The Memo: Trump grapples with prospect of all-out Israel-Iran war
President Trump faces a volatile, fast-moving global crisis as Israel and Iran teeter on the brink of all-out war.
The situation is shifting by the moment in the wake of Israel's attack on multiple sites in Iran in the early hours of Friday, local time. Iran launched a retaliatory barrage against Israel later on Friday.
Iran's ambassador to the United Nations said that Israel's initial attacks had killed 78 and injured more than 320. Iranian officials have said they regard Israel's actions as a declaration of war.
There has been no such explicit declaration from the Israeli side, but clearly the two nations are in the middle of a grave clash that could easily spiral even further.
Such a confrontation has the potential to scramble American politics, too.
In some ways, it already has.
The price of oil spiked as soon as the Israeli attack happened, rising by more than 8 percent at one point on Friday.
An elevated oil price for any significant length of time could feed inflation and dampen economic growth. That unpleasant combination is one reason why the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by roughly 1.8 percent on Friday. The broader based S&P 500 declined by more than one percent.
To be sure, a cooling of tensions between Israel and Iran could happen, calming oil prices and producing an instant rebound on the financial markets. But such a de-escalation is far from certain. The more negative scenario — military actions by two foreign nations causing economic trouble in the U.S. — would be an especially galling development for Trump.
Then there are the intertwined issues of Trump's general attitude toward Israel, his pursuit of a fresh nuclear deal with Iran, and his broader skepticism of interventionist military policies overseas.
Trump is on one level a fervent support of Israel. He often boasts to pro-Israel crowds about the actions he took in his first term, including moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and facilitating agreements to normalize relations between Israel and two Gulf nations, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.
But Trump has had a checkered relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump reportedly took umbrage at Netanyahu accepting former President Biden's victory in the 2020 presidential election. In a 2023 speech, Trump complained that Netanyahu had 'let us down' by backing out of what Trump said was a planned joint action to kill Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani. The U.S. went ahead and killed Soleimani.
In Trump's second term, the president pressed Israel to agree to a ceasefire in the first couple of months of his term. But he also outraged Palestinians and their supporters by suggesting Gazans could be pushed out of the strip of land that is home — which Trump proposed could be redeveloped as a tourist destination.
Similar complexities surround Trump's suggestion that there could be a new nuclear deal with Iran.
He had excoriated the 2015 deal that was made during former President Obama's tenure, withdrawing the United States from it in 2018, during his first term.
But he has recently been pursuing a new agreement, and at one point it was reported that the U.S. might be willing to countenance some element of uranium enrichment on Iranian soil. Trump has more recently said that is not the case.
The latest round of talks involving Trump's negotiator Steve Witkoff and Iran's foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, had been set for Sunday. Trump, on Thursday at the White House, responded to what were then rumors of an Israeli attack on Iran by saying, 'I don't want [Israel] going in, because I think that would blow it.'
When the attack went ahead, there was instant speculation that Netanyahu was seeking to vaporize any hope of a U.S.-Iran deal.
This thesis was strengthened in the immediate wake of the attack when Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a statement emphasizing that 'Israel took unilateral action against Iran.'
But that all changed by the next day.
Trump, always sensitive to any suggestion that he has been outflanked or sidelined, seemed to take exception to a Wall Street Journal reporter's question about whether the U.S. had been given a 'heads-up' by Netanyahu, insisting that the White House knew all about the attack in advance.
Some of his allies also advanced the idea that the earlier expression of misgivings had been a tactical sleight-of-hand intended to make the Iranians think an Israeli attack would not come.
In any event, the Iranians have now pulled out of the talks. Trump, on Truth Social, posted that he had offered Iran the chance to reach a new deal in recent months 'but they just couldn't get there. Now they have, perhaps, a second chance!'
In the short term, it appears extremely unlikely that Iran would sign onto a deal on Trump's terms in the wake of an Israeli attack. Such a move would surely look to many in the Islamic Republic and the rest of the Middle East like a humiliation.
Trump is also navigating between his instinctual backing of Israel and his more isolationist tendencies. Both impulses have their advocates in different parts of the Republican universe.
Among office holders, the views expressed in recent days by Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) were typical. Graham said that if Iran continued to balk at a nuclear deal, the U.S. should 'go all-in to help Israel finish the job.' Cruz said, 'Israel is acting to defend itself. I stand with Israel.'
But in the broader MAGA universe, prominent figures including Tucker Carlson and Matt Walsh are exponentially more skeptical.
Carlson inveighed against 'warmongers' who wanted 'direct US military involvement in a war with Iran,' on X on Friday. Walsh, on the same platform, wrote, 'Israel is its own country and perfectly capable of taking care of itself. We do not need to be involve in this and should not be.'
While some dismiss Carlson and Walsh as mere media figures, they have a combined X following of roughly 20 million people.
The political impact of the current crisis is impossible to predict at this point. It is certainly possible that it could rebound to Trump's advantage, especially if the intensity of the confrontation wanes quickly.
In the very short term, Friday's escalating crisis in the Middle East saw a big story from the previous day that was to Democrats' advantage – the handcuffing of Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) after he sought to question Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem – fade toward the margins.
But there are dangerous waters churning, and any missteps by Trump could cost him dearly.
The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.
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