President Donald Trump is 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 the long-dreaded conflict that 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.
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.
Should Iran’s battered regime decide 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 destroy Iran’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.
Why Trump might see a reason to join the conflict
White House team has reported that the president is deeply skeptical about 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 in a major speech in Saudi Arabia in 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.
