Article by:
Stephen Collinson
A president is being driven – by events, fear of proliferating weapons of mass destruction and the need to back up his own words – toward a shock-and-awe entry into a Middle East conflict with no guaranteed way out.
Expectations are growing in Washington that Donald Trump will soon heed Israeli calls to try to strike a decisive blow against Iran’s nuclear program, using bunker-busting weapons that only the US can deliver.
The president’s rhetoric took a sharp turn following the apparent success of Israel’s early barrage that wiped out top military leaders and nuclear scientists and severely degraded Iran’s capacity to defend itself.
And CNN reported Tuesday that Trump was warming to the idea of using US military assets to strike Iranian nuclear sites and was souring on his previous unsuccessful attempt to settle the issue through talks with Iran.
As always with Trump, we must ask whether his tough talk is for real. Perhaps he is trying to bully Iran back to diplomacy and the “unconditional surrender” he demanded on social media.
This looks like a pipe dream.
“As long as President Trump is trying to capitalize on Israeli aggression against Iran, to get the Iranian leadership to surrender, it is just simply not going to work,” Ali Vaez, director of the Iran Project at the International Crisis Group, told Becky Anderson on CNN International’s “Connect the World” Tuesday. “What they see at the end of this slippery slope is basically full capitulation and regime collapse.”
And since Israel’s preemptive attack on Iran seems partly motivated by the desire to derail US diplomacy, who’s to say a president who has recently been ignored by Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping could stop Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu?
But Trump may be on the brink of a huge gamble that would repudiate his own political principles.
His own scathing contempt for US presidents who pushed regime change played a huge role in the former reality star’s dive into politics in 2015. If he goes to war in Iran, Trump will be ignoring a loud sector of his MAGA movement. The “America First” president would become the kind of interventionist he despised.
Still, there is a loophole in Trump’s isolationism. He’s always insisted that Iran, given its threats to eradicate Israel and sworn enmity with the US, would never be allowed to get a nuclear weapon. Read more...
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