Trump buys himself time, and opens up some new options

Washington: US President Donald Trump’s sudden announcement that he could take up to two weeks to decide whether to plunge the United States into the heart of the Israel-Iran conflict is being advertised by the White House as giving diplomacy one more chance to work.

But it also opens a host of new military and covert options.

Assuming he makes full use of it, Trump will now have time to determine whether six days of relentless bombing and killing by Israeli forces – which have taken out one of Iran’s two biggest uranium enrichment centres, much of its missile fleet and its most senior officers and nuclear scientists – have changed minds in Tehran.

Donald Trump’s public flirtation with entering the war has sharply divided his base.Credit: Bloomberg

The deal that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei rejected earlier this month, which would have cut off Iran’s main pathway to a bomb by eventually ending enrichment on Iranian soil, may look very different now that one of its largest nuclear centres has been badly damaged, and the president is openly considering dropping the world’s largest conventional weapon on the second. Or, it may simply harden the Iranians’ resolve not to give in.

It is also possible, some experts noted, that Trump’s announcement on Thursday (early Friday AEST) was an effort to deceive the Iranians and get them to let their guard down.

“That could be cover for a decision to strike, immediately,” James G. Stavridis, a retired navy admiral and the former supreme US commander in Europe, said on CNN. “Maybe this is a very clever ruse to lull the Iranians into a sense of complacency.”

Even if there is no deception involved, by offering one more off-ramp to the Iranians, Trump will also be bolstering his own military options. Two weeks will allow time for a second American aircraft carrier to get into place, giving US forces a better chance to counter the inevitable Iranian retaliation, with whatever part of their missile fleet is still usable. It would give Israel more time to destroy the air defences around the Fordow enrichment site and other nuclear targets, mitigating the risks to US forces if Trump ultimately decided to attack.

And it frees Trump from operating on a battlefield schedule driven by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been pressing Trump to enter the fray, with weaponry Israel does not possess.

Credit: Matt Golding

In fact, within an hour of the White House release of Trump’s statement that “I will make my decision whether or not to go within the next two weeks”, Netanyahu signalled that he was likely to use the time to try his own attacks on the deeply buried Fordow nuclear plant.

“I established that we will achieve all of our objectives, all of their nuclear facilities,” he said. “We have the power to do so.”

In fact, American and foreign experts say, the Israelis have been preparing military and covert options for years, examining how they might interrupt the massive electrical supply systems that keep the centrifuges buried in an enrichment hall under a mountain. Even the introduction of a surge or a pulse in that electrical flow could destabilise and destroy the delicate machines as they spin at supersonic speeds, like a top spinning out of control.

In recent days, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) concluded that Israel’s destruction of the electric plant above another enrichment centre, at Natanz, probably critically damaged the thousands of centrifuges spinning below.

The Israelis have considered what it would take to bomb and seal the tunnel entrances into the facility, trapping workers inside and making it all the more difficult to bring near-bomb-grade fuel into the plant for a final boost that would make it usable in a weapon. That fuel itself, stored in the ancient capital of Isfahan, would also be a target for the Israelis, American officials say.

But the first question is whether the Iranians have the political flexibility to seize on the time period Trump has opened up.

Administration officials say Steve Witkoff, the president’s special envoy, has already been in touch in recent days with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, with whom he has been talking since early April.

“I think the question is, can the Iranians see this as an opportunity to avoid the significant challenges that would come from the destruction of their last remaining facility?” asked Laura Holgate, who served as American ambassador to the IAEA during the Biden administration. But she said that “direct surrender is probably not on the table for them”, or “total abandonment of enrichment capacity either, even now”.

Robert Litwak, a scholar who has written extensively on diplomacy with Iran, said, “Here is the diplomatic needle both sides need to thread: the US accepts that Iran has a right to enrich uranium, and Iran accepts that it must completely dismantle its nuclear program”.

The conflict between Israel and Iran has consumed the president’s week, as he returned early from the Group of 7 meeting in Canada to deal with the war. He spent the early part of the week posting a series of bellicose threats on social media, seeming to lay the groundwork for the US to join Israel’s bombing campaign.

He urged all the residents of Tehran, a city of roughly 10 million people, to evacuate, claimed the US had “complete and total control of the skies over Iran”, and said American officials knew where Iran’s leader was hiding but would not kill him – “at least not for now”.

Many of the president’s allies believed that the US’s entrance into the war was imminent. But on Wednesday, the president said he had not made a final decision about whether to bomb Iran, and he berated Iran for not agreeing to a new deal to limit its nuclear program. Still, he said, it was not too late for a diplomatic solution.

“Nothing’s too late,” he said.

Trump’s public flirtation with entering the war has sharply divided his base – so much so that Vice President JD Vance wrote a lengthy social media post on Tuesday seeking to downplay concerns that the president was abandoning his commitment to keep America out of overseas conflict.

“I can assure you that he is only interested in using the American military to accomplish the American people’s goals,” Vance wrote.

But some of the president’s most prominent allies, including Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and former aide Steve Bannon have criticised the prospect of the US getting involved in another country’s war.

“Anyone slobbering for the US to become fully involved in the Israel/Iran war is not America First/MAGA,” Greene posted on social media.

On the other end of the spectrum, many of Trump’s hawkish allies in the Senate, including South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham and Arkansas senator Tom Cotton, are urging the president to take a more aggressive posture toward Iran.

“Be all in, President Trump, in helping Israel eliminate the nuclear threat,” Graham said this week on Fox News. “If we need to provide bombs to Israel, provide bombs. If we need to fly planes with Israel, do joint operations.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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