A week is a long time in international affairs: it can break an entire political doctrine. Just over a week ago, President Trump was signalling both his disapproval of Netanyahu’s decision to launch a war against Iran, and his desire to keep America out of it. It was a characteristically Trumpian policy of restraint central to his re-election campaign, and backed by his base, which is deeply disenchanted with America’s costly losing streak of forever wars in the Middle East. Indeed, in his landmark Riyadh speech just last month, Trump had chastised the neoconservative ideologues and liberal interventionists whose meddling in the Middle East, built on shaky premises and excessive faith in the ability of American might to reshape alien societies, had wasted so much blood and treasure to no positive effect. “In the end,” Trump declared, “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.” His voters agree: less than a quarter of Republican voters support American involvement in Netanyahu’s war of choice against Iran, while its strongest advocates are the neoconservative Never-Trumpers who have spent the past decade calling Trump himself a dictator to be toppled. But then, despite all this, Israel targeted Iran’s chief negotiator with the United States, and America First anti-interventionism suddenly fell by the wayside. Trump, for reasons that will remain a matter of speculation, had abruptly changed his mind.
In bombing Iran’s nuclear sites, Trump fulfilled a decades-long Netanyahu aspiration. But he also rescued Netanyahu, at least temporarily, from a short-term problem of his own making. Israel’s leader had launched a war with no clearly-defined end state, against a distant, larger and more populous power, whose terrain renders it safe from ground invasion. Through a combination of impressive intelligence fieldcraft and long-range aerial strikes, Israel has achieved concrete successes in decapitating Iran’s military leadership and degrading its ability to launch ballistic missile barrages at Israel, yet without eroding its capacity entirely. Indeed, the overnight Iranian ballistic missile strike against Israel was its most effective yet, as Israel burns through its stock of interceptors. What was until last year an almost unimaginable occurrence — Iran striking Israel directly, at its most sensitive and protected sites — now happens multiple times daily. Israel’s wars of choice have always been short, pre-emptive blows aiming to quickly triumph over enemies a longer war of attrition would favour. The current war is no exception. The pleas from Israel’s leadership for direct American involvement, initially rebuffed by Trump, were a recognition of the fact that Netanyahu had started a conflict which Israel could not finish alone. In this, Israel’s course of action, as the International Relations scholar Emma Ashford observed, was “about as clear a case of attempted alliance entrapment as you’ll ever find outside an IR theory book”.
“In bombing Iran’s nuclear sites, Trump fulfilled a decades-long Netanyahu aspiration.”
Yet the need to bring in American firepower is a rational one for Israel. As the eminent scholar of air power Richard Pape notes, Israel is attempting to do something that has never successfully been done: topple a regime through air power alone. While there is a first time for everything, the more likely result, as Pape notes, of Israel’s overconfidence “in what its technologically advanced weapons can do is likely to harden Iran’s resolve and produce the opposite of its intended results: a more dangerous Iran, now armed with nuclear weapons”. Whether or not it decides to respond directly against the United States, risking an all-out war it can ill-afford to wage, Iran is almost certain to now withdraw from any external monitoring of its nuclear programme, and from meaningful diplomatic outreach to the erratic and provably untrustworthy superpower. As Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, hurrying to Moscow for support, remarked: “Last week, we were in negotiations with the US when Israel decided to blow up that diplomacy. This week, we held talks with the E3/EU when the US decided to blow up that diplomacy. What conclusion would you draw?”
Iran’s cautious and elderly Supreme Leader Khamenei, who has long resisted acquiring nuclear weapons, is now surely as threatened from within his own regime by younger and more radical elements as he is by Israeli targeting. Diplomacy has been proved not only fruitless but directly harmful, while caution in acquiring nuclear weapons capabilities has been shown to be a strategic disaster. In the short term, a direct response to the American strikes may be outside Iran’s capabilities, as it struggles to fend off Israel’s multi-faceted assault. But whether or not, as Iranian regime sources claim, the United States provided advance warning of the strikes, and whether or not Iran managed to remove nuclear materials from the attack sites beforehand, in the longer term the logic of events will push Iran, as well as regional rivals of Israel such as Turkey, to acquire nuclear weapons capabilities as quickly and covertly as possible, outside international oversight.
But if the Iranian regime struggles with unpalatable choices, so does its American counterpart, now urging a return to the nuclear negotiations abruptly ended by Israeli bombing. Vice President JD Vance’s claim today that “We’re not at war with Iran, we’re at war with Iran’s nuclear program,” can be read as a de-escalatory attempt by a long-standing critic of American interventionism in the Middle East to keep an Iranian response within symbolic bounds, and return to the negotiating track. Indeed, Vance was quoted by Reuters just days ago as “saying the United States shouldn’t be directly involved and suggesting that the Israelis were going to drag the country into war”. He was correct on both counts. As the anti-interventionist IR scholar Stephen Wertheim observes, Israel “acted less to preempt an Iranian bomb than to preempt American diplomacy,”, and in this it was entirely successful.
In pursuing a course of action likely to accelerate Iran’s nuclear weapons programme, while removing international oversight, the Trump administration has crossed a Rubicon previous administrations had worked hard to sidestep. Advocates of regime change will now conjure proofs that the one-off strikes were less effective than hoped, and new and allegedly urgent targets will soon be proffered for bombing. America will now be locked into recurrent military intervention to “mow the grass” of Iran’s nuclear programme on the basis of intelligence which will necessarily be unclear, speculative and politically contentious, not least among America’s increasingly conspiratorial and anti-interventionist populist Right. As Vance, a connoisseur and product of the dissident Right, surely understands, a dangerous backlash for American Jews in general as well as for Israel is brewing on the populist Right, far more so than on the pro-Palestine Left that has until now absorbed their attention. But for Israel and its friendly lobbyists in Washington, that is a problem for another time: for now the restrainers and America Firsters are humbled, and the neoconservatives and Never-Trumpers exultant.
And they have every reason to be: in embroiling the anti-interventionist Trump administration into long-term military confrontation against Iran, against its own repeatedly-expressed will, Netanyahu’s inveterate high-stakes gambling has once again won out. Threatened by corruption charges at home, and a war crimes warrant abroad, the Israeli strongman has nevertheless shown himself to be the most influential actor in US foreign policy, far more so than America’s mere Vice President. Netanyahu may not be able to install a pliable new regime in Tehran, but bending Washington to his will has proved a far easier task. Yet as with Iran, the longer term effects, as the week’s events work their way through America’s political tumult, may be far less palatable for Tel Aviv and its Washington advocates than the short-term gains. In playing its Trump card so flagrantly for short-term ends, Israel has been left with a weaker hand in years to come.
