they usually do when hostilities erupt in the Middle East. That may subside, given that Israel isn’t targeting Iranian oil facilities. But this Middle East war could get a lot worse and reverberate far from the region in ways that Trump’s untested foreign policy team may fail to appreciate.
Israel is now conducting a far more substantial campaign than the limited strikes it mounted against Iranian targets over the last two years. Iran, as expected, retaliated with a missile and drone barrage against Israel. More fireworks are likely.
Iran’s nuclear facilities are deep underground, and it could take days or weeks of repeated Israeli airstrikes to destroy them for good. “Israel is launching what appears to be a multi-stage operation,” Middle East expert Gregory Brew of the Eurasia Group wrote on June 12. “There will be more steps.” Trump says the United States didn’t participate in the Israeli strikes, but that doesn’t mean the US will be able to stay out of it.
Trump has already left fingerprints at the crime scene. During his first term, he canceled the Obama-era deal in which Iran agreed to halt its nuclear weapons program in exchange for sanctions relief. That deal was imperfect, but all of Iran’s recent progress on nuclear weapons came after Trump pulled out in 2018.
Trump has been trying to make a new deal with Iran, which Israel obviously felt wasn’t producing the desired results. Trump is now using the Israeli strikes to pressure Iran further. “There is still time to make this slaughter, with the next already planned attacks being even more brutal, come to an end,” he posted on social media on June 13.
“Iran must make a deal, before there is nothing left, and save what was once known as the Iranian Empire.”
