How Benjamin Netanyahu beat America First

New Statesman​

3 hours ago

'Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace,' Donald Trump told the world from inside the White House last night. Earlier that day, B-2 bombers had dropped their bunker-busting payloads on three Iranian nuclear facilities, marking America's entrance into the conflict between Israel and Iran. This is not peace through strength, but peace through war.
What happens now depends on the Iranian response. Trump's gamble seems to be that the attack will force a vulnerable Iran to negotiate (which they were doing before Israel assassinated their chief negotiator) because the mullahs know a long bombing campaign risks bringing down the regime itself. But that would mean Ayatollah Khamanei accepting the humiliation of bowing to American power.
The alternative is to attack. The 40,000 American troops in the Middle East have been told to prepare for retaliation. The Iranians could also hike the price of oil by attempting to blockade the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 per cent of the world's supply passes. That is why Trump wants this to be the end.
Escalation puts his administration's core purpose at risk. The neoconservative mind assumes that America can be insulated from its foreign wars. In contrast, America First sees war as inexorably linked to, and inevitably bad for, Washington's appetite to put Americans first. Hence Maga isolationists have spent the past two weeks lobbying against any strikes.
Where is that dissent now? Charlie Kirk, the online Maga influencer, posted: 'America stands with President Trump'. JD Vance stood beside the president as he gave his speech, even as Reuters reported earlier on Saturday that the vice president told senior Israeli officials that the US should not be directly involved in the conflict and that Israel was going to drag the US into the war. The lesson here is that loyalty to the Maga leader sits beneath any moral or strategic gripes someone in Maga might have with the president's decisions.
That dissent is rare means the Democrats can take up the anti-war mantle. Bernie Sanders read out news of the attack at a rally yesterday. The crowd erupted into the chant: 'No more war'. 'It is so grossly unconstitutional,' Sanders said, 'the president does not have the right'.
Sanders is correct: bombing a sovereign country is a declaration of war, a power that the constitution reserves to Congress. President Trump did not put much effort into winning over the public. Where were the interviews making the case for war? Persuasion was substituted by his own public musings as to whether he would give the order, which is illuminating because it suggests he sees war as something waged by himself alone, and not the nation as a whole. His nationalism, in other words, sits beneath his ego.
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It feels almost quaint to talk about the United Nations in 2025, but Trump has reduced those institutions designed to stop one country forcefully imposing its will on another to farce. Similar disregard for the UN in 2003 was at least accompanied by the pretence – at least partly down to the diplomatic efforts of Tony Blair throughout 2002 – that Bush cared enough about international opinion to enlist Colin Powell to plead the case at the Security Council. That pretence has been read its last rites. The President has not even tried to justify the strike in terms of self-defence.
The Labour government has said it supports the strikes, despite pushing diplomacy as the only appropriate course of action beforehand, raising the question: do they support the ends without the means, or do they now support the action simply because it has happened? That call for diplomacy now looks quixotic. Trump is a practitioner of power, not words. As he said this week, 'Europe is not going to be able to help in this'.
The timeline of events leading up to Saturday's strike punctures the idea that this was Trump's plan all along. In May he asked Netanyahu not to strike Iran so that negotiations could take place. But once Netanyahu ignored him, Trump's pure machismo need to be in on the action meant he forgave the snub and sent a fleet of B-2 bombers to Iran. The Israelis were reportedly told about yesterday's strike beforehand, and Trump even thanked Netanyahu personally in his White House speech.
If international law and diplomacy has lost, Netanyahu has won. He once again judged correctly that America would follow where he led. Remember Joe Biden's 'redline' over Rafah? Netanyahu invaded anyway. The alliance endured. Clearly it still does.
[Further reading: Where have all the anti-war Democrats gone?]
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