Tag Archives: middle-east

(Versions of this first appeared at jns.org and Israelnationalnews.org))

In August 1990, days after Iraq invaded and conquered Kuwait, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher pressed President George H. W. Bush on taking decisive military action. Bush agreed, but when he at first deferred to the United Nations for support, Thatcher challenged him, and famously said, “This is no time to go wobbly, George.” Less than six months later, the United States and allies launched the Gulf War, and within a few weeks, Kuwait was liberated, Saddam’s forces were routed, and the Iraqi threat was, for a time, neutralized.

Donald Trump has gone wobbly. Lacking another world leader with the fortitude of Mrs. Thatcher, Mr. Trump lacks any counterforce and thus is torn between several of his more engaged advisors – some of whom are obviously pained and troubled by the deal with Iran – and his more isolationist advisors, who want to cut US losses and run. Across the world, Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer is the anti-Thatcher, Europe’s leaders are docile and primed for appeasement, Russia and China can sense American impotence, and the Gulf States are more afraid of Iran than respect the United States.

The only world leader who still wants to defeat the menace of radical Islam is Binyamin Netanyahu, who has now been set up by Trump as the scapegoat if the agreement with Iran fails, no matter the reason. It can fail because Israel will still not accept an Iran with extensive ballistic missile capabilities (something that Trump has now accepted), because Israel will not withdraw from the land it has freed from Hezbollah domination in southern Lebanon, because Israel cannot accept the remilitarization of Iran’s terrorist proxies, or because Israel is unconvinced of Iran’s sincerity in abandoning its nuclear weapons program.

Indeed, to anyone who does believe that Iran will voluntarily disavow its nuclear program I would gladly sell them a bridge in Brooklyn that can be renamed the Trump Bridge.

Trump’s concessions are quite flabbergasting. He has already conceded that the 60-day deadline is not final. The Iranian negotiators, masters of procrastination and obfuscation, are playing Trump and will simply delay as long as necessary, knowing the resumption of war is unlikely and especially having received sanctions relief that will enable them to feed their fighters and spread their terror.

More stunning are two admissions that Trump made during his press conference on Wednesday: that the United States never thought that Iran would close the Straits of Hormuz or launch attacks on the oil infrastructure of its Gulf neighbors.

It is hard to underestimate the level of unpreparedness this reflects. Was a US attack on Iran never war-gamed? The essence of war gaming is anticipating the possible responses of the enemy, who, after all, also has a say in how the war is conducted. Was this not done – or, worse, was it done, but Trump simply ignored it because he admittedly prefers to rely on his own instincts?

This fiasco was compounded by two great failures of the US military. The first was the inability to reopen the Straits of Hormuz to international shipping, dubbed Operation Project Freedom, which was aborted before it began. Ultimately it does not matter whether the Straits remained closed because of the United States’ lack of capability or lack of willpower to reopen them, willpower being an essential element in the conduct of warfare.

This failure emboldened Iran, which now knows that it can open and close the Straits at will, thus disrupting the global economy. Israel may soon be facing Iranian demands such as withdraw from Lebanon and Gaza, divide Jerusalem, or establish a Palestinian state – or Iran will close the Straits of Hormuz to world shipping. If that occurs, that will be a Donald Trump legacy.

The second failure – just as staggering – was the United States’ inability to protect its Gulf allies from Iranian attacks that caused extensive damage to land and infrastructure. It is incomprehensible that these Gulf kingdoms – purchasers of hundreds of billions of dollars in American weapons over the decades – could not protect their own territory. Even more egregious was the reluctance to respond in kind to Iran’s infrastructure, now rendered sacrosanct and off limits to attack, purportedly to allow the Iranian people a greater chance at prosperity once the regime collapsed. There is little chance of that happening now.

Trump going wobbly – when Iran was weakened as never before – has succeeded only in empowering and enriching Iran, heartening the enemies of America and Israel, and intimidating the Gulf states in casting their destiny with Iran and not with the West. And all to save a dollar a gallon in the price of oil or seriously plan on fighting history’s first casualty-free war or chase the chimera of retaining Republican control over Congress this autumn.

A sagacious Israel should realize the limits of American support and prioritize its own interests, as all countries do. This includes not only the judicious use of the word “no,” when the demand is made that we withdraw again from Lebanon but also our demand that the American military base outside Gaza be shuttered forthwith. There is absolutely no good that will come to Israel by having American forces on its soil. If anything, they will limit our freedom of action to fight terror.

That being said, the attack on Iran was still useful. It halted Iran’s march to the bomb and greatly weakened Iran’s proxies. Israel is far better situated now than before the war. But Iran saw and sees through Trump’s blustery threats, including the vacuities about resuming the bombing in sixty days. Bombing is a tactic, not a strategy; it would be helpful if Trump could articulate a strategy. Today Iran mocks him as it once did Obama.

Trump was so desperate for an agreement that had Iran asked the US to pay for 444 days of room and board for the American hostages it held in the late 1970’s, Trump would have paid, plus interest.

Donald Trump has a penchant for being liked, sometimes by the most unsavory people. Without a Thatcher to goad him into not going wobbly, he has gone wobbly, and bigly. He would be wise to learn from another saying of Margaret Thatcher: “If you set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing.”

That, for now, is Donald Trump’s Iran legacy. A lot of bombs bursting in the hot air of empty threats, curses, and braggadocio. Indeed, it wasn’t the “crazy lunatics” who surrendered, but the self-proclaimed “high IQ genius,” outwitted by a gang of murderous thugs, a surrender that has shamed the United States and strengthened the enemies of freedom.

What he does not realize is that the “Guardian of Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps” (Tehillim 121:4). The rest is in our hands, to live as G-d intended, as our existence is more secure than that of Donald Trump, or JD Vance.

(First published at Israelnationalnews.com)

It is prudent to be skeptical of anything Donald Trump says, whether it pertains to his “landslide” electoral victories or his sundry “peace” deals across the globe. This skepticism is triply warranted regarding the highly touted peace deal with Iran whose details are still largely unknown, speculative, fanciful, and exceedingly fluid. Undoubtedly, as the week progresses towards a signing ceremony, it will become increasingly clear that there is almost no meeting of the minds, except on one issue. Trump will boast that due to his remarkable negotiating skills, he has successfully pressured Iran into reopening the Straits of Hormuz, which of course were open to navigation before the current hostilities began on February 28.

In other words, Trump’s conduct of the war induced Iran to close the Straits, plunging the world’s markets into turmoil and driving up the price of oil precipitously. His management of the war including, it must be said without any glee, the underperformance of the US military that failed to reopen the Straits, has succeeded only in restoring the status quo ante with one major exception: Iran now realizes that it controls the Straits and can open, close, and regulate them with impunity, and full immunity from any consequences. 

Oh, yes, one more thing. Although details are still hazy, it is safe to say that Iran certainly expects that in exchange for its agreement to reopen the Straits (whose closure was a blatant violation of international law) it will receive multibillions of dollars of financial relief that will revive its battered economy and facilitate its support of terror across the region. 

Trump’s capitulation, no matter how he spins it, is truly Obama worthy, and Iran’s mockery of Trump and its characterization of the American “defeat” will irritate him no end, if not derail the agreement entirely. Personal pique is one of the most compelling factors driving American diplomacy in the Trump era. The irony, it should be underscored, is that Trump at his worst and dumbest is better than Biden at his best and Obama at his brightest. His visceral support for Israel is still present but we need not join in his delusions. 

Peace is not coming. Iran is not yet defeated, but it is greatly weakened, its vulnerabilities exploited and still exposed. The current war was necessary and worthwhile, even if Trump for his own reasons is aborting it, eschewing victory and reverting to the West’s embrace since World War II of stalemate instead of success, of kicking the can down the road in place of resolve and resolution, of appeasing evil because it has abandoned any understanding of objective morality, of good and evil. Europe’s amorality, coupled with its failed pursuit of material prosperity, placed it on a trajectory towards its own extinction. Obama’s statecraft was not much different, and now Trump’s partakes of the same. 

If the whole point of life is to make money and as much as possible, then war with Iran or any other evil entity is bad for business. Indeed, even acknowledging the power of ideology is counterproductive and so it is best to deny that any nation, including Iran, has any exterminationist motivation, and so that doesn’t exist even if it does. In Trump world, unwelcome facts are simply ignored, and harping on them is considered rude. 

The materialist will never comprehend the power of religious ideology and certainly not the depth of religion-based hatred. The fact of its existence is dismissed as “fake news.” And Trump has been both the victim of fake news and one of its leading disseminators. 

American and Israeli interests were bound to diverge at a certain point, and that point has arrived. Iran’s threat to Israel and the United States is existential but the US has the luxury of ignoring Iran for a longer period than Israel can. The fact that the Iranian regime has spent the better part of forty seven years humiliating the United States is of little moment. Iran has been governed during the last (almost) half century by essentially one regime with a depraved but consistent ideology, while the US has had eight presidents of different ideologies, backgrounds, objectives, and approaches. It is no wonder that Trump wishes to cut bait and run. Iran is weakened, for sure, but while it threatens Israel today, its threat to the US will be some other president’s problem. Obama’s policy was literally kicking the Iran problem down the road. For all his bluster and protestations, that is Trump’s policy today, maybe not tomorrow, but probably again the day after. 

Any sentient observer realizes that Trump, wearing his Obama mask, has succumbed to Iran’s hoary tactics of endless negotiation, conceding and then retracting, agreeing to a final deal and then insisting on one last concession from its interlocutors that undoes much of what was agreed to, and then not abiding by any agreement it does sign. If Trump really believes that Iran will ever willingly divest itself of its nuclear program or materials, then he is now, officially, the most dangerous man in the free world, not its leader. Iran, much like Trump did repeatedly in his years as a real estate developer, will sign something, and then weasel, haggle, threaten, litigate, and not pay up. He might even know this, not that it matters. As the American novelist Upton Sinclair once wrote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.” In Trump’s case, it is not his salary but his world view, his ambition, and his hubris that requires him to look away from Iran’s aggressions and its war against America.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if Trump allows himself to be deceived because the war is unpopular in the United States, or because he fears a Republican defeat in the midterms, or because he hoped to wage history’s first casualty free war, or because the American military has failed to achieve its war objectives despite the hype and spin. What does matter is that the US under Donald Hussein Obama allowed Iran to gain the upper hand in the Straits of Hormuz, could not reopen it despite the seeming disparity between the American military might and Iran’s decimated forces, and could even defend its own bases in the Gulf Arab states and the Gulf Arab states themselves. That does not bode well for them, or, for that matter, for Taiwan, or other US allies.  

As for us in Israel, we should be grateful for past, present, and future assistance from the United States, and certainly for their actions in the last two years that facilitated many of our successes, and particularly the debilitation of all our enemies and the projection of Israeli power on every front and into enemy territory. Sometimes, as with the biblical (and perhaps current) Amalek, the task of our generation is to weaken them when they can’t yet be defeated (as in Shemot 17:13). But we should not delude ourselves into thinking that our interests with the US are identical. We certainly should not constrain our actions against enemies who wish to destroy our State and murder Jews because of an agreement made between the US and Iran to which we were not a party and in which our interests were not primary or even secondary considerations. That would be insane. 

No nation waives its right of self-defense and no self-respecting nation allows its right of self-defense to be theoretical and not actual. This might require publicly calling out Mr. Trump and asking him “which American border towns would he allow to be rocketed, and how many US citizens would he allow to be murdered without any response because of geopolitical considerations?” 

That question neatly frames our dilemma, our options, and the untenability of demanding our restraint. We need not like Trump wearing an Obama mask and we need not acquiesce to its broader ramifications. Trump does not like war, and in truth, no sane person seeks war. But as George Santayana wrote, “only the dead have seen the end of war.” That is neither our fate nor that of the world, until the coming of Moshiach. Until then, we fight evil, even alone, even when the blusterers are tempted to slink away when the going gets tough, even when they are snatching defeat from the jaws of victory and boastfully tweeting about it. 

As little is real in Trump world, the immediate future and even the signing of a deal is uncertain. But in his kowtowing to evil, his abandonment of regime change and hope for the Iranian people, and his fantasy of forcing Israel to accept an agreement with Iran that inevitably leads it to a nuclear bomb, Donald John Trump is more like Barack Hussein Obama than he cares to admit.