Israeli attack on Iran a major failure of US power and diplomacy

If America genuinely did not want Israel to attack Iran and its nuclear facilities, then the launching by its ally of what in effect is now an all-out war must represent a major failure of US power and diplomacy.

That failure should not all be laid at the door of President Donald Trump, as the path toward it had already been created by his predecessor, Joe Biden. Nonetheless, it exposes the true nature of Trump’s foreign policy: loud talk plus a short attention span, leading to strategic incoherence.

This is the attack that successive US administrations for at least two decades have feared might happen and, so, have sought to prevent. They have feared such an attack because the consequences of war between the Middle East’s sole known nuclear power, Israel, and the region’s largest military force, Iran, are unknowable and could be perilously difficult to contain.

Moreover, the Americans have feared this attack because – even while they have not wanted Iran to develop its own nuclear weapons, and so have felt sympathetic to Israel’s desire to block that development – they have been convinced that bombing raids would never be able to destroy Iran’s uranium-enrichment and nuclear weapons facilities.

Those facilities are widely dispersed around the country and hidden deep underground. This is not just a matter that requires a few “surgical strikes.”

We can only speculate as to why the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has chosen to attack now. Although it is certainly clear that Israeli intelligence agencies’ penetration of Iran’s political, military and scientific leadership has been deep and impressive, the range of contradictory messages coming out of Israel about how close Iran was to being able to produce a usable nuclear weapon – a year, several months, merely weeks – suggests that Israeli knowledge of the true state of Iran’s nuclear program is less than precise.

Having launched this war, Netanyahu is following up with further powerful attacks. As the first exchanges, including attacks on both Tel Aviv and Tehran, have shown, this is not going to be just a series of symbolic blows. The big question is whether Iran will attack not just Israeli targets but also American ones, perhaps military bases, naval vessels or embassies across the Middle East. And then the even bigger question is how America will respond.

In fact, Netanyahu may well have calculated that it will be through Iranian attacks on American targets that the US military can be brought directly into this war.

His gambit could have been to say to President Trump something like this: “We have started this, but we all know that we cannot fully finish it, as only the huge power of American bunker-busting bombs can succeed in destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities. Your negotiations with Iran were getting nowhere: join us and we can end this danger for at least a generation, perhaps more.”

Pressure appears to be growing inside Republican circles in America to do just that.

America’s failure of power and diplomacy has occurred because first under Biden but even more so under Trump the US has given Netanyahu carte blanche to do whatever he likes in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Iran. It did this by continuing to provide Israel with weapons regardless of its actions, and by never following up on whatever warnings or criticisms either Biden or Trump may have made.

And Trump multiplied this effect by his casual and poorly thought-through remarks in support of moving the nearly two million Palestinians out of Gaza. That would amount to ethnic cleansing but the remarks implicitly endorse the view of far-right members of the Israeli government not only that a separate Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza is undesirable but that formation of such a state should be blocked actively by seeking to drive the Palestinians farther away from Israel.

While Netanyahu has been resuming his war in Gaza against Hamas, President Trump has focused his attention on making money in Saudi Arabia and the countries of the Gulf.

His administration did seek to negotiate a deal with Iran over its uranium enrichment program. However, those negotiations so far had not looked likely to reach any agreement that would be better than the 2015 deal that he dumped in 2018 during his first term in office.

So it would be reasonable for Netanyahu to have supposed that, if Trump did not like the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that the US and Europe had agreed with Iran in 2015, he could now be persuaded to support military attacks instead.

In the short term, that supposition has been proved correct. Although America was not involved with Israel’s attack, Trump’s first move has been to try to exploit the threat of further Israeli attacks as a way to force Iran to make bigger concessions in the Oman nuclear talks, or whenever and wherever those talks resume. Yet this is unlikely to succeed, at least until Iran has carried out whatever major retaliation it has in mind.

Whatever now happens – and we should all be preparing for some pretty bad things to happen – this attack will confirm a general reality about nuclear weapons. It is that although it is true, as Israel and soon Trump will doubtless say, that Iran has been attacked to prevent it from gaining a nuclear bomb, the Iranians and others will know that they would not have been attacked if they had already possessed such a bomb.

The incentive for Iran, like North Korea, Pakistan and India before it, to gain a nuclear weapon as a deterrent will only increase, and that incentive will be shared by other countries. It is paradoxical, in a sense.

Nuclear deterrence between two hostile countries can work when both have nuclear capabilities, a deterrence which almost certainly helped to contain the fight that India and Pakistan had last month over terrorism and the disputed region of Kashmir. But when just one of the hostile countries has that capability, it can be destabilizing.

Formerly editor-in-chief of The Economist, Bill Emmott is currently chairman of the Japan Society of the UK, the International Institute for Strategic Studies and the International Trade Institute.

A version of this article has been published in Italian by La Stampa and can be found in English on the substack Bill Emmott’s Global View. It is republished here with kind permission.