Donald Trump claimed during his 2024 campaign for president that America had fought “no wars” during his first presidency, and that he was the first president in 72 years who could say that.
This was not, strictly speaking, true. In his first term, Trump intensified the air war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, ordered airstrikes against Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime in response to chemical weapons use, and escalated a little-noticed counterinsurgency campaign in Somalia. But in those cases, Trump could say, with some justification, that he was just dealing with festering crises he had inherited from Barack Obama.
Likewise, the president has repeatedly claimed that the wars in Gaza and Ukraine never would have happened had he been president when they broke out, rather than Joe Biden. That’s a counterfactual that is impossible to prove, and he may have been overly optimistic in his promises to quickly negotiate an end to both those conflicts, but it’s fair to say that both are wars Trump inherited rather than chose.
This time, it’s different. This time, it’s Trump’s war.
On Saturday night, the United States bombed three nuclear sites in Iran at Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan, ending weeks of speculation about whether the US military would join the Israeli war on Iran that began more than a week ago.
The past few days in Washington have felt a bit like the battles over intelligence in the lead-up to the war in Iraq, but run in fast-forward. Rather than pressuring intelligence agencies to justify his preferred course of action, Trump has simply overruled them. Rather than building a case before Congress and the UN for the need to act, he’s simply ignored them.
Trump argued that Iran brought the attack on themselves by not taking the deal he was offering — but negotiations were ongoing at the time Trump abandoned the diplomatic path. Trump endorsed the Israeli assessment that war was necessary because new information showed Iran was “very close to having a weapon.” But this contradicts the very recent statements from his own intelligence agencies and director of national intelligence. According to the Wall Street Journal’s reporting, officials in these agencies were not convinced by Israel’s new evidence that something dramatic had changed in Iran’s nuclear program. It also contradicts Trump’s own statements from earlier this month when he publicly discouraged Israel from attacking Iran, saying it would derail his efforts to negotiate a new nuclear deal.
It’s hard to overstate just how fast the Trump administration’s policy has shifted. Just a month ago, Trump appeared to be giving Netanyahu’s government the cold shoulder, pursuing direct diplomacy with Israel’s staunchest enemies – including Iran – and cozying up to governments in the Gulf that plainly had no appetite for a new war.
Now Trump has not only endorsed Netanyahu’s war; he has joined it, and boasted in his brief statement from the White House on Saturday that the two had worked as a team like “perhaps no team has ever worked before.” He ended his speech with “God bless Israel” along with “God bless America.”
Tonight was also a major blow to those on the right, as well as some on the left, who hoped that the Trump administration would usher in either a new era of military restraint or a shift in priorities away from the Middle East toward China. (The US has now relocated military assets from Asia for this war.)
There’s still a lot we still don’t know, but it’s fair at this point to say that this is a war of Trump’s choosing.
Trump’s extraordinary gamble
In his statement from the White House on Saturday night, Trump said that the operation had been a “spectacular military success” and that the enrichment facilities had been “totally obliterated.” For the moment, we don’t have corroborating evidence of that.
Israel had mostly avoided striking these sites itself. Only the US has the powerful GBU-57 “bunker buster” bombs that can destroy Iran’s most security nuclear sites, particularly the underground uranium enrichment facility at Fordow, and only the US has the aircraft that can carry them.
US officials told the New York Times that US bombers dropped a dozen bunker busters on Fordow on Saturday. Many experts believe the facility would be difficult to destroy and require multiple strikes, even with those bombs. Doubts about whether Fordow could be destroyed were reportedly one reason why Trump hesitated in ordering these strikes.
In his statement, Trump also implied that this was a one-off operation for now. Speaking of the pilots who dropped the bombs, Trump said, “hopefully we will no longer need their services at this capacity” but also threatened that if Iran did not “make peace” then “future attacks will be far greater and a lot easier.” He added: “There are many targets left.”
The hope appears to be that Iran will now be forced to cut a deal to entirely give up its nuclear program. But an Iranian regime mindful of its own legitimacy is also likely to retaliate in some form, possibly by targeting some of the roughly 40,000 US troops deployed around the Middle East.
The hope may be that these will be limited tit-for-tat strikes like those that followed the US assassination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani in 2020, though subsequent assessments have found that those attacks did more damage than was initially thought and could easily have killed far more US troops.
In any event, the Iranian regime is far more desperate now, and once the missiles start flying, it could get very easy for things to escalate out of control.
If Iran has any remaining enrichment infrastructure, either at these sites or hidden elsewhere throughout the country, the country’s leaders may now feel far less hesitation about rushing to build a bomb. There was long a view that Iran’s leaders preferred to remain a “threshold nuclear state” — working toward a bomb without actually building one. In this view, they believed that their growing capacity to build a weapon gave them leverage, while not actually trying to build one avoided US and Israeli intervention. That logic is now obsolete.
It’s also not clear that Israel simply wants nuclear concessions from the Iranian regime. While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that new intelligence about Iran’s nuclear capabilities was the reason for starting this war, it’s been clear both from the Israeli government’s rhetoric and choice of targets that this is a war against the Islamic Republic itself, and that regime change may be the ultimate goal. Trump didn’t mention regime change in his statement, but he has now committed American military power to that Israeli war.
So far, this war has been characterized by stunning Israeli tactical successes, as well as the seeming impotence of Iran and its once vaunted network of regional proxies in its response. (Though it’s unclear how long Israel’s air defense system can keep up if Iranian strikes continue at this pace.) This may have emboldened a president who has backed off of actions like this in the past, convincing him that striking Iran’s nuclear program now would be effective and that the blowback would be manageable.
It’s quite a gamble – and this time he will have no one else to blame if it doesn’t go as planned.
