Donald Trump took the biggest gamble of his combined four and a half years in the White House on Saturday night in striking Iran and joining Israel’s war against the Islamic republic.
Trump’s primary wager is that Iran and its proxies in the Middle East have been so weakened that the US president can cast his intervention as both limited and successful. It is also a bet that a cowed Tehran will swiftly seek a settlement rather than retaliating.
If Trump is right he will have achieved a goal of US foreign policy spanning multiple administrations — the elimination of the Iranian nuclear threat — and done so at relatively low cost.
But the move carries the huge risk of inflaming the Middle East further — jeopardising the security of the US and Israel and backfiring on a president who had vowed not to draw America into new global conflicts.
“It all depends on how the Iranian regime reacts — and it’s not clear what the regime’s capacities and will are at this point. [But] Iran’s network across the region remains operationally lethal, and it is able to sow more instability and terror if it chooses to do so,” said Brian Katulis, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, a Washington think-tank.
Trump had spent much of his 2024 presidential campaign arguing that he would be a peacemaker in his second term, solving global conflicts rather than fomenting new ones.
But the president, under pressure from Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saw a strike against Iran both as an opportunity to be seized, and a chance to secure a legacy as a leader willing to wield American military power.
On Saturday, Trump seemed to be relishing his transition from isolationist to warmonger. The president donned a red “Make America Great Again” cap as he gathered with top aides in the White House situation room. During his speech after the strikes, he warned that he was ready to expand the military campaign against Iran, if needed.
“There will be either peace or there will be tragedy for Iran far greater than we have witnessed over the last eight days,” Trump said. “Remember, there are many targets left . . . But if peace does not come quickly, we will go after those other targets with precision, speed and skill.”
Iran has always been something of an exception to Trump’s non-interventionist mantra. In early 2020, towards the end of his first term, he launched a high-stakes military operation to assassinate Iran’s military commander Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad.
“If Americans anywhere are threatened, we have all of those targets already fully identified, and I am ready and prepared to take whatever action is necessary. And that, in particular, refers to Iran,” Trump said at the time.
On his visit last month to the Gulf region, the US president had issued another clear warning to Tehran. “We want them to be a wonderful, safe, great country, but they cannot have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said. “This is an offer that will not last for ever.”
Those public warnings to Tehran were dramatically stepped up over the past week, as he departed early from a G7 summit in Canada to consider the strikes against Iran. His suggestion on Thursday that the Islamic Republic had two more weeks to bow to US demands proved shortlived.
Dana Stroul, former deputy assistant secretary of defence for the Middle East, now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said Trump’s bellicose shift on Iran was at odds with his earlier stance on foreign policy.
“Trump has repeatedly stated his preference for diplomacy, his desire to make a deal, and his desire to be judged by the wars the United States does not enter into,” she said.
“And here we are, five months into the second administration, and he has entered the United States into direct conflict with Iran, absent a serious articulation to the American people about the intelligence picture, absent serious engagement with Congress . . . about authorising the use of military force.”
Chris Van Hollen, a Democratic senator from Maryland, expressed his anger, signalling the kind of domestic attacks that Trump can expect in the coming days.
“The war in Iraq was also started under false pretences,” Van Hollen said. “The United States has rightly supported Israel’s defence, but it should not have joined Netanyahu in waging this war of choice.”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic New York congresswoman, called for Trump’s impeachment for taking military action without the US Congress’s authorisation. Republican congressman Thomas Massie wrote about Trump’s decision to attack: “This is not constitutional.”
But some other Republican lawmakers hailed the move.
“The president’s decisive action prevents the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, which chants ‘Death to America’, from obtaining the most lethal weapon on the planet. This is America First policy in action,” said House of Representatives speaker Mike Johnson.
Trump’s action against Iran came with 51 per cent of Americans disapproving of his performance in office, and 46.9 per cent approving, according to the Realclearpolitics.com polling average.
Aaron David Miller, a former US state department negotiator in the Middle East now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Trump had “a lot of margin politically” to keep fighting, especially if Iran retaliated.
But he also warned that the window may not be open for long, especially if the war widened or sparked a new energy crisis. “How that would play with Americans being killed, and the price of oil over $100 a barrel, is another matter.”
Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, put it another way: “This was a massive gamble by President Trump, and nobody knows yet whether it will pay off.”
