President Trump is pumping the brakes, at least for the moment, on direct U.S. engagement in Israel’s assault on Iran.
On Thursday, Trump determined that he would make a “decision on whether or not to go within the next two weeks,” according to a statement read by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
Trump had also determined there was “a chance for substantial negotiations that may or may not take place with Iran in the near future,” Leavitt said.
But that pause could be unpaused at any moment, given Trump’s mercurial nature, the volatility of the situation in the Middle East and the voices within American politics arguing that the time is ripe for the U.S. to deliver a decisive blow on Israel’s behalf.
Trump on Friday said the two-week period was the “maximum” period that would elapse before he decided on the question.
That left the overall positive muddy — but it also gave Trump some room to maneuver.
And even his current equivocal stance shows him edging back toward his more anti-interventionist “America First” instincts.
That is a turn from earlier in the week, when Trump had seemed right on the brink of sending American forces in some capacity to back Israel’s assault.
At that point, he had bragged on social media that “we” had control of the skies over Iran and, in a separate all-caps post, appeared to demand Iran’s “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!”
Trump’s fuzzy position since then reflects several different facts.
First, for all his aggressiveness on the domestic stage, Trump has long been skeptical of foreign adventuring. In his first run for the presidency — a campaign that began a decade ago — he was critical of former President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, to an extent that was highly unusual for a Republican candidate.
Relatedly, Trump’s apparent flirting with war provoked significant pushback from influential figures within his Make America Great Again (MAGA) base.
The most prominent of these is Tucker Carlson, whose skeptical questioning of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) during a long interview went viral in recent days.
Carlson, former chief strategist Steve Bannon and widely-watched influencers on the online right such as Theo Von have all argued that the dangers of getting sucked into a new Middle East war are acute.
Then there is broader American public opinion to consider. There seems remarkably little appetite among the public for direct U.S. involvement in an attack on Iran. A Washington Post poll released on Wednesday found 45 percent opposed to U.S. airstrikes on Iran, just 25 percent supporting such action and 30 percent undecided.
So, it’s no surprise that Trump is returning to a long-established tactic of playing for time.
As some sardonic media reports have noted since Thursday’s “two weeks” pronouncement, this is a timescale he has cited in the past for things that have never ultimately happened.
One example was a promise to produce a detailed health plan that would purportedly replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA) passed under President Obama. He has also cited “two weeks” as a timeframe by which various facets of his views on the war in Ukraine would become clear.
On Iran, the president is to be sure under some pressure from those who believe this is a rare opportunity to strike at Iran, debilitate its uranium enrichment capacity for good and perhaps topple the nation’s theocratic leadership.
This school of thought holds that Iranian proxies and allies like Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and the former regime of Bashar Assad in Syria have been so worn down (in the case of the first two) or removed (in the case of Assad) that stronger action is possible today than would have been the case even a couple of years ago.
The Trump administration has its fair share of vehement supporters of expansive Israeli power.
For example, Trump’s ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, has in the past been supportive of Israel’s decades-long occupation of the West Bank, despite that occupation being deemed illegal by numerous interpretations of international law.
Huckabee also wrote Trump a message in recent days — which Trump duly published on social media — in which the ambassador suggested that Trump was positioned to act as a vehicle of divine will regarding Israel.
Yet another wrinkle in Trump’s approach is his seeming split with his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, on the question of whether Iran is actively seeking a nuclear weapon.
Gabbard’s belief flies in the face of the purported Israeli rationale for the attack on Iran. But on Friday, Trump was confronted by a reporter on the question.
The reporter asked what evidence Trump had that Iran is building a nuclear weapon and said U.S. intelligence had reported that it had not seen such evidence.
“Well then, my intelligence community is wrong,” Mr. Trump insisted. “Who in the intelligence community said that?”
When the reporter named Gabbard, Trump shot back, “She’s wrong.”
Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman, is renowned for her general skepticism of American interventionism.
Trump appears to yet hold out some hope of a breakthrough in talks with Iran. His envoy Steve Witkoff remains engaged on the issue.
Any major Iranian concessions at this point would allow Trump to claim — as he often likes to do — that his high-risk approach to diplomatic negotiation had paid off.
On the other hand, it’s hard to see how any deal between the U.S. and Iran would placate the Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu.
Indeed, the possibility of such a deal in the first place is seen by some as one of the reasons Netanyahu launched the assault on Iran in the first place.
For now, Trump has bought himself some time. But there are risks in every direction.
The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.
