Trump may have pulled off a brilliant deal this time – but can you trust the boy who cries victory?
Washington: Donald Trump couldn’t have scripted it better. He will arrive in the Netherlands for a NATO summit, having just wowed the world with the might of the US military, obliterated the nuclear program of a global pariah state and brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Iran, ending a 12-day war and achieving world peace. At least, that’s according to him.
Never backward about coming forward, Trump and his allies unleashed a public relations blitz after pulling off a series of events that White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt described as something “no other president in history could ever imagine”. All without sustaining so much as a scratch on an American soldier.
It will truly be a coup for the ages – if the ceasefire holds. And if the situation really is as Trump has gleefully described. But only hours after the ceasefire came into effect, Israel accused Iran of breaching it with more missiles – a claim Iran denied – and said it was preparing to strike Tehran again.
So many questions about this conflict remain. Have Iran’s nuclear facilities been completely destroyed? Trump angrily insists they have been, directing bile and homophobic insults at TV journalists he accuses of failing to acknowledge the efficacy of the US raid.
We can see the sites have been damaged. The global nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, believes the impact was severe. But both the IAEA and the Pentagon are saying it will take time to assess the full extent of the damage, and what has been left behind.
And just as the US anticipated Iran’s retaliatory missiles, Tehran had plenty of time and reason to move its nuclear stockpiles from the well-known target sites before the US dropped its bunker-busting bombs. Indeed, satellite images released by US defence contractor Maxar Technologies appeared to show trucks lined up at Fordow, the main target, days before the US strikes.
US President Donald Trump at the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar last month.Credit: Getty
If it’s true that Iran’s entire nuclear capability was just knocked out, the country is strangely sanguine about it. The retaliatory fire against a US base in Qatar on Tuesday (AEST) was minimal, forewarned and accounted for; it was essentially the bare minimum – going through the motions. Qatar and the US say all but one of the missiles were shot down, and there were no casualties.
Can that really be all there is when it comes to Iranian retaliation? For now, perhaps so. We know we are dealing with a weakened Iran courtesy of more than a week of Israeli bombing and a year-and-a-half of Israeli operations against the regime’s proxies in the region.
And Iran has a history of barking more than biting. Emily Harding, the vice-president of the defence and security department at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, points out that Iran has done little to retaliate against Israel’s war on Hamas and Hezbollah, and did not retaliate when the US shot an Iranian passenger plane out of the sky in 1988, wrongly believing it to be a military aircraft, killing 290 people.
“They will threaten and express determination to retaliate at a time of their choosing, perhaps with terrorist attacks against US leaders, but their actions will tell a different story,” Harding writes. “When faced with overwhelming force, Iran backs down and opts to live to fight another day.”
A satellite image of Al Udeid Air Base outside Doha, before Iran’s missile strikes. Many US aircraft left the tarmac (top centre and left) on Wednesday.Credit: Planet Labs via AP
Weak, old and now hiding in a bunker, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, offered only this glib assertion on X: “Those who know the Iranian people and their history know that the Iranian nation isn’t a nation that surrenders.”
As for the ceasefire between Israel and Iran, which Trump said would last “forever” – it was already looking doubtful of holding, only hours after it came into effect.
On Tuesday evening AEST, the Israeli military said it had detected missile launches from Iran towards Israel. Iran immediately denied the claim, but Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz said Israel would “respond forcefully to Iran’s violation”.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses the nation on Sunday after US strikes on Iran.Credit: X
Speaking on CNN before that development, Brett McGurk, the US National Security Council co-ordinator for the Middle East under Joe Biden, gave Trump “extremely high marks” for how he had handled the crisis. “This is about the best place we could be,” he said.
On the surface, at that moment, it is difficult to disagree. But with the caveats that first, this conflict may not yet have fully played out, and second, Trump is always so boastful, so outlandish in his claims of unprecedented success, that one can’t help but be sceptical, even when it seems he might have done something right. He is the “boy who cried victory”. Exercise caution.
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