Trump’s Ultimatum to Iran

Trump’s ultimatum and shifting U.S. war aims

When Israel launched a major attack on an Iranian gas field last week and sent oil prices soaring, the U.S. seemed unhappy with its ally.

First, Trump insisted he “knew nothing about” it. Then he backtracked and said he’d warned Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, against the move: “I told him don’t do that,” Trump said. The attack, and Trump’s attempt to distance himself from it, my colleagues wrote at the time, highlighted the ways in which the U.S. and Israel’s goals for the war sometimes diverge.

But by Saturday, Trump was threatening to bomb Iran’s power plants himself. In a social media post that evening, Trump threatened to “obliterate” the plants — on which millions of Iranians depend — if Iran did not fully open the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours. Iran responded with defiance, saying it would retaliate with its own strikes on energy infrastructure.

We still don’t know if Trump will follow through; it was only a day earlier that he’d talked about potentially “winding down” operations in Iran.

But if the attack on the gas field, known as South Pars, pointed to the daylight between Israel and America, with his announcement this weekend Trump seemed to be threatening to do the very thing he’d warned Israel against.

America First meets Israel First

When the U.S. and Israel initially attacked, it seemed as if they were on the same page.

Both Trump and Netanyahu appeared to be pushing for regime change, encouraging Iranians to rise up against their own government. Both vowed to destroy what’s left of Iran’s nuclear program and the long-range missiles capable of hitting Israel.

But just a few days into the war, Trump effectively dropped the regime change language from his public statements. What he wants is still not clear, though most reporting to this point has indicated his ideal outcome is more like regime-change lite — the same style of government in Iran, led by a more compliant counterpart — that ends in a nuclear deal.

Netanyahu, by contrast, has remained unwavering: He sees the Islamic republic as a threat to Israel’s existence. He’s still hoping the war leads to regime change. But if it doesn’t, he wants it to leave Iran as battered as possible.

Their different priorities have — up until this weekend, at least — resulted in different strategies on the battlefield.

Analysts say the Israeli attacks on energy facilities, and the targeted killings thinning out the ranks of the Iranian government, seem to be aimed at weakening the regime so thoroughly that it leads to what some are calling “state collapse.”

It’s an approach that might make sense from Israel’s perspective — if the goal is to facilitate an uprising, or if the regime seems so dangerous that even collapse and chaos look like better options.

But targeted killings can work against the goal of regime-change lite, by hardening the resolve of those who are left. And the U.S. has balked at the strikes on energy facilities, which are part of a pattern of attacks and counterattacks on oil and gas infrastructure that have sent prices soaring.

An inevitable divergence, or not?

That brings me to this weekend.

Should Trump follow through on targeting Iran’s civilian energy infrastructure, it would be an attack that seems more of a piece with Israel’s approach to the war to date than the U.S.’s.

So how should we think about this?

Before Trump’s latest threat, my colleague Steven Erlanger, our chief diplomatic correspondent in Europe, wrote that some divergence between the U.S. and Israel was inevitable.

Israel has higher stakes and more narrow concerns. Its position is that an Iran run by the current theocracy, which has vowed to destroy the state of Israel, is intolerable, and that almost any change would be preferable.

Trump’s concerns are more global. He sees Iran as a bad actor, but the war is hurting strategic allies in the Gulf and helping adversaries like Russia. And it’s unpopular at home: The price of gas is rising, and this is an election year.

Over the last three weeks, Iran has exploited its leverage over the Strait of Hormuz so effectively that it now looks like a fundamental threat not just to Israel, but to the global economy — not to mention Trump’s midterm elections prospects.

We should be cautious about reading too much into the words of a president who has offered notably muddled messages around the war. Still, Trump’s latest threat might be a sign that if Iran can’t be persuaded to open the strait, he could begin to view the war from something more akin to an Israeli perspective: That there is no negotiating with Iran’s current regime, only battering it until it changes.

“Netanyahu has been talking about how the regime in Tehran needs to go throughout the war, and increasingly in English,” David Halbfinger, our Jerusalem bureau chief, told me yesterday. “You get the feeling that his message is getting through — at least to the proverbial audience of one.”

More news about the war:

Israel’s defense minister ordered the military to step up its destruction of bridges and houses in southern Lebanon.
About 175 people were injured in Iranian strikes on two cities close to Israel’s main nuclear research site.
The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran is a perfect storm for India’s economy.
Follow our live updates.
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