Donald Trump has faults but weakness isn’t one of them
Sure, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are widely disliked in the West – although they have their supporters. But they have shown real leadership against Iran, which could not be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon.
On any analysis, this was an extraordinary feat of arms. Not only did the US Air Force fly seven B-2 Spirit stealth bombers from the US to Iran and back, all of which returned safely after dropping 14 Massive Ordnance Penetrator bunker-busting bombs. But a US submarine also delivered Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles on Iranian targets from 1000km away out at sea.
As President Donald J. Trump acknowledged, such an operation would not have been possible without Israel which, across many months, had effectively destroyed Iran’s air defence system. The USAF planes that accompanied the B-2 bombers also returned to base without incident.
In addition, from June 13 Israel launched attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities at Natanz and Isfahan. Now there is a ceasefire, for the moment at least, and several leaders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps along with some Iranian leading nuclear scientists have been killed.
On ABC TV’s Insiders last Sunday, ABC journalist Raf Epstein effectively denied that Iran was close to developing nuclear weapons. He blamed Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for attempting to convince Trump that this was the case.
Whereupon presenter David Speers commented: “Ann Coulter’s quote about Donald Trump – that he’s like a sofa, he bears the impression of the person who last sat on him. You just hope that it’s not Netanyahu that he was listening to.”
This is a serious misreading of the US President. Like all of us, he has his faults. But weakness is not one of them.
Sure, Trump and Netanyahu are widely disliked in the West – although they have their supporters, especially in the US and Israel. But they have shown real leadership in this instance.
Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong are not in the Trump-Netanyahu cart (to borrow Paul Keating’s expression). But both acknowledged this week that Iran under the rule of supreme leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei and the mullahs could not be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon.
Coulter is an American isolationist in the tradition of Pat Buchanan. So is Tucker Carlson, formerly of Fox News until his role was terminated in April 2023.
Carlson’s isolation is such that he palled up with Russia’s Vladimir Putin last year, giving him an oh-so-soft interview in which Carlson exhibited an appalling ignorance of the former Soviet Union (which Putin admires) and contemporary Russia (which Putin rules in an authoritarian manner).
On June 23, The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote: “For all the predictions that a strike on Iran would ‘almost certainly result in thousands of American deaths’ (Tucker Carlson) and set off World War III, Iran strongly signalled it doesn’t want to fight.”
There is no evidence that Trump wants a war. Even less that he would be led into one by Netanyahu.
It came as no surprise that CNN – the left-of-centre US subscription television outlet – sought to discredit not only Trump but also the US military by this report of a leak from the US Defence Intelligence Agency: “Two of the people familiar with the assessment said Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was not destroyed. One of the people said that centrifuges are largely intact. Another source said that the intelligence assessed enriched uranium was moved out of the sites prior to the US strikes. So the (DIA) assessment is that the US set them back maybe a few months, tops, this person added.”
The story received widescale coverage in Australia and elsewhere. However, it was later reported that the assessment was labelled to be of the “low confidence” kind.
This is understandable since it is too early to gauge the success of the US attack and that of Israeli forces before that.
However, an assessment of analysis provided by US Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Dan Caine and CIA director John Ratcliffe indicates that substantial damage to Iran’s nuclear facilities has been achieved that will take years to be overcome.
Recently Axios reported that, according to Israeli sources, the strikes at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan have been very significant. Moreover, the International Atomic Energy Agency has put out six statements on Iran since June 19. All suggest widespread damage to Iran’s nuclear assets.
Much of the internal opposition to Trump’s position on Iran comes from Democrats who are disillusioned and isolated because of his success at the November 2024 election. They overlook the fact, in March 2011, president Barack Obama ordered military strikes on Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in Libya.
Hillary Clinton was US secretary of state at the time. No Democrats suggested then that the Obama administration had acted illegally in a war inconsistent with the US War Powers Act.
Then there is the Western left. From London to Melbourne and Sydney, leftist activists can be seen in the streets in opposition to the democratically elected administrations in Washington and Jerusalem and in favour of the unelected theocracy in Tehran.
This street mob includes some radical feminists who are blind to the suffering and persecution of Iranian women.
As the likes of historians Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts have argued in these pages, we live at a time when the future of Western democracy is at stake. It is a melancholy fact that all wars are dreadful and involve the deaths of children, women and men. This was true of Germany along with Japan in 1945 and earlier. But the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan was necessary to the survival of Western civilisation.
In recent times Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper highly critical of the Netanyahu government, has reported that captured documents reveal that Hamas’s invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023, was designed to wipe Israel off the map. The destruction of Israel would be a disaster to Western democracies. At times, defensive war is necessary – to paraphrase O’Rourke’s view.
Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.
It’s just over three decades since American satirist PJ O’Rourke wrote a book titled Give War a Chance: Eyewitness Accounts of Mankind’s Struggle Against Tyranny, Injustice and Alcohol-Free Beer. I was reminded of this last Sunday morning when news reached Australia about the US strike against the Iranian nuclear facility at Fordow.