Trump’s Iran strikes mark his biggest foreign policy gamble

WASHINGTON - With his large-scale attack on Iran, Donald Trump has seized a legacy-defining moment to demonstrate his readiness to exercise raw US military power. But in doing so, he is also taking the biggest foreign policy gamble of his presidency, one fraught with risks and unknowns.

Mr Trump

joined with Israel on Feb 28

to plunge into war with Iran, providing little explanation to the American public for what could become the biggest US military campaign since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Mr Trump has pivoted away from a preference for swift, limited operations like

January’s lightning raid in Venezuela

to what experts warn could be a more protracted conflict with Iran that risks escalating into a regional conflagration engulfing the oil-rich Middle East.

He has also set out a daunting objective of regime change in Tehran, pushing the idea that air strikes can incite a popular uprising to oust Iran’s rulers.

It is an outcome that outside air power has never directly achieved without the involvement of some kind of armed force on the ground, and which most analysts doubt will succeed this time.

“Most Americans will wake up Saturday morning and wonder why we are at war with Iran, what is the goal, and why US bases in the Middle East are under attack,” said Mr Daniel Shapiro, a former senior Pentagon official and US ambassador to Israel who is now at the Atlantic Council think-tank in Washington.

Mr Trump’s fixation on Iran has emerged as the starkest example yet of how foreign policy, including his expanded use of military might, has topped his agenda in the first 13 months of his second term, often overshadowing domestic issues like the cost of living that public opinion polls show are much higher priorities for most Americans.

His own aides have been privately urging him for weeks to focus more on voters’ economic worries, highlighting the political dangers ahead of this November’s midterm elections in which Mr Trump’s Republican Party is at risk of losing one or both chambers of Congress.

The brief pre-dawn video that Mr Trump posted on his Truth Social platform announcing what the Pentagon has dubbed “Operation Epic Fury” provided only broad reasons for going to war now with a country the US has tussled with for decades while averting all-out hostilities.

He insisted he would end what he said was Tehran’s ballistic missile threat – which most experts say does not pose a threat to the US - and give Iranians a chance to topple their rulers.

Mr Trump said that to accomplish his goals US forces would lay waste to much of Iran’s military as well as deny it the ability to have a nuclear weapon. Iran denies that its nuclear programme has military aims.

Dashing hopes for diplomacy

Mr Trump’s sudden resort to force, using huge US military assets built up in the region in recent weeks, appeared all but certain to close the door for now on diplomacy with Iran. The latest round of

nuclear talks in Geneva

on Feb 26 failed to achieve a breakthrough.

Some Trump aides have previously suggested that he might be able to bomb Tehran back to the negotiating table to force deep concessions. Instead, Iran responded on Feb 28 by launching missiles at US allies Israel and oil-producing Gulf Arab countries.

Mr Trump’s focus in the video on the urgency of the threat posed by Iran’s ballistic and nuclear programmes had echoes of the case President George W. Bush made for war against Iraq in 2003, which later turned out to be based on faulty intelligence and false claims.

Mr Trump’s assertion in his Feb 24 State of the Union address that Iran will soon have a missile that can hit the United States is not backed by US intelligence reports, according to sources familiar with the assessments, and experts have also cast doubt on his aides’ recent claims of Tehran’s ability to quickly advance its nuclear capabilities.

With the Feb 28 strikes, Mr Trump, who had originally threatened to strike Iran in January in support of street protesters facing a violent crackdown, also erased all doubt that part of what he seeks now is regime change in Tehran.

But analysts question whether Mr Trump, who has ruled out deploying US troops on the ground, has a strategy that could unseat Iran’s longtime cleric-dominated government, which has proved resilient in the face of crippling sanctions and periodic mass protests.

The first wave of strikes mainly targeted Iranian officials, a source familiar with the matter said. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was not in Tehran at the time of the attacks and had been transferred to a secure location, said a source with knowledge of the matter.

However, several senior commanders in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and political officials have been killed, an Iranian source close to the establishment said.

Even if the strikes do succeed in eliminating top leaders, that could have the unintended consequences of sowing chaos across a sprawling nation of 93 million or even lead to a military-run government that might be even more intransigent with the West and oppressive to its people, analysts said.

“He wants to change the government,” said Mr Jon Alterman at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a think-tank in Washington. “But it’s hard to change the government from the air. It’s hard to change the minds of Iranians through the air.”

Mr Tyson Barker, a former senior US official who is now with the Atlantic Council, said Mr Trump’s call for the Iranian people to rise up was also not likely to work.

“They’re really exposing these poor Iranian people by saying, ‘Stand up and overthrow your government. We got your back’,” Mr Barker said.

Appetite for military risk

Mr Trump, whose appetite for military operations has grown since the start of his second term, received briefings ahead of the Iran strikes that not only delivered blunt assessments about the risk of major US casualties but also touted the prospect of a shift in the Middle East in favour of US interests, a US official told Reuters.

Mr Trump appears to have been emboldened by

the US bombing

of Iran’s main nuclear facilities in June, which he considered a major success, and the in-and-out raid that captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in January and has given the US considerable sway over the OPEC country’s vast oil reserves.

He may have forced his own hand with Iran with his frequent threats of military action while building up a huge naval force that he could not sustain indefinitely in the region.

Analysts see Iran as a much tougher, better-armed foe than Venezuela, even though its air defences and missile capabilities were severely degraded in joint US-Israeli strikes in June.

“Iran is a more formidable military power, and even what the response is right now in the Gulf - they’re willing to cross lines that they weren’t willing to cross before,” said Dr Nicole Grajewski, with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

But Mr Mark Dubowitz, chief executive officer of the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies, a nonprofit research institute considered pro-Israel and hawkish on Iran, said Tehran is in such a weakened state that it is worth Mr Trump taking the risks to curb Tehran’s nuclear capabilities.

Whether or not the Iranian government falls, he said severely degrading Iran’s nuclear and missile programmes could be a victory for Mr Trump. REUTERS