President Trump announced that the US had bombed three Iranian nuclear sites. Then he messaged that “now is the time for peace.” No, it is time for war. No negotiating, just giving Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu precisely what he wanted — the bunker-busting bombs that the Israeli leader had been dreaming of being used. Trump now is co-owner of a war that can only end badly for all sides.
Let’s step back a few days. Prior to the US air assault, the mass media was fixed on military strategy in the Israel-Iran war. Diplomacy took a back seat. Iran insisted it would not enter talks until Israel stopped its attacks. Israeli officials said they would not stop attacking Iran until all its objectives had been achieved. The IDF command told Israelis to prepare for a long struggle. At the UN, Secretary General Antonio Guterres said: “The expansion of this conflict could ignite a fire that no one can control. We must not let that happen.”
And in Washington, Trump sat and waited, watching the war unfold and unwilling to offer any plan for stopping it even temporarily. Instead, he ordered B-2 bombers to the Middle East. We all assumed their purpose was to coax Iran back to the negotiating table. But that assessment was wrong.
In normal times, we would expect that the world’s most powerful country, with important economic and political interests in an overseas war, would step up to the plate with incentives for the warring parties to stop fighting and start talking. But the Trump administration has eviscerated the state department, has amateurs in charge of diplomacy, and consequently has a high diplomatic fail rate.
Trump hasn’t been able to get Russia to accept even a 30-day cease-fire with Ukraine, much less peace talks. Trump has not secured a trade deal with China despite the “framework” consensus reached in London. And he dismissed a European Union effort to broker talks between Tehran and Tel Aviv. Talking with Iran never aimed at an equitable agreement.
Having failed at Iran regime change in his first term, Trump now is only interested in securing Iran’s surrender. If his interest were peace, he would have at least called for a cease-fire and de-escalation of the fighting. Instead, Trump bombed Iran and then warned it not to retaliate; if it did, he said Iran would face force “far greater than what was witnessed tonight.” Quite a peace message.
I had thought Trump would not want to get the US directly involved in this war. I thought he would fear that if the US became a combatant, his presidency would be destroyed. Direct US involvement would mean combat deaths, entanglement in Iran’s post-Khomeini politics, Iran’s retaliation and a potential wider war, deep fissures in the MAGA camp, and further disruption of Trump’s economic plans.
US involvement might also risk confrontation with Russia and, conceivably, a nuclear confrontation. Trump would be handing the Democrats a major election slogan — “He took us into war” — even though some Democrats in Congress favor Israel’s war.
Yet in the end, Trump evidently listened to Republican hawks like Marco Rubio and Sen. Lindsay Graham. Perhaps he thinks that having “completely obliterated” Iran’s nuclear facilities, Iran will come begging for peace. But as we all know, war brings many imponderables.
The best-laid plans disintegrate in the fog of war. One shot is rarely if ever decisive. Iran might still have the capability to produce a nuclear weapon — and even more incentive now to do so.
Nearly buried in Trump’s decision is the constitutional issue. The Democrats, and the relevant Congressional committees, were not consulted ahead of time. As has happened so often in the past, Congress’s power to declare war was ignored. Nor has the 60-day clock under the War Powers Act been started. The administration’s disdain for constitutional procedures is once again in evidence, as is the Democrats’ impotence.
In a war in which one side is trying to fend off annihilation and the other side is committed to just that end, diplomacy is exceptionally difficult. Added to the difficulty is the absence of trust between Iran and the US, the only parties with any hope of finding common ground.
Prior to the US entry into the war, Iran’s foreign minister accused the US of bad faith, saying Washington pretended to be interested in a nuclear agreement but knew all along that Israel was preparing to attack. That accusation now seems to have merit.
Nevertheless, as the ayatollah faces the near-total destruction of his nuclear facilities and his military leadership, he might yet be amenable to a deal on nuclear enrichment. But he will have virtually no leverage.
Robert Malley, who participated in negotiating the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, suggests that Iran might agree to “‘voluntarily’ and ‘temporarily’ stop enriching uranium, which is much easier now that its enrichment capacity is a shadow of its former self.”
But it now may be too late to finesse the enrichment issue.
Trump’s war is just beginning.