A war without objectives

Say what you like about Netanyahu, but he's known what he wanted for years

When I spoke to Once A Diplomat‘s Charlie Gammell last week about the strikes on Iran - childishly termed Operation Epic Fury - something that seemed already clear at that stage was that Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu might have different objectives. Netanyahu has sought, consistently and doggedly, for the downfall of the Islamic Republic of Iran. This objective gained additional urgency after Hamas’s October 7 massacre: whilst there is little or no evidence of operational involvement by Iran in the massacres (a US intelligence assessment from March 2024 concluded that Iran “did not orchestrate nor had foreknowledge” of Hamas’s attacks) there is no doubt that Hamas received material support from Iran and nor is there any doubt that Iran has been both a regional and a global menace, targeting Iranian citizens and supplying terror groups in several Middle Eastern countries.

Netanyahu’s desire to see the end of the Islamic Republic is problematic because he has never convincingly articulated what should take its place. The list of US presidents that declined to support Netanyahu in his goals, from George W Bush (who coined the term ‘Axis of Evil’ for Iran) to Barack Obama and Joseph Biden, all of whom decided not to join in with this idea, shows us that it is unlikely to be a partisan question and might be due to deeper problems. Even at the height of hubristic US neo-conservatism (e.g. the years 2003 - 2005) the Americans realised that removing the government of a vast country of nearly 100 million people, riven with complex regional and sectarian divisions, would bring untended consequences of the most dangerous kind. Consequences such as surging oil prices, attacks on Gulf neighbours, refugees spreading across the region and crises with former allies of the US, such as the United Kingdom and Spain. That’s all before we get to the bit where Iran slips into an epic fury of civil war.

Until Donald Trump. Or, more specifically, until the unbound second Trump presidency in which there are no grownups in the room where it happens, where his Secretary of Defense (or “War!”) is an intemperate second-rate Fox News host who believes that ‘woke’ culture has destroyed the US military and Republican politicians that have been consistently opposed to “foreign wars” are now enthusiasts for them. It is clear that Netanyahu has inveigled Trump into something that he doesn’t understand, largely by invoking FOMO. There is some risk to this characterisation: there is an antisemitic trope of the cunning Jew pulling the strings that control gentiles. I don’t believe that the world is controlled by the Rothschilds or George Soros, or that rootless bankers will have caused this war because of some clever short position. But it is clear that the current Israeli Prime Minister (who is of course, fairly unpopular in his own country) has been able to manipulate Donald Trump. Again, this is nothing to with Judaism: Trump is a fabulously, extravagantly stupid man who has been easily manipulated by a range of figures from Vladimir Putin to Xi Jinping to Kim Jong-Un to Jeffrey Epstein. Trump is not the first US president to be notably dim, but he might be the first notably dim US president to insist that he doesn’t need advisers, gatekeepers nor professionals running his government.

The results are here to see: all of the previous Presidents that Netanyahu tried to persuade to join him on an attack on Iran would probably have been aware that Iran would close the Straits of Hormuz in response. This is one of the most widely discussed possibilities in international affairs. If you do a Google Search on this, limiting results to before the current war you’ll see that this was widely discussed in mainstream media long before Epic Fury and was even the subject of a motion in the Iranian parliament last year - hardly a secret plan. What makes Trump different is that he isn’t interested in information or expertise. Similarly, Iran’s attacks on GCC neighbours was widely anticipated in the event of war. It’s grimly amusing to note that Trump believed he had better relations than any of his predecessors with the Gulf countries because of his instinct for self-enrichment and his willingness to participate in business deals directly with the Gulf monarchies (none of which have a culture of separation of national budgets and those of the ruling families - which matches Trump’s approach). He probably did have better relations, until he brought war to the region, at which point he probably doesn’t.

But I said at the top of this post that Trump and Netanyahu might have different objectives. So what are Trump’s objectives? Trump keeps announcing that the war is over, that Iran has been defeated, that America has succeeded in its aims. His objective is to be told that he has won, that he has done something that no other president has done, that he is the greatest American in history. Unfortunately for the people of Iran, Trump has not decided whether winning involves leaving the Islamic Republic in place, perhaps under a more pragmatic leadership or continuing to target its civilian infrastructure. Trump and his allies will argue that they have prevented Iran from threatening the region. Let’s see how that works out.