With Trump conflicted and Iran emboldened, vital bid to end regime’s nuclear drive is being botched |
This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly contradicted himself regarding the progress of the Iran war.
He has said that the war is won, just not won enough.
He has said that the Iranian regime has changed, replaced by a leadership that is less radical and very reasonable, but also that the current leadership, if it attains nuclear weapons, would blow up Israel and the region and create a “nuclear holocaust.”
He has insisted that Iran must be prevented from attaining nuclear weapons, and criticized his vice president for offering a deal under which Iran would be prevented from enriching uranium for only 20 years, and subsequently said that a 20-year limitation on enrichment would be sufficient.
He has set repeated deadlines for Iran’s surrender, or for its acceptance of US terms, or for its submission of more reasonable terms, and warned with multiple linguistic flourishes that otherwise the fighting will resume and Iran will be destroyed. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” he vowed last month, in the most far-reaching such threat. He has then repeatedly canceled those deadlines.
In such a confused and contradictory context, there is simply no knowing how, or whether, the war will continue. By his own account(s) on Tuesday, Trump was both an hour away from taking the decision to resume airstrikes on Monday, and/or had already taken the decision, but decided to hold off.
As far as most of the international community is concerned — and that includes much of the American public — the world would have been a far better place had the US and Israel not attacked Iran on February 28, because the regime has been able to leverage its control over the Strait of Hormuz to play havoc with global energy supplies. Any remotely competent strategic planning would have recognized this danger before the first airstrikes were launched and planned accordingly.
As far as most of the international community is concerned, by extension, the key imperative now is to reach some kind of accommodation with the regime that enables the stable reopening of the strait. But, of course, so long as the regime is in power, there can and will be no credible guarantees of stability.
Far worse, the essential goal with which the US and Israel went to war — ensuring that this regime........