President Trump’s foreign policy decisions over the past week have been completely consistent with his repeated statements for years that Iran couldn’t get nuclear weapons — something the White House chose to re-emphasize overnight, pulling a litany of quotes all the way back to 2011. Yet the effect on a cadre of people, many of whom have built their media careers off of claiming to be Trump whisperers, has been a bizarre chain reaction: dire warnings that this represents the end of the MAGA movement, the end of Israel, not to mention the end of Trump’s presidency. Unsurprisingly, Trump responded by rebuking a ‘kooky’ Tucker Carlson on Iran — consistent with his message that he alone defines what America First means. But there is a definite split here, one that could potentially lose Trump some degree of support from his base. Three views on that topic below:
Neither Israel nor Iran can bring about regime change in its opponent through its current methods of war. Airpower is historically impotent in this regard, and while the Israelis are adept at assassinating enemy leaders—including Iranians—the hydra will regrow its head. Israel, meanwhile, can withstand Iran’s ballistic missiles, as long as they don’t have nuclear warheads. The blackest irony of the war is that it justifies each side’s reason for the conflict. Israelis seeing the missiles crash down upon them know that if they had nuclear payloads, their nation would not survive. Iranians, seeing their defenses easily penetrated by Israel and their offensive capability inadequate to deter their enemy, have reason to think only nuclear weapons would buy them security against this kind of attack.
America, meanwhile, has only an ideological stake in the conflict. Americans are ideologically pro-Israel. Our land and our population, however, are not augmented by getting into another Middle East war. Quite the contrary: our people suffer in these wars, not only because they wind up doing the fighting but because our leaders neglect their needs while focusing on foreign struggles. Even a successful war for Israel’s sake, not our own, will contribute to the decay of American institutions, whose root cause is the disconnect between the people’s needs and the interests of the elite. Involving Israel in this domestic national entropy by involving ourselves in Israel’s war will only infect the Israel-U.S. relationship with what is destroying the old authorities here at home. Americans will feel used by Israel, and by our own elites on behalf of a foreign interest. That feeling will not redound to Israel’s benefit in the long run.
The “regime change” that counts is internal, and we’re in the midst of it ourselves. Israel can’t afford to get mixed up in that internal upheaval. It would be a high price to pay for American bunker-busters.
A wide spectrum of elite Americans, opponents as well as supporters of involving ourselves in Israel’s war, believe that the United States will have no choice but to occupy Iran and replace its regime to bring the conflict to a conclusion (and/or to keep order in the region). This isn’t true: while President Trump may or may not be willing to add American air power to Israel’s already more-than-adequate air superiority, this is nothing like 2001 or 2003, when the shock of 9/11 gave President Bush the political capital to launch land wars and occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Trump saw how those wars turned out for Bush and for America.
He isn’t going to repeat his predecessors’ folly, and the country isn’t going to follow a leader who tries. An American occupation of Iran would be another futile endeavor—occupying someone else’s land for merely abstract, ideological aims, which is precisely what leads us to lose wars over and over again. The alternative, in the worst case, might be a regional war, potentially one with Russian and even Chinese involvement (though I doubt it—the Chinese usually steer clear of such traps), but the horror of such a mess wouldn’t make it any more meaningful for ordinary Americans, who now rightly prioritize our people and our land. The ideological utopias and nightmares that consume the minds of our too-well-educated elites, antiwar as well as interventionist, are simply irrelevant to the public’s experience. And that experience in almost all our wars, and every recent one, has been demoralizing and destabilizing.
Despite numerous claims that Trump would intervene to end the conflict diplomatically, it appears that he is upping the ante. He and Netanyahu are not aiming for a modus vivendi with a defanged Iran but for something that Trump has for over a decade campaigned against in the Middle East: regime change. What was once out is now in.
What gives? As ever with the morally flexible Trump, he is biased in favor of success. Now that Israel’s assault on Iran appears to be successful, Trump wants in on the action. NBC News is reporting that Trump has instructed the White House National Security Council to be prepared to meet him in the situation room upon his early return from the G7 meeting.
So far, Trump has provided Israel with vital assistance in helping to impede Iranian ballistic missiles from striking Israel. But the big question is whether it really will be “bombs away,” as the hawks are advocating, or whether Trump will stay on the sidelines. It would be no small irony if Trump were to bury the Iraq syndrome by unleashing American B-52s to launch bunker-busting bombs to demolish Iran’s nuclear site Fordow. Trump has never hesitated to go big in the past, as when he decided to eliminate the Iranian General Qasem Soleimani. My belief is that Trump will approve an American bombing campaign targeting Fordow. After he does, the die will be cast and his administration, as Steve Bannon is warning. Trump’s stock will rise or fall on the outcome of his decision.
Iran entered Israel’s 10/7 Long War directly on April 13, 2024, and again on October 1 of that year by firing hundreds of missiles and bombs of all types via many attempted delivery mechanisms at the civilian population of Israel. The Israeli Defense Forces ("IDF"), with the assistance of the United States and other allies of the Jewish State, intercepted those two waves of attacks, and Israel absorbed some damage and loss of life and others injured. Israel responded with small but very precise counter-attacks that damaged Iran’s air defenses and which sent a message about Israel’s capabilities. President Biden and his team worked to restrain Israel from additional escalation on both occasions.
After 10/7, as Israel reeled, Iran began a rush to weaponize its enriched uranium into a nuclear weapon. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave the order to advance to active planning of this past weekend’s strikes, shortly after President Trump’s sweeping victory in November and days before the capitulation of Hezbollah to Israel in the Lebanon theater of the 10/7 Long War in the same week of Trump’s triumph.
But Netanyahu still needed at least tacit approval from President Trump, which he received after the expiration of the 60-day window which Trump had given the Iranian theocracy to engage in serious negotiations over the dismantling of its nuclear weapons program.
Iran tried to play the president and that was a mistake of historic proportions. Now stories are flying about Iran’s desperate attempt to get the U.S. to stop Israel’s pummeling of the theocratic dictatorship which has ruled Iran since 1979 under first Ayatollah Khomeini and now Ayatollah Khamenei. Those two dictators are responsible for all the ruin Iran is experiencing now and for the past 46 years. Now the aging and obviously incompetent fanatic Khamenei has been allowed to survive to see the destruction of his madness. He may not live to see the overthrow of the regime, but he might. Because Donald Trump told him what he had to do and he not only rejected it, he repeatedly mocked Trump and threatened the U.S.
Khamenei spent decades and billions building "proxy forces" in Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria’s Assad regime, the Houthis in Yemen and some militias in Iraq in a vain attempt to intimidate Israel and thus prevent its striking Iran’s nuclear facilities openly.
Khameini is also suspected of trying to assassinate Trump and other American officials after Trump ordered the elimination of General Qasem Soleimani when this mastermind of Iran’s international terror network landed in Iraq on January 3, 2020 on a mission to kill more Americans. (The Islamic Republic of Iran is directly responsible for the killing, wounding and hostage-taking of thousands of Americans since Khomeini overthrew the Shah of Iran in 1979.)
In five months Trump has moved the United States from telling Israel "don’t attack Rafah" in Gaza, to "go ahead, strike Iran. They refuse to negotiate in good faith." Netanyahu didn’t or need or ask a second time. And, for the first time in the many times Netanyahu has asked for the support of Israel’s military leadership for the strikes, the IDF agreed: Rise up and strike.
All this time Trump has maintained a "masterful ambiguity" about his role. It is remarkable and unprecedented.
“If there is any one thing I have learned in the past couple of centuries, it’s this: These things pass. Wars and depressions and Prophets and Covenants—they pass. The trick is to stay alive through them.”
