The Netanyahu Trap

We are now in week three of the ongoing conflict between the United States (and Israel) and Iran. The fog of war means 100% certainty on what is happening on the ground is impossible, but we do have the social media equivalent of a foghorn to guide us partially through the miasma.

Namely, the American President, though what he has said has often been contradictory. Trump has at times claimed the war has been ‘won’ and that the Americans don’t need the help of their NATO allies. He even accused Keir Starmer of seeking to ‘join a war that has already been won’. THAT was done in response to reports that the UK was thinking of sending two aircraft carriers to the region, which Trump said ‘weren’t needed’.

But then Trump has reversed course and demanded his NATO allies send ships (including presumably the UK, whose ships ARE apparently now needed) to defend passage through the Strait of Hormuz and insinuated in an interview with the Financial Times that those allies need to be the ones to shoulder responsibility for the security of the straits because they are the ones who supposedly benefit from it rather than the US…

“It’s only appropriate that people who are the beneficiaries of the strait will help to make sure that nothing bad happens there…If there’s no response or if it’s a negative response I think it will be very bad for the future of NATO.”

Trump’s argument was seemingly based on everyone he was dealing with having as remedial a grasp of economics as he appears to have. His argument is that as the United States is an energy exporter who can meet its own needs, it doesn’t need the supplies that traverse the straits. Therefore, those who do rely on the energy supplies that transit the straits should take up the responsibility (and costs) of ensuring the waterway remains open to navigation.

Someone must have pointed out to him that the closure of the straits is driving up energy prices globally and that the United States will not be immune to the coming inflation shock. According to the Guardian…

“Trump wrote on Truth Social that the US would “hit and obliterate” Iranian power plants – “starting with the biggest one first” – if Tehran did not fully reopen the strait within 48 hours, or 23:44 GMT on Monday according to the time of his post”

Such an action would be a war crime, but I think everyone has given up expecting Trump to feel constrained by such pesky things as law and morality.

As for his European allies, their reluctance to get dragged into a war they regard as a massive mistake and that is massively unpopular with their populations has enraged him to the point he now derides them as ‘cowards’.

Perhaps he would have received a more positive response had he not spent the past fourteen months mocking, belittling and humiliating his allies whilst telling them to focus on being able to defend their own countries without his help from threats…threats which in recent weeks have included himself. He did after all threaten to invade Greenland, part of the Kingdom of Denmark, a NATO ally. After all, to support Trump in this war would represent an immense expenditure of political capital by the leader of any European nation, and given how blasé he is about the sacrifices American allies have undertaken in the past, many have likely concluded any such support will have been forgotten by him within days of it being provided.

I think all of this taken together tells us that his actions during the twelve-day war last Summer, and Iran’s feeble response, led him to start believing his own propaganda. After all, he has taken actions that he had been warned would lead to cataclysmic consequences and gotten away with it. The failure of the worst consequences to materialise seems to have only embolded him to take risks again and again in the foreign policy sphere.

Trump’s ideological and temperamental opposite, Barack Obama, did everything in his power to contain Iran’s nuclear aspirations rather than using force because he was aware of what could unfold following a direct confrontation with the Islamic Republic. Similarly, he preferred using diplomacy with his country’s enemies, believing that they were problems to be managed rather than problems to be solved through brute application of force.

Trump derided such an approach as weakness and in spite of getting elected on a ticket promoting isolationism, has been increasingly seduced by the temptation of wielding US might nakedly, shorn of the moral cloak his predecessors had deemed essential for the conduct of foreign affairs. Even though none of those predecessors ever lived up to the lofty aspirations they articulated, most understood the importance of the hypocrisy, that America be seen as the good guy.

Trump literally doesn’t care, though some may regard him shedding the hypocrisy as having a certain honesty to it. His intervention in Venezuela earlier this year when American forces swooped in and seized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife was the start. It wasn’t even framed as removing a corrupt regime or doing it for the people, Trump has been quite open about his desire to get his hands on Venezuela’s oil riches.

He then began threatening Cuba (which is on the verge of collapse due to the Americans tightening their economic blockade) and which is next on Trump’s ‘to-do’ list. Were it not for other world events, the seemingly inevitable collapse of the Cuban revolution under US pressure would probably be the top story right now. His motives, again, aren’t about the people but about affirming American dominion in its own backyard, its ‘Sphere of Influence‘ wherein the sovereignty of America’s neighbours in the western hemisphere extends only so far as they clash with the wishes of the American government.

But it is the war he has launched in Iran that has likely exposed the folly of his choices and his own arrogance. The Wall Street Journal article reports that Trump was warned about the likelihood of Iran closing the straits of Hormuz (in fact every discussion of a hypothetical war with Iran posed in the past two decades has highlighted this risk) by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Trump dismissed the warning on the grounds he felt Iran would capitulate before it did so.

It is not hard to guess that the reason he came to this conclusion was arrogance built on repeated successes on taking actions his predecessors had shied away from because of the potential consequences but which he had pulled off successfully, leading him to gamble one time to time too many. He told Keir Starmer in a recent call, when Starmer said he needed to consult with his team on a course of action that Trump was pressing him to take,

“I said you don’t need to meet with your team, you’re the prime minister, you can make your own, why do you have to meet with your team to find out whether or not you’re going to send some minesweepers to help us or to send some boats. I said you don’t have to meet with your team, it’s the same thing here.”

Which is Trump once again confirming that despite all the advice he is offered and the expertise acquired over decades of painstaking experience, he trusts the consul of one voice above all. His own, though this time it may have mislead him because as of the time writing Iran has NOT capitulated and the straits of Hormuz are most definitely closed.

The political danger for him is real. He got elected on a promise of no more foreign wars and on fixing the American economy. He undid both at a single stroke. Now for the third time this decade, there’s an inflation shock coming. The vibes from the American public outside his MAGA movement (which itself is splintering whilst trying to process the ideological contradictions of the war) are that of pure rage. This bodes poorly for the President, who may now face a blue tsunami come the mid-terms this November if he fails to contain the economic damage.

Democratic control of any part of the government will be a nightmare for him, as they will doubtless gridlock his agenda and subject his administration (hitherto given a free pass to do what it wants by a supine Republican party) to investigations and actual accountability.

Trump doesn’t do well with being held accountable, as his recent social media post celebrating the death of Robert Mueller (the man tasked with investigating purported Russian interference in the 2016 election) shows. His final two years in the White House maybe a deeply unpleasant time for him as a result.

Someone who is having a much better time though is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Fresh from flattening Gaza, Netanyahu spied an opportunity to pursue his dream of getting the United States into a war with Iran.

Netanyahu has said that Israel ‘didn’t drag the US into the war’ but I think the word ‘drag’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Flatter, argue, wheedle and maybe some haranguing could be more appropriate verbs for what likely occurred behind closed doors but he was definitely advocating it. He has always advocated for it, even as far back as 2012 when he lectured the UN about the threat posed with the implicit threat in the air that ‘something is going to have to be done one of these days…’.

Whereas Obama wished to manage Iran and hopefully wait out the Islamic revolution until better days, Netanyahu has always perceived an existential threat, arguing Iran sought nuclear weapons as a means of destroying Israel, which, in fairness to Netanyahu, IS a major foreign policy goal of the Islamic Republic.  Netanyahu opposed the deal Obama struck with Iran to manage their nuclear program, and he successfully lobbied Trump to withdraw from it.

And now that he has the war he has craved for years, he is doing everything he can to ensure the United States cannot easily get out of it by simply declaring victory. The annihilation of much of Iran’s leadership, including the Supreme Leader and major figures such as Ali Larijani has removed individuals with a measure of pragmatism (though that doesn’t excuse their otherwise brutal conduct in other spheres) and seen them replaced with uncompromising hardliners less interested in finding a way out than in exacting bloody retribution.

Then there was the Israeli strike on the South Pars oilfield, so critical to Iran’s infrastructure enraged the Iranian leadership, and they attacked the Ras Laffan liquefied natural gas facility in return. These facilities are supposed to be off-limits by unspoken mutual agreement, as their destruction would lead to years of rebuilding (and exceptionally painful consequences for the global economy in the meantime). Iran’s attacks on this facility, other energy facilities and civilian infrastructure in the Gulf Region, have enraged the Gulf States against Iran. Some reports suggest that the Gulf States which were previously pleading with the United States to NOT go to war, may now be advocating that the US finish the job it has started.

Iran has also reportedly begun charging oil companies and countries a toll to use the Straits, with one firm reportedly giving Tehran two million dollars for safe passage. Iran having effective control of the straits, extorting some whilst blocking others, would be an unacceptable outcome to the war for Trump.

There is also the danger that as a consequence of the war, Iran may begin a clandestine weapons program designed to achieve some measure of nuclear capability to forestall this ever happening again. It was the spectre of such a program that was the justification for the American and British invasion of Iraq over twenty years ago.

These potential outcomes buttress Netanyahu’s overarching approach: that the war will leave the Iranian regime too dangerous to leave in place by radicalising it. The logic of the conflict may thus compel Trump to follow through no matter the cost even as every other instinct he may have is telling him to declare victory.

He cannot easily simply stop the fighting now, as Iran would also have to stop and it will be hard to declare victory if they are still lobbing missiles all across the region.

It seems he’s trapped in a war of choice that has grown out of his control, hemmed in by the actions of his own ally who are desperate to ensure the US stays in the war as long as possible (preferably till the bitter end) and the actions of an enemy who cannot win but who are determined to deny Trump a victory. The President may instead be coming face to face with the consequences of his own ruinous hubris.