As the smoke rises above Iran and Israel after waves of Israeli airstrikes and Iranian retaliation, only one thing is immediately clear: President Donald Trump owns this war and Americans will likely be stuck with the tab, and it may well be a very big one.
The president spoke about ending endless wars in the Middle East during his campaign and in office. He bragged about his unique ability to make peace and how wars would never have happened on his watch. He talked about putting America first. If this were believable until last week, it all evaporated into thin air as Israeli jets streaked across Iran’s skies. The seeds of Trump’s disastrous policy shift, from opposing to leaning toward joining Israel’s war on Iran, date to Trump’s first term, when he rashly withdrew from President Barack Obama’s painstakingly negotiated Iran nuclear deal.
Now, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is achieving his lifelong dream of bombing Iran and trying to force the US military into the war, the United States is poised to stay stuck in the endless nightmare of war in the Middle East. Whether Netanyahu is trying to drag Trump into another Middle Eastern war by blowing up his diplomatic efforts, or whether Trump intentionally greenlighted this attack as part of a co-conceived deception alongside Netanyahu, does not change the fact that Trump owns this war.
Whose War Is It Anyway?
There are two competing theories about who is responsible for this war: Israel or the United States. As one theory has it, Trump was engaged in diplomacy with Iran, regularly stating he wanted to avoid war and preferred a diplomatic agreement, welcoming progress and the prospect of success. In fact, a sixth round of negotiations between the United States and Iran around a nuclear deal was announced just hours before Israel initiated its act of aggression the night of June 12-13. Reports indicated that Trump had told Netanyahu that the United States did not support an Israeli strike and preferred to give diplomacy a chance as recently as last week. It may appear that Netanyahu, seeing this difference with Trump, decided to force the issue and drag the United States into a war it did not want. As another theory has it, Israel is supposed to be an American ally. It owes its survival to American weapons that flow continuously and are funded by the American taxpayer. There is simply no way that Israel would conduct this strike without an American green light, this theory posits. Even if Netanyahu gave the order to the Israeli military, it can only be understood as an extension of American policy that has always warned against a purported nuclear Iran.
The Trump administration initially seemed to distance itself from an Israeli strike before the fact, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio issuing a statement claiming that Israel acted “unilaterally” during the attack’s opening wave the night of June 12. But the next morning, after seeing television coverage of some of the results on the ground, Trump embraced the strikes and their deadly results. Trump perhaps told the Israelis that he would not ask them not to strike but that he wanted to wait and see if Israel’s attack was successful before associating himself with it. But one week after the start of the Israeli attack, Trump’s White House announced that the president’s decision whether to involve US forces in the attack on Iran will come in “two weeks.” Suffice it to say, this is a dangerous approach to matters of war and peace; yet, with this president, it is an entirely plausible scenario.
It was Trump who unilaterally withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the agreement reached by the Obama administration, leading the P5+1 and Iran, which Trump tore up in his first term. Opponents of the JCPOA long insisted that the alternative to the agreement was not war with Iran, and now we are witnessing how disingenuous that claim always was. Trump owns this war primarily because he set the United States on a path toward it years ago.
What Are the Consequences?
If Iran was not convinced it needed a nuclear weapon before Israel’s strikes, it must be now. This Israeli attack is a product of Iran failing to establish deterrence as Israel repeatedly struck inside Iranian territory in recent years. With each inadequately answered Israeli attack, Israel grew bolder. It is hard to imagine that Iran would not now seek to race to achieve nuclear breakout. And who can blame the Islamic Republic? It made a deal with the United States that the United States then broke, and it still did not build a weapon? The result? Israeli strikes that killed an echelon of Iranian leaders.
Iran had sought for years to find a middle ground between the Libyan route (fully shutting down a nuclear program), and the North Korean route (breaking all rules regarding nuclear weapons) to retain the possibility of crossing the nuclear threshold instead of dismantlement but staying short of a surprise nuclear test. Iran relied on a network of allies, particularly Hezbollah, to keep Israel in check so that the fight would not take place on its territory. That strategy largely worked for two decades but its time has expired. Now Iran’s deterrence is weakened significantly, and it cannot afford staying in the middle ground. It will either have to accept Israeli and American diktats—which its leaders believe will ultimately lead to regime change—or develop a new deterrent by racing to breakout. Each choice presents unprecedented risks and challenges to the regime. But if regime survival is perceived to be at stake, the likelihood of miscalculation goes up significantly and the Iranians may well decide that breakout is at least a path that they can control. In other words, for all the bluster from Netanyahu over the years, warning about Iran going nuclear, for all the theatrical, gimmicky speeches and videos he has made about it, his decision to attack Iran on June 12-13 may have done more to contribute to an Iranian decision to develop nuclear weapons than anything else. And that may be precisely what he wanted.
Can a Greater Conflagration Be Averted?
From Netanyahu’s perspective, the window to carry out regime change in Iran could be closing. Netanyahu is embattled in Israel and will eventually have to pay the political price for presiding over October 7, 2023, the worst security failure in Israeli history. He refuses to end the genocidal campaign in Gaza precisely to put off that inevitability. At the same time, Iran’s regional deterrence is weakened and its enrichment has accelerated. Internationally, Israel’s reputation is now as low as it has ever been, so starting yet another war would not change much in that regard, and the Trump administration will not stand in his way. This combination of factors meant the window to launch his Iran apocalypse plan is open but closing fast.
Preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons requires convincing the regime that the deterrent is not necessary or that it does not need to acquire the latest technology to catch up with the nuclear states like Israel. Netanyahu is doing just the opposite in order to bind the United States into yet another regime-change war.
The fact that Netanyahu is a duplicitous, indicted war criminal also facing numerous corruption charges in Israel should be enough to convince anyone not to follow him down this destructive path. He sold the United States on regime change in Iraq in 2002, telling Congress that toppling Iraqi President Saddam Hussein would have “enormous positive reverberations.” The region and the world are still recovering from the Iraq fiasco. In the same hearing before Congress, Netanyahu testified that force is not even necessary for regime change in Iran. He claimed it could be done by beaming in American teen television shows into Iran via satellite. Now he is trying to get the United States to commit to an even bigger debacle than the Iraq war. The average American probably has enough common sense not to even buy a used car from someone with Netanyahu’s record; it is hoped that American policymakers will not buy into the catastrophic war that he is selling.
An Iran war has already started, and Trump practically took this path when he nixed the JCPOA. Still, Trump can influence how bad this war becomes. He should not make the same mistake former President Joe Biden did in the fall of 2023 in giving Israel a free hand in Gaza. Had Biden forced Israel into a ceasefire earlier on, countless people would still be alive today. Instead, he permitted Israel to commit genocide in Gaza where their military is still grinding the besieged coastal strip into dust 21 months later. Iran is not Gaza. It is not Iraq either, and the risks involved with Netanyahu’s regime change expedition in Iran are far greater.
While this choice is the most central and immediate now, the bigger question for the United States is how it can escape the cycle of ruinous war in the Middle East when it should instead be investing in the American people and other more important global challenges. The key to resolving this is understanding that Zionism, through its demand to subjugate Palestinians and eliminate those who resist, will constantly drive chaos and instability in a region of which Palestinians are an inseparable part. It might be in Israel’s interest for the region to constantly be on fire and for America to be paying the costs of one catastrophe after another, but is it in the American people’s interest? President Trump still has a chance to answer this question the right way, but it is hard to be certain that he will.
The views expressed in this publication are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the position of Arab Center Washington DC, its staff, or its Board of Directors.
Featured image credit: Twitter/The White House
