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Will he or won’t he? Donald Trump prides himself on being unpredictable. “I may do it,” he said on Wednesday when asked if he was planning to strike Iran. “I may not do it . . . Nobody knows what I’m going to do.”
In practice, however, Trump is often easy to decode. Judging by his first term and the first 152 days of his second, Trump’s most extreme rhetoric is frequently a precursor to its opposite. Ask Kim Jong Un. In 2017 Trump vowed “fire and fury” on North Korea’s “rocket man”. The next year, he disclosed that Kim had sent him “beautiful letters and . . . we fell in love”.
No deal came of it. Could Iran be in for a similar metamorphosis? Trump’s signals are mixed. But his declaration on Thursday of a two-week timeout suggests he is inching away from war. In Trump’s world, two weeks is a long time. Yet he can also turn on a dime.
Repudiation of the 2003 Iraq invasion was one of Trump’s most effective ways of signalling a populist break from traditional Republicanism and the wars of the Bush family dynasty. But that sprung from his reading of the public mood, not from some humanitarian impulse. His record shows he is happy to break any pledge if he senses an advantage.
Does he think a US mega-bomb strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities would be quick and effective? Or would it trigger Iranian escalation? The first option would be hard for Trump to resist. But increasingly urgent warnings from Maga influencers about the second have clearly given him pause. Nothing would scream “forever war” louder than the US joining Israel’s onslaught on Iran’s regime. The bitter fight between restrainers and neoconservatives for Trump’s ear is thus the greatest test so far of how much war he is prepared to risk.
The now famous two-hour interview that Tucker Carlson, the ultra-Maga former Fox News anchor, conducted this week with Ted Cruz, the Texan senator and Trumpian henchman, was in practice a shouting match. Each claimed to be the keeper of the Trumpian flame from polar opposite positions. Trump’s managerial style is usually to encourage squabbling between underlings. That enhances his role as the decider.
But it is Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, not Trump or his loyalists, who has been dictating the agenda. For three decades, Netanyahu has been warning that Iran is close to nuclear breakout. He convinced Trump in 2018 to pull out of Barack Obama’s US-Iran nuclear deal that eased sanctions in exchange for limits on Iran’s nuclear programme. Though Netanyahu claimed Tehran was breaking the deal, the suspicion was that he feared it was working.
Trump’s ensuing campaign of “maximum pressure” on Iran yielded his boldest military action to date — the 2020 assassination of Qassem Soleimani, the regime’s most powerful commander. Trump only ordered the strike, however, after the CIA assured him that Iran’s retaliation would be muted.
The clearest battle for Trump’s mind is thus between Netanyahu, who needs the US to finish the war that he started, and Steve Bannon, whose War Room daily show is a direct line to the Maga base. Bannon’s case is that Trump should not be tricked into an Israel First policy.
Sixty-one per cent of Republicans told a YouGov/Economist poll this week that they wanted Trump to negotiate with Iran. Just 18 per cent disagreed. This almost exactly matched America’s response as a whole. The spectre of soaring oil prices and supply chain disruptions is what prompted Trump’s pause. If the Pentagon cannot guarantee Trump that its 30,000lb bunker-busting bombs would demolish Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Netanyahu will have to find other tools of persuasion.
He is backed by a familiar chorus. The loudest of these is Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, whose star anchors, including Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, are nightly banging the war drums. Had Rip Van Winkle fallen asleep in 2003 and awoken today, he would perceive little change.
The Fox network’s agitation for regime change — and the ease with which the network’s stars say it can be accomplished — is hard to distinguish from its case for toppling Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Other enthusiasts for war then and now, such as Lindsey Graham, the US Senate’s leading neocon, pitch nightly to Trump on Fox.
Few of the familiar figures who got Iraq so wrong paid much of a price for a blunder that eventually sank George W Bush’s presidency. But Trump does not fear them. Men such as Graham and Cruz have proved on every issue that they will toe the line of whatever Trump decides.
Here is also a rare moment when Russia’s Vladimir Putin and America’s European allies are saying broadly the same thing. Each is urging de-escalation. Trump is hearing a similar refrain from his royal friends in the Gulf. Israel’s leader is alone on the world stage arguing for war.
Netanyahu’s battle is for existential survival — that of his own political career. Trump’s instincts are equally ruthless. In the coming days, Netanyahu will spare no effort to persuade Trump that their interests are one and the same. It would be a surprise if Trump were knowingly to outsource his fate to another.
edward.luce@ft.com