By Johnathan Tobin
(JNS) — Donald Trump appears to have fooled both his friends and foes. And he has done something none of his predecessors dared to do. With a single stroke, his orders to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities may well have altered the path of history. The Islamist regime’s goal of building a nuclear weapon with which it could destroy Israel, intimidate America’s allies in the region into subservience and threaten the rest of the West with which it continues itself to be in a religious war is effectively finished.
After 20 years during which American presidents have variously ignored, appeased or actively aided the Iranian threat, Trump has essentially broken the pattern set down by the American foreign-policy establishment. Just as he did in his first term by moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights and understanding that the Palestinians should not be allowed to veto peace between the Jewish state and Arab states via the Abraham Accords, he has now extended that streak to his second term with respect to Iran.
The questions to be asked about this involve more than just the ones focused on next steps in the current conflict or if the president’s strategy will prompt Iran to finally recognize that it must give in to his demands or send the region spiraling into an even more dangerous and bloody war.
An indispensable man?
At this point, it’s appropriate to ponder whether any other recent American president or likely commander-in-chief would have done as he has done. If the answer is “no,” then it’s fair to say that Donald Trump has still proven to be not only a political and presidential outlier in many respects; he has also proven to be an essential figure in modern world and Jewish history.
To note that is not to excuse his personal faults, his often-hyperbolic modes of expression, the way at times he plays fast and loose with the truth or his sometimes-inconsistent policy shifts. Nor does it excuse his lack of interest in ideas or a strong base of knowledge in history, flaws that can influence his choices. But, although the cemeteries are, as Charles De Gaulle said, “filled with indispensable men,” it may be that Trump comes as close to one as any other recent world leader.
With respect to Iran, he spent his first few months in office speaking and behaving as if the foreign policy of his second administration would resemble more that of Barack Obama or Joe Biden than that of his own first term. But it turns out that it was all a ruse or, at the very least, a thorough rethinking of how American diplomacy is supposed to work. The president gave Iran’s leaders a chance to engage with the United States to resolve the dispute over its retention of a dangerous nuclear program. However, to their great surprise, as well as to that of most onlookers, he did not do so, as his predecessors did, in order to allow them to hold onto it with minimal concessions or to run out the clock with endless delays in order to achieve the same outcome.
Instead, he meant what he said when he declared that he was giving them two months to negotiate a way to back down and give up their nuclear ambitions, and that if they failed to give him what he wanted, they would regret it. And this is exactly what has happened.
Ending the nuclear threat
By ordering U.S. forces to strike at nuclear targets with the sort of weapons that only the American military possesses — 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs and the U.S. Air Force B-2 bombers that can drop them on targets such as Iran’s mountainside Fordow uranium-enrichment plant — Trump has done more than tipped the scales against the Islamist regime in the current conflict. His actions make it a given that, no matter what happens in the coming days and weeks, the Iranian nuclear threat is effectively over for the foreseeable future.
No matter what Iran’s terrorist forces and allies may attempt to do to strike back at the United States and continue to rain down missiles on the Jewish state, the chances of its nuclear project’s surviving are likely to be effectively zero. After decades of work and the expenditure of vast sums by this theocracy, the odds of its being able to repair or rebuild what it lost in the last 10 days are very long indeed. A regime that was already on the verge of an economic, political and military collapse, and which is under severe sanctions by the United States, simply won’t have the wherewithal to undo the damage done by the Israeli and American strikes, even if this war ends soon.
This is an enormous accomplishment for both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who made the struggle to avert an Iranian nuclear bomb a persistent theme of his leadership for the past 15 years. But while the Jewish state’s position on the necessity of ensuring that Iran’s nuclear program is destroyed has been a constant, the same cannot be said for American policy on the issue during this period. While all American presidents, even Obama, had paid lip service to the need to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, American actions toward Iran during the last decade have at times been more of an aid to Tehran’s ambitions than a roadblock.
Reasons for inaction
There have always been reasons for American presidents to avoid taking action on Iran.
Key among them has been an unwillingness to acknowledge Iran’s goal or what it would mean if Tehran obtained a nuclear weapon or was allowed, as it appeared to be already the case in recent years, to become a threshold nuclear power.
Many in the American intelligence community clung to the belief that “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s purported ban on Iran’s building a nuclear weapon was a genuine policy decision. Though it was proven false by the regime’s nuclear files obtained by Israel’s Mossad in 2018, those determined to give Tehran a pass — like current Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard — have continued to wrongly insist that its nuclear project is not a threat.
Others thought that dealing with the problem could also be postponed. That was the position of the George W. Bush administration, which was already embroiled in quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Obama went even further and negotiated a nuclear deal that not only postponed a reckoning on the issue, but essentially guaranteed that Iran would get a weapon once the sunset provisions in the 2015 accord expired by 2030. More than that, Obama and his former staffers who ran foreign policy during the Biden administration went even further and imagined that Tehran was open to a rapprochement with the West and believed that it should replace Israel and Saudi Arabia as the lynchpin of U.S. policy in the region.
Like them, some of Trump’s “woke right” supporters, such as former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, were also advocating for a soft response to Iran, either out of stubborn isolationist disinterest in stopping an Islamist enemy of the West or a malicious desire to see it harm Israel.
But not Trump.
Trump, alone among recent American presidents as well as other leaders on the international stage apart from Netanyahu, seems to have understood the peril presented by Iran and the necessity for action.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, a senior contributor for The Federalist, a columnist for Newsweek and a contributor to many other publications. He covers the American political scene, foreign policy, the U.S.-Israel relationship, Middle East diplomacy, the Jewish world and the arts.