Donald Trump and the Iran Crisis
“History is not repeated, but it rhymes.” That Mark Twain has never really said this line, he adapts and sounds noisily while President Trump rushes between the oval office and the situation room, weighing if he had to send bombers to another American outing in the Middle East.
First of all, the necessary warnings. Since the seizure of power in 1979, Iranian theocracy has threatened its eighty-million million citizens and the region in the broad sense. Ayatollahs have deprived the country of a prosperous civil society, rather channeling resources towards militarism and messianic fantasy. The regime is based on repression – Crackdowns, imprisonment, torture, executions – to keep control of a muffled and reluctant population. Many of the country’s educated elite have emigrated. The ranks of leaders have staff, to a large extent, with satraps and mediocrities. The pursuit by Iran of nuclear weapons in tandem with its nuclear energy project has proven an unnecessary disaster – in particular for the Iranians themselves. As Karim Sadjadpour, an Iranian Endowment for International Peace Carnegie expert, notes the nuclear program has been a practical and strategic “albatros”; It only provides about one percent of Iran’s energy needs, but has cost up to five hundred billion dollars in construction, research and sanctions for international sanctions.
Meanwhile, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – the supreme chief since 1989 and now eighty -six years – ensures the martial objectives of his regime and disturbing fantasies. In 2015, he promised that Israel, who did not share any border with Iran, would disappear by 2040. The regime projected the force through the body of the Islamic revolutionary guard and has proxy militias funded throughout the region: Hezbollah, Lebanon; Hamas, in Gaza; The Houthis, in Yemen; and, in Iraq, Islamic resistance. Armed and advised by Tehran, these groups all carried out deadly operations.
For decades, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu qualified Iranian nuclear business intolerable, both for Israel and the world. In many ways, Netanyahu is a flagrant politician Duplicitis; There is not much that he will not say or will not do to maintain his coalition and his power. But he is right from there: an Iran with nuclear arms would threaten Israel (which has had nuclear weapons for decades) and could cause Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and others to pursue such a weapon.
No American president has ever challenged the danger of an Iran with nuclear arms. However, when the Obama administration managed to forge a nuclear agreement, the Complete Complete Action Plan, Netanyahu denounced it weak. Donald Trump concluded, if only to be disdaining for Obama. In 2018, Trump moved away from the JCPOA – a little insolent movement because he had no alternative to offer. It left a dangerous empty.
Following the attacks in Hamas on October 7, the political psychology of Israel has changed considerably. The original promise of the Israeli state was to end, once and for all, the dependence and helplessness of an exile people who had undergone anti -Semitic persecution for centuries – a dark story that has reached its Nadir in the Nazi death camps. For the Israelis, the attack on Hamas represented not only the bloodiest day in the country since its foundation but also the nightmarish return of vulnerability. On October 7, the State failed: the intention reports on the intentions of Hamas were ignored or rejected; The army has been widely deployed elsewhere. That day, Hamas sought to inflict maximum suffering in Israel; He also aimed to wake up all Iran’s attorney, perhaps even Iran himself, to join the fight.
But what Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas in Gaza, hoped to be the final battle of the liberation ended with defeat and misery. Israel, in his fury, decimated Hamas and destroyed its leaders – including Sinwar – and also killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians. Whole cities and cities – Rafah, Khan Younis, Jabalia – have been flattened, or almost. Moshe Ya’alon, once the Minister of Defense of Netanyahu qualified the operation of “ethnic cleaning” and accused the government of abandoning the hostages taken by Hamas and of “losing contact with Jewish morality”.
While the Israeli government has absorbed the international condemnation of its excesses and crimes in Gaza, its forces fought with a precision relating to Lebanon, killing almost all the leaders of Hezbollah and thousands of its fighters. Shortly after, the Assad regime in Syria – having shot down hundreds of thousands of its own inhabitants with Iranian support – took place.
It was the moment of weakness in Tehran that Netanyahu was waiting for. Israeli information seems to have penetrated the Iranian regime and its even more in -depth security bureaucraties than it had Hezbollah. Over the past two weeks, Israel has eliminated the highest ranks in Military Directors and Iranian intelligence and its nuclear scientists. But it did not take long for Netanyahu’s rhetoric and tactics to move – from the emphasis on attacks against military and nuclear sites to broader and more perilous ambitions. Israel attacked the main Iranian television center and the great command of the Tehran police; These are symbols of the government, not military targets. Netanyahu, asked by ABC News if he was aiming for Khamenei himself, replied, dryly: “We do what we have to do.”
But history insists on its own lessons. The first triumphant days of “overwhelming force” and the overturned monuments are almost always followed by the unexpected: sectarian conflict, insurrection, terrorism, chaos. We have already been enough here often to have realized that the fantasy of the change of diet is rarely, if never, realized. It does not prove to be people, is not delighted with their “release” by foreign invaders. And, as a recent report in the Wall Street Newspaper Note, if Khamenei is overturned or killed, it is the body of the Islamic revolutionary guard, which maintains a huge economic and military influence, which could be able to appoint a new sovereign and “assume unprecedented power”.
So what will Trump do? Israel has already struck and seriously damaged the installation of uranium-enrichment in Natanz, the Isfahan Nuclear Technology Center, the heavy water reactor in Arak and other sites. However, most experts are suitable that the crucial objective is the Fordo enrichment center, which is integrated in the depths of a mountain. It is largely assumed that the only weapons capable of destroying Fordo are the penetrators of massive ammunition – American “bunker” bombs weighing thirty thousand pounds each. Only American B-2 bombers are able to wear them. Netanyahu hinted that Israel could have her own ways of degrading Fordo, perhaps with a kind of functioning on the ground, but he clearly prefers that Trump orders the pilots to do the work.
There is no American president – Bill Clinton, George Hw or George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden or Donald Trump – who treated with Netanyahu and no, sooner or later, to come with a feeling of persistent resentment. Netanyahu gives off supernatural confidence in its manipulation powers. In 2001, during a meeting with Israeli terrorism victims, he assured them that he could still bring the United States. “I know what America is,” he told them. “America is something that you can move very easily, move it in the right direction.”
It is not easy to trust Donald Trump to make an optimal decision. On the one hand, it is wary of almost all sources of information to save his instinct. He revels in uncertainty. (“No one knows what I’m going to do.”) He has dug the staff and the expertise of the National Security Council. He seems to disdain his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and his conclusion that Iran’s prosecution by a nuclear bomb is not as advanced as Netanyahu claims. He dismissed his National Security Advisor Mike Waltz but, rather than replacing him, simply put the additional functions to the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio. Metternich by Trump is Steve Witkoff, a real estate developer in New York modestly accomplished; His defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, formerly Fox News host of the weekend, finally struck the president as an empty costume with a pompadour. (According to the Washington JobHegseth has been sidelined.) In the meantime, Trump must pay attention to the ideas provided by rival camps in his Maga Universe: The isolationism of Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson in relation to the interventionism of Mark Levin and Laura Loomer.
Trump has established a two -week deadline for rumination and negotiations. The story offers cold comfort and little clarity. Philip Gordon, a senior foreign policy advisor to President Obama and Vice-President Harris, once reflected in the lesmentary results of recent American military interventions in the Middle East. Writing in Politico, in 2015, he noted:
Now, a decade later, another crisis in the Middle East is there, and it rests in the hands of the American president and the supreme chief. In almost all things, the military issues included, Trump is hardly a model of discernment. He recently sent navies to face “insurrectionists” Protestant against his immigration policies in downtown Los Angeles, even if he threw the real insurrection in Capitol, four years ago, as “a day of love”. Meanwhile, Khamenei must now consider going back like never before. His predecessor, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, once compared to sign a truce with Iraq after a decade of war to “drink poison”.
Self -intake that can accompany the first days of the battle – the euphoria of “Shock and Awe”, dreams of a regime change without friction – once again on the path of rational negotiation. To avoid a broader conflagration in Iran, Israel, and beyond, the American president will have to temper his worst pulses for a “fast victory” and negotiate. Ayatollah, for its part, like its predecessor, will have to lift the chalice on its lips and take a sip. ♦
