The U.S. President used bombast in Capitol Hill negotiations and bombs in Iran to try and force a Middle East negotiation.BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images
U.S. President Donald Trump’s effort to win what he calls a “big, beautiful” budget bill that cuts spending and taxes is facing headwinds as his self-imposed July 4th deadline approaches. But that struggle now is in the far background as the shape of a bigger, more beautiful, Middle East settlement may seem, if not in immediate reach but at least in the realm of the imaginable.
Though dismissed by Trump critics and some Middle East figures as unrealistic, that has been the long-term goal – the seemingly unrealizable dream and yet the persistent hope – of Mr. Trump since he first became president in 2017.
The ceasefire between Israel and Iran after 12 days of fighting – announced, celebrated, and perhaps actually shaped by Mr. Trump – came far more swiftly than any progress in the U.S. Senate, which is still struggling to craft a version of the spending legislation that the House of Representatives passed last month.
Mr. Trump used bombast in the Capitol Hill negotiations and bombs to force a Middle East negotiation and perhaps an end to Iran’s nuclear project, though preliminary damage assessments are far more modest, suggesting that the Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs didn’t collapse the Fordow site’s underground buildings and delayed Iran’s work by only about six months.
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After Iran’s missile strike on an American installation in Qatar that proved to be not deadly but a dud, it may be possible to envision a broader peace rather than the broader war that seemed to be imminent.
However, it remains unclear whether the Iran-Israel ceasefire will hold. Mr. Trump, employing an epithet, lashed out at Israel in particular Tuesday morning for violations of the truce. “I’m not happy with Iran,” he said, “but I’m really not happy with Israel.”
There also is no certainty that Iran won’t still mount retaliatory actions – symbolic or deadly, consisting of military action or cyberattacks – against Americans at home or American interests abroad. U.S. authorities have placed the country and its military installations on alert.
Though Middle East breakthroughs repeatedly have disappeared like desert mirages, a broader peace that could emerge might involve an end to Iran’s nuclear-weapons dreams; the cessation of the months-long fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza; and at least a brief interregnum in the years-long tensions between various players heretofore determined to force the extermination of the Jewish state.
At the same time, the status of Iran’s nuclear-weapons project remains the great unknown in the region. The preliminary damage report, which the White House swiftly sought to discredit as an effort to demean the President and diminish the effect of Operation Midnight Hammer, raised questions of whether the American assault on the country’s nuclear facilities and Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan actually eliminated Iran’s effort to produce such a weapon.
At the heart of that question is whether the bunker-busting bombs delivered by American B-2 stealth bombers left supplies of uranium, which may have been distributed to remote sites across Iran, undisturbed – and whether sufficient numbers of scientists, engineers and other nuclear personnel survived to begin the project anew.
One of the immutable truths of the atomic age, which began in 1945 with the two bombs dropped on Japan, is that the knowledge to construct a nuclear weapon is forever preserved in the minds and the engineering capacity of humans to construct such a weapon.
Even so, Mr. Trump has long imagined a massive Middle East settlement – a desirable outcome, to be sure, though perhaps delusional. He believes that the Abraham Accords, which his first administration brokered, marked the first step toward such a relaxation of the tensions that have roiled the region for more than a century. The 2020 agreement normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and several Arab states, including the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, and led to subsequent accords with Morocco and Sudan.
U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday used a profanity to criticize both Iran and Israel for what he said were violations of a ceasefire between the two adversaries.
Reuters
If hope is, as the 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson wrote in one of her best-loved verses, “the thing with feathers,” it is also the thing that has the great potential of flying away. Still, as she wrote around 1861, as the Civil War was beginning, “it perches in the soul.”
It is impossible to know what perches in the soul of Mr. Trump, who is famously bereft of that sort of introspection and contemplation. Nor what resides in the hardened heart of many Middle East combatants, beginning with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and including a murderers’ row of Israel’s opponents, from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, to the commanders of its proxy warriors in Hamas and Hezbollah.
Another cautionary element: Many players in Middle East politics and combat aren’t inclined to agree to a cessation of hostilities while the political and geographical destiny of the Palestinians is unresolved. Israel’s hard-right political faction, which supports residential settlements and not peace settlements, holds the balance of power in Israel.
Mr. Trump clearly has channelled Theodore Roosevelt, a 20th-century American president with impetuous impulses (issuing executive orders establishing forest reserves in six western states) and a taste for exceeding the contemporary limits on presidential action (saying of his actions in the Panama Canal, “I took the Canal Zone and let Congress debate”).
Mr. Trump, with the blustering style and the “Trump always chickens out” inclination that has made “TACO” one of the memes of his presidency, sometimes seems to personify the very opposite of the Roosevelt maxim: “Speak softly and carry a big stick.”
But he knows that the 26th President mediated the 1905 Peace of Portsmouth that ended the war between Japan and Russia and was rewarded with the Nobel Peace Prize. Mr. Trump and many of his supporters believe, to the wonder and consternation of the President’s critics, he deserves that honour – an award not ordinarily presented for the use of bombs and missiles to promote peace but, then again, Mr. Trump prides himself on the unconventional.