President Trump may be a second-term president now, but he hasn’t lost his penchant for surprising critics and supporters alike. No one could be sure what he would do about the Israel-Iran war. Had he played a role in setting it up, by duping the Iranians into believing he wanted to strike a “deal” to arrest their nuclear-weapons program? Or was he negotiating in good faith and blindsided by Israel? Would he involve America in the war or not? And if he did, would regime change in Tehran be his goal?
For a week debate raged over these questions, with rival camps on social media deriving their most desired or most feared conclusions from contradictory statements the president had made. In the end, however, his actions were consistent with his own record. He has said since he first entered politics that Iran must never obtain nuclear weapons.
And he hasn’t been shy about using force, including against Iran when he ordered the attack that killed Qasem Soleimani in his first term. He bombed Syria in 2017 and had bombed Yemen as recently as this spring. What’s characteristic of Trump’s use of force, however, is that it usually doesn’t involve a prolonged campaign. (An exception is the effort against ISIS during his first term.)
Trump bombed Iranian nuclear facilities on Saturday evening, and by Monday evening was announcing a ceasefire between Iran and Israel. He ended the war almost as soon as he got America into it, a feat that confounds hawks and doves alike. The former wish the war had been longer, the outcome more certain,
and the conclusion the end of the ayatollahs’ regime. The latter wish Trump had never allowed the war to happen—assuming he had the power to stop it—or that he’d kept America out of it. Now the raging debate online is over who won the policy battle. Is a two-day war (for us) consisting of one bombing sortie actually a war? It defies the grandiose claims of both interventionists and non-interventionists, who were more alike than not in assuming that regime change was in the offing and the stakes were much the same as those on the table in the 2003 debate over the Iraq War.
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