There is, as they say, a tweet for everything—or, in Donald Trump’s case, many tweets. Back when he was still just a serial bankrupt playing a successful businessman on TV, Trump often took to Twitter to predict that President Barack Obama was about to start a war with Iran. “@BarackObama will attack Iran in order to get re-elected” (January 17, 2012); “Now that Obama’s poll numbers are in tailspin—watch for him to launch a strike in Libya or Iran. He is desperate” (October 9, 2012); “I predict that President Obama will at some point attack Iran in order to save face!” (September 16, 2013); “Remember that I predicted a long time ago that President Obama will attack Iran because of his inability to negotiate properly—not skilled!” (November 10, 2013).
Of course, Obama never did order an attack on Iran. Instead, he helped negotiate the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), a 2015 deal that kept Iran from pursuing the production of nuclear weapons in exchange for relief from international sanctions. The deal held until 2018, when the Trump administration, under pressure from the Israeli government and eager to abandon as many Obama-era policies as it could, abruptly withdrew from it, to the consternation not only of Iran but also of JCPOA’s other signatories—the UN Security Council and the European Union. Predictably, Iran responded by building more nuclear centrifuges and enriching uranium beyond the limit set by the agreement.
Since the United States abandoned the JCPOA, international inspectors have had limited access to Iran’s nuclear facilities, so it has been difficult to assess just how close the country is to possessing a nuclear weapon. Most experts believe Iran has enough enriched uranium to make a bomb fairly quickly if it decides to. But as recently as March, Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, told Congress that the U.S. intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.”
One might expect that Donald Trump would have welcomed and amplified that assessment. After all, he spent a decade promising not to repeat the mistakes of the George W. Bush administration: no new preemptive wars in the Middle East to chase down hypothetical weapons of mass destruction, no more wars for regime change. Trump warned us before the last election that, if Kamala Harris became president, she was “guaranteed” to get the United States into World War III. He, by contrast, would be the president of peace. And yet, just five months into his second term, he casually dismissed the judgment of his own director of national intelligence and—acting on the assessment of Israeli intelligence, as reported to him by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—decided to bomb three Iranian nuclear facilities. His decision appears to have been motivated not by any imminent threat to the United States or even to Israel, but by Israel’s recent success in striking Iran and Iran’s apparent inability to defend itself or to strike back with commensurate force. Trump, it turns out, is not opposed in principle to another military adventure in the Middle East, as long as he can be convinced that it comes without risk.
Hours after U.S. B-2 bombers dropped fourteen thirty-thousand-pound “bunker-buster” bombs on three Iranian nuclear facilities, Trump appeared on television to announce that the facilities had been “completely and totally obliterated.” Now it was time for the Iranians to make peace—on America’s terms. “If they do not,” he warned, “future attacks will be far greater and a lot easier.” A few days later, Iran went through the motions of retaliation by firing a few symbolic missiles at a U.S. military base in Qatar, though not before warning the United States in advance so as to avoid any casualties. And one day after that, President Trump declared a ceasefire between Israel and Iran. The show was apparently over.
But the president did not get much time to savor his triumph. The same day the ceasefire was announced, several U.S. media outlets reported on a preliminary assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency, which found that the U.S. attack on Iran had not “obliterated” the targeted facilities, as Trump had claimed, but only damaged their entrances. The agency also estimated that Iran’s nuclear program would be set back by only a few months. Partly because of Trump’s own indiscreet teasing of the attacks on social media, Iran had plenty of time before the bombs fell to move its enriched uranium from the targeted facilities to other sites. Worse, the U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran may have convinced the Iranian leadership that their country will never be safe from future attacks until they have their own nuclear weapons. In short, the “Twelve Day War” may end up precipitating the very outcome it was supposed to prevent, while demonstrating, yet again, that no war—and especially no war in the Middle East—comes without risk.
Whatever the long-term consequences, this episode made at least one thing perfectly clear: Trump is not in any meaningful sense an antiwar president, whatever he and his supporters may say. The principal difference between him and the neoconservative warmongers he rails against is not that he is any more committed to peace than they were; it’s that they were reckless zealots, while he’s just a cynical opportunist. These are no doubt very different species of rogue, but they can both get a lot of people killed.
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