PresidentDonald Trumpis desperate not to fight a war with Iran.
But can he really avoid it?
Compelling national security arguments and domestic political considerations mean it makes sense to stop short of direct US offensive operations in thelong-dreaded conflictthat Israel describes as a matter of preserving its own existence.
But powerful forces could suck America deeper into the conflict than its current role in helping to shield Israel from Iran’s deadly rain of missiles and drones.
CNN reportedthat over the weekend, Trump rejected an Israeli plan to kill Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, according to two sources.
But some of this is out of Trump’s hands.
ShouldIran’s battered regimedecide it has nothing to lose and attack US bases and personnel in the region, or US targets across the globe, Washington will be forced to respond hard to preserve credibility and deterrence. Another possibility is that Tehran could create duress on Trump to rein in Israel by attacking international shipping in the Gulf or Red Sea and bring on a global energy crisis.
Pressure is also mounting on Trump from inside his own party for action that only the United States could carry out — a mission to destroyIran’s subterranean site at Fordow, which is believed to be beyond Israel’s airborne capabilities. The logic of such a strike would be that Iran is now uniquely vulnerable, and a better chance may never come for the US to destroy the possibility of an Iranian nuclear weapon.
CNN’s White House team has reported thatthe president is deeply skepticalabout throwing the United States into the fray. Such a move would be fraught with danger. It could lead to the expansion of the conflict beyond its current belligerents and lead to a grueling open-ended war with no clear endgame.
If there is one lesson from the early 21st century, it’s that war objectives and analyses of the Middle East drawn up in Washington almost always turn out disastrously wrong. The idea that Iran’s brutal clerical regime could fall might be attractive. But the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the civil war in Syria show that Middle East nations can simply splinter when power vacuums open.
A US intervention would also widen deep strains in Trump’s political base and dismantle a core principle of his “America first” movement: that the United States should stay out of foreign quagmires after more than a decade of pain in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is only a few weeks, after all, since the president set out a new vision for the Middle East and American involvement.
“The so-called nation-builders wrecked far more nations than they built — and the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves,” Trump said ina major speech in Saudi Arabiain May. “A new generation of leaders is transcending the ancient conflicts and tired divisions of the past and forging a future where the Middle East is defined by commerce, not chaos; where it exports technology, not terrorism; and where people of different nations, religions and creeds are building cities together — not bombing each other out of existence.”
A new American war is utterly incompatible with such a vision. Still, hawks in Washington might argue that Trump has a unique opportunity to remove the major impediment to his vision by eradicating Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon or even contributing to the toppling of its theocratic leadership.
Presidents have often written in their memoirs about momentous and agonizing choices to deploy troops in foreign wars. Sometimes, however, a decision not to rush in even when it appears tempting requires as much courage.
Dilemmas like the one now facing Trump typically come with negative outcomes either way.
Political heat is already mounting on the president to come off the sidelines even as the United States made clear that Israel’s decision to launch major attacks against Iran is its alone and that Washington’s forces have no offensive involvement.
One of the complicating factors for Trump is that while Israel’s attacks seem to have been successful in taking out top military leaders and nuclear scientists, it remains unclear whether Israel has the capacity to eradicate Iran’s nuclear program itself.
Former Vice President Mike Pence said on “State of the Union” Sunday that if Israel’s attack doesn’t somehow convince Iran to make major concessions in Trump’s diplomatic attempt to end its nuclear program, then the United States should be prepared to join the conflict.
“Now, if the Iranians want to stand down, I think the president’s made it clear he’s willing to enter into negotiations. But there can be no nuclear program of any kind, no enrichment program of any kind,” Pence told CNN’s Dana Bash. “And at the end of the day, if Israel needs our help to ensure that the Iranian nuclear program is destroyed once and for all, the United States of America needs to be prepared to do it, because this is about protecting our most cherished ally.”
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham argued the worst possible outcome of a conflict between Israel and Iran would be for Tehran’s nuclear capabilities — which it has long denied are designed to build a bomb — to remain.
“If diplomacy is not successful, and we are left with the option of force, I would urge President Trump to go all in to make sure that, when this operation is over, there’s nothing left standing in Iran regarding their nuclear program,” Graham, a key Trump ally, said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “If that means providing bombs, provide bombs. If that means flying with Israel, fly with Israel.”
These calculations are difficult enough. But Trump also faces a complex domestic political scenario that is the result of his own transformation of the GOP into a more isolationist party. This means he faces a different political scenario than the one before President George W. Bush when he went into Afghanistan and Iraq.
Some of the loudest voices on the right, includingTucker CarlsonandCharlie Kirk, have already warned Trump against fracturing trust with the MAGA base by diving into a new Middle East war. The president has always been extremely careful with his own complex coalition. He’s loath to take steps that annoy his voters. One example was his turnaround last week in halting deportation sweeps against agricultural workers — partly to avoid angering farmers and employers in the rural heartlands where he draws much of his support.
Trump’s preoccupation with the political costs was evident in a conversation with journalist Michael Scherer of The Atlantic on Sunday.
“Well, considering that I’m the one that developed ‘America first,’ and considering that the term wasn’t used until I came along, I think I’m the one that decides that,” Trump told Scherer. “For those people who say they want peace — you can’t have peace if Iran has a nuclear weapon. So for all of those wonderful people who don’t want to do anything about Iran having a nuclear weapon — that’s not peace.”
The president appeared to be rehearsing an argument for his base that he’d have to use if he joined Israeli action. It’s fascinating to watch him wrestling with a conundrum between national security arguments that would face any conventional American president and the sectors of the political movement that lifted him to power. He doesn’t seem absolutely convinced yet by his own argument, perhaps because, as Kirk pointed out, younger male voters who flocked to his reelection campaign last year do not want to join a “quagmire” in the Middle East.
This is hardly where Trump hoped to be early in his presidency — one reason he appeared so bullish even as recently as this month about his effort to force Iran to agree a deal to peacefully end its nuclear program.
Trump started his second term vowing to be a peacemaker.
But five months in, two major wars raging when he took office are worse and the dangerous new conflict with Iran promises the greatest test of “America first” restraint.
Trump’s authority has been flouted by three key leaders: Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And his “art of the deal” approach to foreign policy is a failure.
Putin has ignored Trump’s efforts to end the Ukraine war. Xi has twice forced the US leader to fold in their trade war. And Netanyahu’s decision to launch the conflict with Iran that American presidents have long sought to avoid appears to have scuttled Trump’s Iran diplomacy — and is based on a bet that no American president could afford not to defend Israel even if he differed with its decisions.
At home, presidents must create public trust for their decisions to go to war. Here, Trump may struggle since he’s alienated millions of people with his searing approach to affairs at home. This includes his decision to deploy the military in Californiaamid anti-ICE protestslast week and warnings he plans to use troops everywhere.
Trump’s second term has already belied the notion that the weight of his personality, supposed respect for him among foreign adversaries, and what aides see as an almost magical dealmaking ability would change the world. The promised rush of trade deals shaken loose by his tariffs, for example,has not materialized.
Trump’s first peacemaking foray — in Gaza — failed. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are nowfacing starvationas Israel’s pounding of the Strip, triggered by Hamas’ attacks in October 2023, continues.
The president’s effort to end the Ukraine war never went anywhere. The conflict widened. It spread into Russia with Ukrainian raids on Russian bases that prompted Putin to launch vicious attacks on civilians in Kyiv and elsewhere. The White House made it known that Trump was getting frustrated with the Russian leader andset a two-week deadlineto consider tougher sanctions on Moscow. But nothing revealed the risible nature of that spin and Trump’s biased attitude to the war more than hisexcitement on Saturdaythat Putin had called to wish him a happy birthday.
Events have overtaken Trump’s “American first” reticence to get involved abroad and exposed the shallowness of his statesmanship. Worsening crises may offer a preview of a world that becomes more volatile in the absence of steady and constant American leadership.
Trump’s increasingly brittle domestic political grounding and his already questionable authority internationally will only complicate his dilemmas. In many ways the Iran conflict is the kind of international crisis with no easy answers that he avoided in his first term.
Now it could define his second.