Donald Trump claims to be the leader who will end wars. But by effectively killing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear containment deal with Iran in his first term in office and allowing Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu to run rough-shod across the Middle East in his second, the Republican president is instead fanning the flames of conflict across the region.
It is Trump’s choices that have led Israel and Iran, the Middle East’s most powerful military actors, to the brink of all-out war, with a risk of escalation and spread, global economic disruption and mass casualties.
The JCPOA, signed by the US, Iran, UK, France, Germany, Russia China and the EU in 2015, was far from perfect. It failed to clamp down on Tehran’s conventional weapon programme build-up and its intentions to arm militia as far west as the Mediterranean – but it did succeed in freezing Iran’s nuclear programme.
In persuading Trump to withdraw from the nuclear deal in 2018, Netanyahu triggered the revival of Iran’s uranium enrichment which has led to the current crisis. In doing so, Trump and Netanyahu have, ironically, risked throwing away Israel’s huge strategic advantage from being the only nuclear-armed power in the Middle East.
The Israeli premier’s obsession with destroying the regime in Tehran is partly due to its enmity with the Jewish state, but also because it represents a politically useful distraction as a convenient bogeyman.
Why else is Netanyahu launching his war now, in the middle of US-Iranian talks on nuclear de-escalation? The clue lies in the question. Israel, or at least the hardline Netanyahu cabinet, was afraid that the Trump administration would make a compromise deal with Tehran on nuclear containment. So Netanyahu set out to derail them with its missile onslaught and assassinations.
The Israeli attacks of the past few days certainly weren’t in response to a sudden escalation in the nuclear threat from Iran. The Islamic Republic is not significantly nearer to nuclear weapons capability than it was six months ago. Criticism of Tehran from the International Atomic Energy Agency last week may have given Netanyahu the excuse he needed.
Netanyahu sees a weakened Iran as an opportunity. Its Hezbollah proxy in Lebanon has been decimated, and Tehran’s own air defences weakened in last October’s Israeli airstrikes.
The current conflagration also provides a useful distraction from the carnage Israel is inflicting on Gaza, which has invited international opprobrium from all of its main allies, apart from Washington.
Netanyahu wants to drag the US into the conflict with Iran. The US State Department’s cursory claim that it is not involved is unlikely to age well. It’s already emerged that American forces are operating in the air, on land and at sea to shoot down Iranian missiles being fired at Israel, thus pushing Washington toward more direct involvement. Israel knows that only the US has the huge bunker-busting bombs that can destroy Iran’s underground nuclear sites.
If Israel fails to engage US forces to destroy Iran’s nuclear sites, then the Netanyahu regime is still hopeful for regime change in Tehran.
However, one Iranian intellectual, a fierce critic of the Khamenei regime, told me today that Iranians, much as they hate their government, are “cursing Netanyahu as much as anyone.” He noted that “more than 200 Iranian civilians are already dead and it’s only day three of the war”.
It would be foolish to underestimate the determination and the ability of the regime to survive. After being written off several times amid mass public uprisings – most recently in 2022 after the death in custody of an Iranian Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, who’d been arrested for not wearing a headscarf – Iran’s corrupt and brutal theocracy remains in power.
For those in charge, it is literally a matter of survival. Many of the regime’s leading figures are the hanging judges who’ve condemned dissidents to their deaths in kangaroo courts. They know that regime change could see them hanging from lampposts.
Trump may still have a fleeting opportunity to play the peace-maker he claims to be. There might be a small window of opportunity to offer Iran an off-ramp – probably with the assistance of Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states and even Moscow. But this will also require Trump to apply the sort of pressure on Israel that no US president has done in recent years.
If the conflict escalates and they do cling on, Netanyahu’s gung-ho assault will have the unintended effect of convincing the hardliners in the Tehran regime of the absolute necessity of possessing nuclear weapons. This is the very last thing that Israel or anyone else wants.
