Trump launches airstrikes on Iran's nuclear sites as threat of all-out war looms
Trump had campaigned on a promise to keep the US out of costly foreign wars and has consistently downplayed the value of intervention abroad. As recently as Friday, he told reporters he had no interest in deploying American ground troops to Iran, calling it 'the last thing you want to do'.
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Telegraph
28 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Netanyahu sees lifelong dream coming true as Iranian beast reels
For Benjamin Netanyahu the bombing of Fordow and the destruction of Iran's nuclear programme marks the best part of a life's work – and a promise kept to Israel. That it was US bombers that finished the job will make not a jot of difference. Iran's theocratic regime has been Bibi's obsession for the best part of four decades and few will see the destruction of its nuclear sites as anyone else's victory but his own. A week last Friday, he took care to remind people of this when Israel launched its first strikes against Iran. 'If I may, on a personal level, I've been watching this threat for over 40 years,' he told the nation. 'In 1982, I wrote in one of my books – that's three years, only three years, after the establishment of the regime of the ayatollahs – that the biggest threat faced by humanity and by us, our state, will be the terror regime of the ayatollahs.' On Sunday morning, on the international stage, he was busy praising the American effort ('Congratulations, President Trump. Your bold decision to target Iran's nuclear facilities with the awesome and righteous might of the United States will change history'). But the Israeli prime minister was bigging up the president safe in the knowledge that, at home, it was his name - not Trump's - that was being mentioned second only to God's. 'This morning, the world is a better and safer world,' said Bezalel Smotrich, Israel's messianic finance minister. 'Thank you to the Lord of the Universe. Thank you to Prime Minister Netanyahu … [oh, and] Thank you to President Trump'. Most Israelis only got the news when air raid sirens sounded at 7.30am and they got to the bomb shelters. In mine in central Tel Aviv, there was no outward celebration but relieved smiles broke across most peoples faces as they lit up their phones. Over the past week, there has been real anxiety here that Trump would chicken out and leave Israel to hang. The two week timeline set a few days ago by the president was widely seen as opening the door to a climb down. That mood has shifted dramatically. 'For me the biggest message this sends is that no one f---s with us,' a young South African Israeli told me after the blast doors opened. Where things go from here is anyone's guess but, make no mistake, Netanyahu, the ultimate political operator, has plans. His generals have been very careful over the last few days to stress in their morning briefings that the existential threat Iran poses to Israel is, not singular, but three pronged: nuclear, ballistic missiles and Oct 7 style terrorism. Yet elections loom in Israel (they must be held by Oct 2026 at the latest) and as the polls stood the day before the strike, Netanyahu was still trailing. He will no doubt aim to exploit the destruction of Iran's nuclear facilities to boost his prospects but - as happened to Winston Churchill after the Second World War - Israel may yet choose a different leader to build the peace, if indeed peace comes. How this would be taken by Netanyahu is not clear. Churchill turned to writing, painting and bricklaying but Bibi is a very different animal and has corruption charges against him to contend with, not to mention alleged war crimes. One Israeli commentator recently wrote that he 'he sees himself as a type of white knight fighting against the Iranian monster in order to save humankind'. His father was a famous Israeli historian known for his revisionism and Netanyahu is said to have been shaped by him. If he is remembered for slaying the Iranian beast, one suspects he will ultimately retire satisfied, no matter what else he faces.
Spectator
31 minutes ago
- Spectator
Trump is making the world a safer place
Strength works. It's a foreign policy lesson that sounds too simple to be true and too unequivocal to be wise, and yet there is much truth and a good deal of wisdom in it. Strength does not mean wanton thuggery or hubristic swagger, it must be considered, well-regulated and guided by reflection and sober analysis. But when it is properly deployed to clear and realistic ends, strength can achieve results that negotiation, compromise and avoidance cannot. Strength, when put in service of just goals, can sometimes be the preferable moral option, checking threats, risks and baneful intentions. At some point, US and European foreign policy elites are going to have to reckon with the fact that Trump keeps succeeding where they have repeatedly failed Donald Trump's decision overnight to bomb Iran's nuclear weapons programme is an almost textbook case in the effectiveness and virtue of strength. While we wait to learn just how much damage has been done to the Islamic Republic's uranium enrichment facility in Fordow, its sister plant in Natanz, and the nuclear technology and uranium storage site in Isfahan, it seems likely that, at a minimum, Tehran's plot to get its hands on nuclear weapons has been severely disrupted. The prospect of a nuclear-armed fundamentalist Shia state that proclaims 'Death to America', bankrolls terrorism against the West, and has designs to dominate the Middle East was a scenario too grave for any further delay. Trump has done what his predecessors ought to have done but for various reasons, not all of them excusable, did not. At some point, US and European foreign policy elites are going to have to reckon with the fact that Trump keeps succeeding where they have repeatedly failed, and does so by disregarding the assertions they state with unshakeable certainty. It was Trump who recognised Jerusalem as Israel's capital while brokering normalisation agreements between Israel and Arab states, a remarkable feat of balance and balls. It was Trump who tore up Barack Obama's naive and dangerous Iran deal and took out terror chief Qasem Soleimani. It was Trump who declared Communist China's systematic destruction of the Uyghurs a genocide and who convinced India and Pakistan to back down from their recent stand-off. Now it appears to be Trump who has prevented the rise of a nuclear Iran. You can decry his hostility towards Ukraine and its struggle to restore national sovereignty and expel foreign invaders. You can deride absurdities like his proposal to annex Canada or his decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico. The man is a pinless grenade tossed into one global crisis after another. It's impossible to know when he'll detonate and what the fallout will be. But sometimes he explodes in a way that hits the right target, takes out a threat that would yield to nothing else, and in doing so makes the world a safer place. This is one of those times. There will be blowback — there always is — and this could involve attacks by Iran or its proxies on US military bases, armed forces personnel or political leaders, but that is no reason not to have acted. A regime that kills and kidnaps Americans and funds front groups that do the same must be confronted. Trump's strikes might have wounded the tyrants in Tehran but they and their rule will have to be ended to remove the threat to the United States. Iran's preferred system of government is Iran's business, but that government cannot promote, fund or conduct terrorism against the United States, its allies or its strategic or commercial interests. 'Death to America' must be met with 'Death to the Ayatollah'. The strikes will suffice for now. They have not destroyed the regime but they have done the next-best thing: humiliated it. Strength works. It works even if the United Nations condemns it, the European Union wrings its hands, and the British foreign office pleads for restraint. It works despite what the academics say, what the NGOs demand, and what the journalists pronounce. It works whether the anti-American left howls, the isolationist right seethes, or Tucker Carlson cackles at the very thought. Strength works and, for some reason, leaders and policymakers have decided to allow Donald Trump to be the man who teaches the world that lesson once more.
New Statesman
31 minutes ago
- New Statesman
Trump's assault on Iran is a war without honour
Photo by Carlos Barria - Pool/Getty Images Modern nations not facing a mortal threat rarely, if ever, go to war without a high-flying moral justification. Until now. Trump's justification for going to war with Iran is that he will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. Period. No argument about the need to abolish Iran's cruel repressive regime. Nothing about human rights. Not a syllable about the glories of exporting democracy to an undemocratic land. Instead, Trump addressed the country after the American attacks on Iran Saturday night and weirdly 'congratulated' Benjamin Netanyahu on 'erasing the threat to Israel' with American help. He ended his remarks by muttering, as if receiving an Academy Award, 'and I want to just thank everybody and, in particular, God. I want to just say, we love you, God.' He then declared, 'God bless the Middle East, God bless Israel, God bless America.' No American president has ever led the country into war with such a lack of feeling, with such paucity of eloquence, with a piety so rote as to be transparently impious. But then again, no American president as divisive, undemocratic, criminal and inept as Trump has proven to be has ever led his country into war. Yet the flat-footed, uninspired, no-nonsense businessman's approach to plunging the country into armed conflict is, no doubt for many, a relief after the golden liberal claptrap that accompanied the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. The former was justified by oceans of dazzling liberal eloquence. Kennedy in his 1961 inaugural speech: 'Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.' He wasn't talking about the Peace Corps. Just four months later, he began to stealthily increase the number of American troops in Vietnam. Interventionist neoconservative foreign policy might be back in the news, but nobody does foreign intervention like the liberal elites. America might never have made war on Iraq if it had not been for the so-called liberal hawks at the time, most of whom worked in the media's most prestigious venues, where their tides of rhetoric justifying the invasion soaked the American psyche into compliant stupefaction. Liberal politicians followed suit. By contrast, Trump has never said that there is anything spiritually or historically exceptional about America. What is exceptional is America's military and economic might. His heartland followers, many of whom lost loved ones to the liberals' starry-eyed infernos in Vietnam and Iraq, are sick of being sweet-talked into oblivion, from an idealising domestic policy that excludes them, to seemingly high-minded foreign policy that amputates their limbs and gives them a medal and a pat on the back. They are being enraptured into another foolish and unnecessary war now not by hostility to Iran's brutal regime. They are as gratified by Trump's transactional approach to war as they are by his transactional approach to politics and society. Trump has likely been advised to prosecute a limited assault, as America did in the first Gulf war and later in Kosovo. Unlike then, he will strike exclusively from the air, and will keep to the air even in the event of inevitable retaliation. Unless a bomb or a gunman explodes in an American city. But then Trump would simply send in federal troops. Win-win, as they say about a successfully negotiated business deal. The idea, if Trump indeed is being instructed in it, that he can fight a limited war in Iran from the air offers the narrowest ray of hope. The vicious, self-serving idealism that enabled the country to invade and occupy Iraq in 2003 guaranteed a blinkered momentum that offered no hope. The difference between then and now is profound. There is, for one thing, no 2025 equivalent to A Problem from Hell, which was published one year before America invaded Iraq. Samantha Power's Pulitzer-Prize-winning bestseller, written from some fantastical mental lair of easy indignation, excoriated America's refusal to prevent various genocides, and all but called for American military intervention in such situations. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe The chapter on Iraq, where Power painted a portrait of an inept and spineless US, unable to locate Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons, had the effect of shaming liberal elites into embracing the Bush administration's lies about the existence of 'weapons of mass destruction'. Power herself was at first all for the invasion. Weeks after it began, she told the LA Times: 'That's what's so great about the fall of Saddam Hussein. Now we can actually put our money and power where our might has been so far.' The tussle between Trump and Tulsi Gabbard, his director of national intelligence, over whether Iran's nuclear capability was around the corner or years down the line was a ludicrous caricature of Power's depiction of the search for Saddam's chemical weapons, and of the later phoney hunt for weapons of mass destruction. Trump couldn't have cared less. Of course the most important difference between 2003 and now was the attacks on 9/11. Not only had America never been breached in such a way before, but the threat of terrorism that seemed to increase after the attacks created a universal depression and unease. Pulverising Iraq under the cover of lofty rhetoric about liberation in the name of democracy satisfied the American thirst for morally unexceptionable revenge. Eerily there is nothing like the pretext of a 9/11 behind Trump's bombing of Iran. But then there is also no American carnage, no invasion of 'aliens', no burning down of American cities, no antisemitic pogroms at universities. There are only Trump's fascinating lies, one being, as he said in his brief remarks to the nation, that Iran had killed 'hundreds of thousands' of people in acts of terror. Truth, the saying goes, is the first casualty of war. Peace, in Trump's America, is now the first major casualty of the death of truth. [See also: Where have all the anti-war Democrats gone?] Related
