U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to announce that the U.S. had begun 'major combat operations' in Iran.Donald Trump via Truth Social/Reuters
For months he has been a warlike speaker. Now Donald Trump is a wartime president.
Mr. Trump’s entire second term has been an exercise in risks: Can he take executive powers into new realms? Can he defy presidential customs? Can the American economy survive a trade war? Will the courts strike down his initiatives? Will his base remain loyal?
The one-time casino operator has won nearly every bet so far, though the Supreme Court stymied him on tariffs last week. But now, with an attack on Iran, the vow to topple the country’s theocratic leadership and the beginnings of retaliations for his air strikes, Mr. Trump is undertaking his biggest risk of all.
U.S., Israel launch ‘massive and ongoing’ attack on Iran
From June: For the U.S., the crisis in Iran is the latest episode in a long, tortured history
It comes in multiple dimensions.
First is the potential cost in lives. In danger not only are the attacking forces, but also the 30,000 American military personnel throughout the Middle East—a risk the President acknowledged in his statement early Saturday morning. “The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost and we may have casualties,” Mr. Trump said. “That often happens in war, but we’re doing this not for now. We’re doing this for the future, and it is a noble mission.”
Read U.S. President Donald Trump’s statement on Iran in full
One of Mr. Trump’s Republican predecessors — Dwight Eisenhower, who had real military experience in contrast with Mr. Trump’s tumultuous years in a military high school — liked to say that “plans are worthless, but planning is essential.” The President and his aides have not shared detailed plans for this operation. Presuming that they have them, it is politically imperative that they be shared.
Mr. Trump, wearing a white USA baseball cap, did so only partially with his early Saturday morning statement.
“Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime, a vicious group of very hard, terrible people,” he said. “Its menacing activities directly endanger the United States, our troops, our bases overseas and our allies throughout the world.”
The United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran on Saturday, targeting its leadership and plunging the Middle East into a new conflict.
Reuters
There is, moreover, a cascade of secondary risks. One is to the Atlantic alliance, which may back this operation dutifully but with limited enthusiasm and without military involvement - in a way the reverse of how Mr. Eisenhower refused to join France and Great Britain in the 1956 Suez war against Egypt.
Another is to the MAGA base that Mr. Trump has cultivated, in part by promising fewer international engagements and, specifically, no more “forever wars”—another risk when big powers (like France and the United States in Vietnam, the Soviet Union and the U.S. in Afghanistan) attack smaller ones with asymmetrical resources at hand.
Then there is the risk to the truth. Mr. Trump is not fanatically devoted to truth telling, and in the past several months his assertions that his June Operation Midnight Hammer completely destroyed Iran’s nuclear-weapons capability have been assailed if not refuted. The fact that he is undertaking this attack suggests that even he recognizes the limits of the last attack.
Now the question is whether Iran actually did restart its nuclear-weapons operation. More than two decades ago, American assurances that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction turned out to be false, to the mortification of the George W. Bush administration and at the cost of massive loss of lives in a ground war in Iraq.
“This has shades of Iraq,” said Vincent Rigby, a former Canadian national security advisor. The ‘intel’ has either been politicized or Trump is not listening, because what he is saying doesn’t make any sense. He continues to assert things for which there is no evidence, and as a result there is a real risk of a dangerous regional war.”
The United States has massive military assets in the region, including The USS Abraham Lincoln and USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike groups, an air armada of warplanes and surveillance planes, hundreds of drones and Tomahawk missiles. But the buildup to Mr. Trump’s Operation Epic Fury is dwarfed by Mr. Bush’s buildup to Operation Iraqi Freedom —and Mr. Bush built a “coalition of the willing” far broader than the combination U.S.-Israeli alliance.
What the U.S. military buildup against Iran looks like
Mr. Bush also built domestic support for his operation, winning congressional approval that Mr. Trump has not sought.
Another risk factor: Iran is far better equipped than Iraq turned out to be to retaliate against American bases in the region and against Israel.
“This is a very dangerous policy,” said Nina Srinivasan Rathbun, a professor of international relations at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. “Just as Trump has increased his brinksmanship, so has Iran. Its response won’t be the same as it was last spring. We are likely looking at a wider conflict that is not in the interest of the U.S., its allies and the world.”
This much can be said for Mr. Trump’s offensive: Iran was not caught unaware.
On Monday, Mr. Trump warned, “I don’t think [the Iranians] want the consequences of not making a deal,” prompting Iranian Foreign Minister Minister Abbas Araghchi to respond on social media: “What is not on the table: submission before threats.”
The next day — only four days before the beginning of hostilities — Mr. Trump devoted remarkably little time to foreign affairs in his combative State of the Union address. But one sentence sufficed to send a deadly message: “One thing is certain, I will never allow the world’s No. 1 sponsor of terror, which they are by far, to have a nuclear weapon.”
Mr. Trump and his military advisors, including Secretary of Defence Pete Hesgeth, clearly were not impressed by the exercises at the Strait of Hormuz conducted in recent days by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Though as much as a fifth of global oil moves through that waterway, Mr. Trump has spoken in recent weeks about how oil from Venezuela, the site of his last military operation, would flood the United States.
Indeed, the tactics Mr. Trump used in Latin America now have been applied to the Middle East: Capitulate peacefully, or you will be forced to capitulate militarily.
Mr. Trump often has spoken of the art of the deal. Now he is growing accustomed to dealing with the military arts. Once a gambler, always a gambler.