Between escalation and de-escalation of the Israel-Iran war there is much room for unintended consequences and miscalculations.
The choices made by Binyamin Netanyahu’s Israel and Donald Trump’s United States will have an impact, whether or not Israel’s daring and highly risky attack on Iran succeeds in destroying or changing its Islamic regime.
Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi says Netanyahu successfully played Trump to scuttle the US-Iran negotiations on a nuclear enrichment agreement. Israel’s attack pre-empted a US deal as it says – without proof – Iran is ready to produce nuclear weapons. But Israel’s main strategic target is the Islamic State itself as its principal regional enemy, at a time when Iran’s air defences and axis of proxies in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen have been decisively weakened by Israeli attacks. Netanyahu has been consistent that he wants to create a new regional order in which Israel is the most powerful military player. His aim is also to normalise relations with Arab states on that basis without a Palestinian state.
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He could not have missed this opportunity to strike since its timing avoids yet another crisis for his far-right coalition and once again boosts his domestic popularity. Its surprise execution involved extraordinary intelligence superiority using US assets and fierce lobbying through the pro-Israeli neoconservative interventionist wing of Trump’s Maga coalition in Washington.
Netanyahu’s long experience of US right-wing politics makes him exceptionally well qualified for such lobbying, despite the huge resistance this provokes from Maga’s isolationist wing. Its leaders say US direct involvement will derail Trump’s presidency in yet another forever war.
Trump sacked his national security adviser Mike Waltz last month ostensibly over “Signalgate” but also for getting too close to the Israeli camp. But he must heed the pro-Israeli wing of his movement. He now wants to force concessions from a much weakened Iran in renewed talks. Will he instead be sucked into Netanyahu’s logic and use the US bunker-busting bombs against Iranian enrichment plants? Does he favour the regime change implied by Israeli attacks on leaders, civilians, energy assets and broadcasting stations?
Trump’s statement that he will decide on direct US involvement within two weeks creates space for diplomacy. Yesterday’s talks between Abbas Araghchi and European leaders might open a path through which Trump could claim a win without a war. He could thereby avoid Netanyahu’s trap.
Iran experts warn that the state is more likely to intensify its approach to enrichment and withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty than capitulate to this Israeli attack in any talks. It would be sustained by a popular nationalist response against Israel.
[ Could Israel’s attacks on Iran create a nuclear contamination risk?Opens in new window ]
As for regime change, Iranians are more likely to fragment into potential civil war than to topple the Islamic regime through a democratic revolution. Islamic State repression has ensured they lack an organised opposition and developed civil society.
These unintended consequences would undermine the regional order Netanyahu seeks. A normalisation based on such instability and without Palestine would imperil the legitimacy of Saudi, Qatari and other Gulf rulers, as well as Egyptian, Jordanian and Moroccan regimes, which are also part of it. Trump would then discover this creates another US intervention quagmire like Iraq or Afghanistan rather than a peaceful transformation based on Iranian regime change. His hopes of drawing Iran into an alternative regional order based on Gulf money and expanded US trade with the region could not be delivered without a functioning regime in Tehran.
Israel too would discover such a normalisation against Iran and Palestine is no guarantee that Israelis can live peacefully in the region, however militarily hegemonic they are.
From a more radical perspective, the point can be made that democratic change and upheaval in the Middle East has usually come through regime crisis and war, as well as dysfunctional government – and that potential again. But many fear such change after the ill-prepared 2010-2013 popular Arab revolts in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria or Bahrain. The vicious aftermaths of authoritarian regimes and outside interventions were more Arab winter than spring.
Trump faces critical choices as he steers a path between the domestic promise of no more foreign wars and being played into Netanyahu’s serial gambles on US support in Gaza and Iran. His Maga movement is deeply split on Iran, however much it can cohere over Israel, trade wars or containing China. Events such as these force Trump’s programmatic contradictions into the foreground of politics at home and abroad. His ability to ride and manage them without serious unintended consequences and grave miscalculations is increasingly in question. Popular resistance to his authoritarian assertiveness produced 2,100 demonstrations last weekend.
Netanyahu will decisively – and consequentially – shift Trump’s international position if the Iran war continues on Israel’s terms.
