Let’s start by clearing up what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump’s war with Iran—and yes, it was a war—was not about. It was not about making the United States more secure, more prosperous, or more respected and admired around the world. And no matter what Trump claims on Truth Social or what his loyal acolytes say, it wasn’t about making the Middle East more stable or even about protecting Israel over the longer term.
To begin with, Iran wasn’t on the brink of getting a nuclear weapon, as Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told Congress before the White House forced her to bend the knee and recant. And even if Tehran does get the bomb someday, its leaders couldn’t use it against the United States or Israel without committing national suicide, because Israel has dozens of its own nuclear bombs and the United States has thousands. Iran’s leaders know this quite well.
Moreover, as Kenneth Waltz argued in his last published article, the Middle East might be more stable if Iran had its own deterrent. Its security would be enhanced (meaning it would have less need to rely on proxy forces), and Israel’s ability to attack anyone it wants whenever it wants would be constrained. In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s not Iran that has been bombing Gaza mercilessly for nearly two years—along with airstrikes in Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen—or conducting slow-motion ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank, and ending these activities would go a long way toward stabilizing the entire region. There are valid reasons to question Waltz’s argument, but it is at least as plausible as the claim that an Iranian bomb would be a world-altering catastrophe that must be prevented at all costs.
In any case, if the goal of the war was to prevent Iran from getting the bomb, it is more likely to have the opposite effect. Although Trump and his mouthpieces keep claiming the U.S. attacks were a total success and destroyed Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, initial damage assessments have concluded that dropping all those bunker busters only set Iran’s efforts back a few months. Not only did key structures within the Fordow facility survive, but Iran appears to have dispersed and hidden some or all of its most highly enriched uranium and retains the capacity to enrich it further. The attacks also appear to have strengthened hard-liners in Iran who have long opposed negotiating with the United States and have favored getting their own bomb instead, and Trump just made their arguments a lot more convincing. If Iran does get the bomb in the future, Trump and Netanyahu will deserve most of the blame.
So if this wasn’t a well-thought-out effort to keep Iran from building its own bomb, then what was it about? Because Israel started the war, we must start with what its leaders—and especially Netanyahu—hoped to gain. One obvious goal was to distract the world from the war crimes and destruction that Israel is committing daily in Gaza and, to a lesser extent, the West Bank. A second purpose was to derail the negotiations between the United States and Iran, both because Israel was worried that the United States might allow Iran to retain some of its nuclear infrastructure and because Netanyahu wants to keep Iran and the United States at swords’ points. Preventing a genuine rapprochement between Washington and Tehran is one of the reasons Netanyahu opposed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which the Obama administration hoped would be a first step toward reducing tensions between the United States and Iran. Finally, Israel hoped that a systematic effort to kill top Iranian officials might lead to regime change there and enshrine Israel’s regional dominance. As I noted in my previous column, I think this goal is a pipe dream, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a tempting fantasy for Israel’s increasingly hard-line government. Keeping the region at a boil also helps keep Netanyahu in power (and out of jail).
But these points do not explain why Trump decided to go along, or why he is doubling down on his claims that the war was a great success. Here there were several obvious factors at work.
For starters, the war is a reminder that neoconservatism is not dead—at least when it comes to U.S. Middle East policy—and the Israel lobby still wields enormous influence in this domain. The lobby—which includes both pro-Israel American Jews and evangelical Christian Zionists—wants to preserve a special relationship between the United States and Israel. In practice, they want the United States to support Israel no matter what it does and to use U.S. power to make Israel more secure. It is worth remembering that the lobby played a key role in convincing Trump to abandon the JCPOA back in 2018, a strategic blunder that allowed Iran to expand its array of centrifuges and its stockpile of enriched uranium. Last weekend, groups like AIPAC and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, wealthy political donors like Miriam Adelson, and politicians like Secretary of State Marco Rubio and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee finally got the attack on Iran that they have long favored. Americans who hoped that Trump would listen to wealthy Arab leaders (who have sought to lower the temperature with Iran in recent years) or to the realists who oppose new Middle East wars were disappointed once again. Although Trump remains averse to using U.S. ground troops and even went so far as to criticize Israel for not knowing “what the fuck” it was doing, he also went to war when Israel asked him to join in. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
The Israel lobby doesn’t control U.S. policy, however, and the ultimate decision for war was still Trump’s. Here a key factor was Trump’s unquenchable desire to be the center of attention. He wants the whole world watching, discussing, and, ideally, praising his every move. He’s not that interested in genuine foreign-policy achievements—i.e., in tangible accomplishments that would make America safer, richer, or more influential—because major foreign-policy breakthroughs require real work. Rather, Trump just wants to appear to be doing great things while he and his buddies enrich themselves. Joining Israel’s latest war put him atop the headlines once again, and bombing other countries is one of those things that many Americans (and even some sophisticated observers) think looks “presidential.” It’s a reality show administration, with Trump playing president the same way he played a successful business tycoon on The Apprentice.
Trump’s tendency to put appearances ahead of results is nothing new. He began his first term by engaging in an online war of words with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, then suddenly announced that they had exchanged letters and fallen “in love” and would meet in person. The resulting summits produced the sort of rapt media frenzy that Trump relishes, but the poorly prepared negotiations led nowhere and North Korea’s nuclear weapons stockpile has grown steadily ever since.
This same problem is evident on many other issues. Look at trade policy: The media goes into a tizzy every time Trump threatens, imposes, delays, modifies, suspends, or reinstates a tariff, and yet the dozens of “beautiful” trade deals he has promised to negotiate never materialize. He says he’ll end the war in Ukraine “in 24 hours” and berates Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office (saying that the painfully awkward encounter was “great television”) but loses interest when ending the war turns out to be tougher than he expected. He thinks relabeling the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” is a meaningful accomplishment and recently mused about going back to the title “secretary of war” instead of “secretary of defense.” For Trump, it’s the labels and optics that matter, not the competence of top officials or the effectiveness of the policies they are overseeing. Achieving tangible results isn’t the point: The goal is to keep everyone’s eyes on Trump and what he’s doing.
This tendency shouldn’t surprise anyone at this point, because Trump’s entire career has been based on a remarkable ability to convince millions of people he is something he isn’t. Although he was a mediocre businessman, he was adept at persuading new suckers to lend him money and brilliant at playing a successful tycoon on TV. His reelection reaffirmed his ability to bamboozle millions into believing that he is a visionary who will make the country greater, even as his administration dismantles many of the institutions on which ordinary Americans depend and American power and influence are built. Politics in contemporary America was made for someone like Trump, whose soaring ambition and disregard for truth are perfectly suited to a world where image, clicks, and audience size matter more than facts and accomplishments.
In short, this war was mostly about the president’s ego and need to appear to be running everything. Call me old-fashioned, but this strikes me as an especially bad reason to go to war, and the long-term results of Trump’s latest blunder will make that all too clear.
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