Did Trump Just Help Israel Trick Iran?
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In the wee hours of Friday morning, Israel launched not merely a string of attacks on Iran, as had been the case with recent incursions, but the start of an all-out war , whose goal seems to be the destruction of not just the country's nuclear facilities but also its military command and, possibly, the Islamic regime itself.
The question now is what happens next. Iran has pledged to inflict “ severe punishment ” against Israel, but its first retaliatory strike, involving 100 drones , did little if any damage. Will Iran soon launch hundreds of ballistic missiles, as it has in the past? Will this trigger a wider war in the region? Will the US get pulled into the fight, despite President Donald Trump's deep reluctance to get directly involved in a war? And how will Israel's campaign—by far the largest and most ambitious it has ever mounted against Iran—reshape the dynamics of the entire Middle East?
Clearly the attack, which began in the early hours Friday, had been in the works for months. It involved more than 200 fighter planes dropping ordnance on 100 targets , wiping out command and control centers, killing several Iranian military commanders as well as top nuclear scientists, and damaging the vital uranium enrichment facility at Natanz.
Soon after the air raids began, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that this was only the first phase of attacks that could go on for days or weeks, for as long as it takes to destroy Iran's ability to threaten Israel's survival. He called the campaign Operation Rising Lion —a symbol of victory and divine protection in Hebrew mythology. Later in the day Friday, Israel's attacks on Iran had reportedly been resumed .
President Trump had urged Netanyahu not to launch this attack as long as his chief negotiator, Steve Witkoff, was engaged in talks to dismantle Iran's nuclear program through diplomacy. Witkoff and his Iranian counterparts were scheduled to hold their sixth round of talks in Oman this Sunday . Just hours before the attack began, Trump still publicly held out the possibility that the talks would succeed—although he also allowed that the prospects seemed dimmer than he'd thought a couple of weeks earlier . On Wednesday, he ordered the evacuation of nonessential US personnel from Iraq as well as American military families from bases throughout the Middle East. He did this in anticipation of a possible Iranian attack, which would presumably be launched in retaliation to an Israeli attack on Iran. Some took Trump's order as a bluff—part of a ploy to frighten Iran into accepting stiff demands, which it had previously rejected, in the talks. It turned out not to be a bluff. More than that, Israel launched the attack two days before the talks were set to resume.
It is not yet known whether Israel took this step without Trump's consent—which would have been all but unprecedented in the history of US–Israel relations. Soon after the attack, Marco Rubio , who holds the dual hats of secretary of state and national security adviser, issued a statement calling the attack “unilateral,” claiming that the US had no involvement in it, and urging Iran not to attack American targets as part of its very likely retaliation—as firm a distancing from Israel's actions as one could imagine.
However, Trump told the Wall Street Journal that he knew all about Israel's plan ahead of time, that he wasn't given a mother “heads-up.” It isn't yet known whether Trump gave Netanyahu a full green light, but it does seem that he didn't flash a red light, as he had done a month earlier.
Aaron David Miller, a former US ambassador to Israel, speculated on CNN late Thursday night that Trump's public plans to proceed with Sunday's talks in Oman may have been part of a ruse in order to keep Iran off guard, so the attack would be a surprise. Dennis Ross , another experienced Middle East hand, agreed. Iran's military chiefs and top scientists probably would have taken cover, had they expected an attack was coming. Air-defense crews might also have gone on alert; instead, not a single Israeli plane was downed.
One question, which will no doubt be examined in the days to come, is whether Trump knew about the timing of the attack. He was still saying, just hours before, that he preferred to let diplomacy play out before Israel drew the military card. Even if he knew about Israel's plan (almost certainly true), did he know about when it was going to occur—did he know Netanyahu was going to attack before the talks? That is, was Trump in on the ruse? If so, it makes him an unreliable partner to anyone wanting to engage him in sensitive arms control talks in the future. (This is one reason, among many, that Iran is likely to scoff at his plea, issued Friday morning, to return to the negotiating table and “ make a deal ” before Israel inflicts still greater damage.) If not, it suggests that Trump is unable to control even his closest ally.
What happens next? If Iran does retaliate with greater force, Trump will almost certainly help Israel shoot down the incoming missiles, drones, or planes. (This would be true of just about any American president.) In other words, the US will inevitably become involved in the war.
Last year, when Israel and Iran exchanged missile volleys, other countries—including Britain, France, and Jordan —also got involved in Israel's defense. It's uncertain, given that Israel started this round of the war, whether they will all participate again. If not, more of Iran's missiles will break through. If some of Iran's weapons kill Americans in Israel, Trump will be pressured to get involved in the war still more directly. The Iranians surely know this, and it may deter them from mounting such attacks, but rational thinking doesn't always prevail when passions swell and survival instincts turn desperate.
None of this would likely have happened if during his first term Trump hadn't scuttled the Iran nuclear deal, which President Barack Obama and the leaders of five other nations—Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and China—had signed with Iran back in 2015. The deal called for Iran to dismantle its nuclear program, in exchange for which the other countries would lift most (though not all) of the economic sanctions against Iran. The deal was working. By the time Trump with Drew from it in 2018, Iran had exported 97 percent of its enriched uranium, dismantled its plutonium reprocessing plant, and taken all the other steps required, including opening up its facilities to very intrusive verification procedures by international inspectors.
Trump said at the time that he hoped to negotiate a “better” deal with Iran, but in fact, there was no such thing to be had. For a year, Iranians sought other ways to lift the sanctions, which had been restored, to no avail. So they set about rebuilding their nuclear program. Until today's strikes, they were closer to building an atomic bomb than ever before.
A deal might have been made even now, except that Trump insisted that any agreement must prohibit Iran from enriching any uranium at all. Iranians demanded that they be allowed to enrich enough uranium for civil purposes, such as electrical power—and their case was compelling. (At various points in the last few months, even Trump has gone back and forth on whether to permit this.) The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty — written by the US and the Soviet Union in the late 1960s , entered into international law in 1970, and signed since then by 190 nations, including Iran—not only permits signatories to enrich uranium at very low levels, it enshrines this privilege as a right, and it requires nuclear-weapons states to assist them in obtaining the technology. Iranians argued a decade ago that they shouldn't be barred from an activity that the rest of the world was allowed as a right. Obama and the other negotiators, who initially pressed for an enrichment ban as well, conceded the argument, in part because they realized there would be no agreement if they didn't do so.
Given how much further the Iranians have been enriching uranium in the decade since Trump pulled out of the deal—in other words, given the stronger deck of cards that Iran held (to put it in terms that Trump should understand )—it was fantasy to expect them not only to dismantle their nuclear program but also to give up enrichment altogether.
Now, of course, Iran holds a much weaker hand, and it may be that accepting any sort of deal would be better than getting hit with the next several rounds of Israeli strikes. But for Iran to take such a deal would be tantamount to surrender—it's the kind of demand that only a defeated power might accept after the end of a war—and no leader, least of all the ayatollah, who calls himself the Supreme Leader, endowed with holy mandates, could do that and remain in power.
Netanyahu no doubt knows this, which is why it's a fair inference that having launched Operation Rising Lion, he will push for the goal of his dreams—the dismantlement of the Iranian regime. This could be accomplished in one of two ways, at least theoretically: the overthrow from within, as rebels realize the country's tattered military can no longer protect them, or more direct means. Whether or not this plan succeeds is another question. The regime is not popular with large segments of Iran's people, especially the educated urban population, yet foreign military intervention is less popular still .
Meanwhile, it cannot be denied that, whatever Iran decides to do, it enters this new stage of its venom-drenched relationship with Israel—dating back to the Islamic Revolution in 1979—in a staggeringly weak state.
In the past, Israel has been reluctant to attack Iran directly because Tehran's proxies along Israel's borders—Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, and various militias in Syria—could retaliate with intense force, at very close range, on Iran's behalf. Over the last year, Israel has pretty much wiped out Hezbollah, decimated Hamas, and witnessed the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad, Iran's ally, in Syria. Also, in October, during its last missile volleys with Iran, Israel destroyed the air defense systems protecting Iran's nuclear plants, air bases, and military infrastructure.
Netanyahu may have pushed for the attack now because he saw it as the last chance to get in a clean, massive hit before Iran reconstituted its air defenses.
It is also the case that, especially since Trump started his negotiations two months ago, Iran has accelerated its uranium enrichment program, to the point where it could achieve “weapons-grade” uranium in a few weeks. As Netanyahu admitted in his TV address Friday morning, it would take several months, possibly a year, for Iran to fashion the uranium into a weapon, but once the uranium was out of the reactors and into the various “weaponization” facilities spread out across the country, they would make for harder targets.
And it's possible that Netanyahu feared Trump would actually make a deal with Iran, one that allowed some enrichment. This would actually be a reasonable outcome, possibly a good one, if it was coupled with tight inspections and other restrictions. This would also have made Trump's nuclear deal closely resemble Obama's—which Trump has several times lambasted (incorrectly) as “ the worst deal in history ” and which the Israeli leader loathed.
For this reason, perhaps it was always unlikely that Trump would do a deal. Then again, having failed to end the Russia–Ukraine war, to make more than one trade deal (much less the 99 that he promised to make in his first 99 days), or to make any of his threatened tariffs stick, Trump may have been desperate for some kind of win—and Netanyahu, who has always opposed any kind of deal with Iran, fearing that it would draw Tehran into the international community, may have been fearful of just that.
Israeli officials said Friday morning that they acted now because they saw a “ window of opportunity ,” militarily and diplomatically.
If all goes as Netanyahu hopes, Rising Lion might be seen internally and by Israel's allies as a bold, triumphant move that removes the final sources of the country's existential threats for years to come. If things don't pan out that way, it could mean an intensification of the wars that have embroiled the region—and could now draw in the United States as well.
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