Trump opens a war on three fronts with strikes on Iran

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With a series of deadly bunker-bomb sorties and dozens of sea-based Tomahawk missile attacks on Iran, a combative president suddenly has become a wartime president.

With these strikes, Donald Trump initiated a three-front war: one that inserts the United States in an inflammatory conflict in a Middle East war, another that opens a new conflict within his Republican coalition, and a third against Democratic skeptics on Capitol Hill who consider these actions unconstitutional.

All are dangerous gambles. There is no guarantee that the American assaults against the Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan nuclear-production sites – military action that Mr. Trump argued were “a spectacular military success” – has ended or set back Iran’s drive for the ultimate wartime weapon.

Nor is it certain that the Trump base – an unusually loyal cadre that has stuck with him in a decade of tests and tumult – will swallow this event, a direct violation of the MAGA anti-interventionist ethos of avoiding “forever wars.”

“Most presidents that make decisions in times of war swiftly learn that the way in is a lot easier than the way out,” said Roger Porter, who served in the administrations of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush and who for years has taught the Harvard Kennedy School of Government course on the American presidency. “We will soon know what Donald Trump has learned.”

Mr. Trump ordered the action against what he called “Iran, the bully of the Middle East” that many presidents have wanted to do in the years since 1979, when, following the Iranian Revolution, American diplomats in Tehran were taken hostage. Indeed, a series of American chief executives have vowed Iran would never possess a nuclear weapon, and the Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs employed in the air raids were developed specifically with this step in mind.

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“This has been on the table for several presidencies,” Mara Rudman, a senior national-security official in the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama administrations, said in an interview Sunday. “This was probably the best window for it. Now we’ll see what happens next.”

Among all the uncertainties, there is one clear certainty: Mr. Trump, who prizes control over his circumstances, has lost control of numerous geopolitical and domestic factors that suddenly have become moving parts.

In progressing from a 1969 John Lennon anthem recorded on the 17th floor of Montreal’s Queen Elizabeth Hotel (“All we are saying is give peace a chance”) to the tune from 19th century Jacques Offenbach that provides the stirring instrumental to the Marines’ Hymn (“we fight our country’s battles”), Mr. Trump now must now steel himself for unpredictability from several directions.

He tried, in his Truth Social announcement of the work of “our great American Warriors” to split the difference by saying, “There is not another military in the World that could have done this. NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE!”

But he knows there is the possibility of Iranian counterattacks against the 40,000 American troops in the region; the prospect of a wider war; the chance that his belief the attacks might not have, as he claimed, “completely and totally obliterated” the Iranian nuclear facilities; and the dark but real possibility that Iran is harbouring uranium-enrichment sites unknown to American and Israeli intelligence agencies.

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Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s Foreign Minister, already has warned that the country “reserves all options to defend its security interests and people.”

Mr. Trump’s most loyal domestic political supporters are now assessing the new national-security environment, which includes explicit warnings these attacks could be followed by even more severe operations – “far greater and far easier,” as the President put it – that would increase American involvement in the war.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei earlier warned “irreparable damage” to American assets in the region. Among those vulnerable are U.S. troops in Syria, Jordan, Oman, Iraq, Kuwait, and Bahrain, where the Navy’s Fifth Fleet and its 9,000 military and civilian support personnel are based.

Mr. Trump’s phrase in reference to Iran’s aggressiveness (“It will not continue”) was evocative of the August, 1990 reaction of George H. W. Bush to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait (“This will not stand”).

There remains the possibility that Mr. Trump will have pressed the Iranians to do what he has argued from the start that he desires: pushing Iran to the bargaining table. A YouGov poll found that similar rates of Democrats (58 per cent) and Republicans (61 per cent) believe the U.S. should engage in negotiations.

Here’s what Trump said in his address to the nation after U.S. struck Iranian nuclear facilities

But there also is the possibility that this episode will steel the determination of Ayatollah Khamenei to press ahead – and perhaps even prompt him to order a rush to develop nuclear weapons and then to use them.

Nearly lost in the gathering fog of war is how Mr. Trump’s decision is another extension of executive power.

Having undertaken military action without congressional involvement, the President may be in violation of the War Powers Act and of constitutional restrictions on warmaking – putting him in the company of every president since 1973.

“They have all, without exception, done the same thing,” said the scholar John Robert Greene, the author of biographies of six American presidents. “But there’s something special of what Trump has done. This will change his presidency.”

But Mr. Trump clearly grew impatient with Iran, and four days before he ordered the strikes he said, “I’ve had it. I give up, no more. Then we go blow up all the nuclear stuff that’s all over the place there. They had bad intentions. You know, for 40 years they’ve been saying, death to America, death to Israel, death to anybody else that they didn’t like. They were bullies. They were schoolyard bullies, and now they’re not bullies any more.”

For a time, at least, Mr. Trump was true to his word.