You could make a strong case that every American president in the past 50 years has seen his presidency undone to one degree or another by ill-fated embroilment in the Greater Middle East, the turbulent piece of geography that stretches from northeast Africa to the Hindu Kush.
Jimmy Carter’s single term foundered on the rocks of the US embassy hostage crisis that unfolded after the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979. Ronald Reagan’s short-lived peacekeeping efforts in Lebanon ended with the bombing of a Beirut barracks in 1983 that killed 243 Americans, still the single greatest loss of life for US marines since the Second World War. His presidency was later nearly fatally undermined by the Iran-Contra diplomatic debacle, in which his officials tried and failed to secure a complex deal with Tehran over US hostages held in Lebanon; and the administration’s efforts to support counter-revolutionaries in Nicaragua.
Bill Clinton failed repeatedly to deal with the rising threat of Islamist terror from the region. His presidency was bookended by the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and the attack on the USS Cole by al-Qaeda terrorists in 2000 while at port in Yemen. Clinton’s inability to deliver anything more than a pallid military response emboldened al-Qaeda and led directly to the 9/11 attacks. George W Bush led the US into an ultimately futile war in Afghanistan and an utterly disastrous war in Iraq that unleashed mayhem for a decade and undermined America’s strategic heft for even longer.
Barack Obama later said the worst mistake of his presidency was the failed effort to secure a peace deal in Libya after the fall of Gaddafi in 2011. Others would say that was eclipsed by his refusal to enforce his “red line” warning to Syria after Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons against domestic opponents in 2012. Joe Biden’s presidency was doomed with his disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.
George Bush Sr bucked the trend with the stunningly successful Operation Desert Storm in 1991 against Iraq. But even that came back to haunt his legacy and America’s security after it failed to dislodge Saddam Hussein’s regime.
You could go even further and say that in half a century only Donald Trump in his first term can lay any kind of claim to sustained success in the region, and this was achieved largely by staying out, avoiding the temptation of “forever wars”, and keeping US intervention to a couple of successful, surgical operations with extremely limited objectives, such as the drone attack that killed Qasem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s Quds force in 2020.
Given that historical record it is hardly surprising that many of Trump’s supporters are watching in alarm as the president apparently edges closer to ordering American forces into one of the country’s boldest and perhaps riskiest engagements in the region – joining Israel’s war against Iran. They say Trump’s political and strategic success has been built on the wisdom of resisting the siren calls of “hawks”, “neocons” and “interventionists”, only to wade once again into the Middle Eastern mire.
Leading figures in the Maga coalition such as Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host turned multimedia gadfly, have warned that for the US to accede to requests from Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, to help finish off the Jewish state’s efforts to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities would be a betrayal of the “America First” principle that animates Trump’s entire foreign policy. JD Vance, normally a voluble vice president, has posted on X only a couple of laconic expressions of support for the president’s decision-making. Otherwise his unwonted silence has deafened the internet.
Trump himself has dismissed the idea that joining Israel would be inconsistent with his cautious, highly targeted approach to foreign intervention. “Considering that I am the one that developed ‘America First’ ... I think I am the one that decides” what it means, he told The Atlantic magazine this week.
He has a point. Those close to his thinking say the sort of operation he is pondering would not be any full-scale, boots-on-the-ground intervention aimed at “regime-change”. A few “bunker-busting” bombs to take out the nuclear facility at Fordow would achieve what the US has been seeking for 20 years – the destruction of Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
And yet, what worries the sceptics is that this blithe assurance is exactly what has led so many American presidents to blunder into hopeless and heartbreaking wars in the region. If the US has the capacity to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities; if it can be confident that Iran’s response would not lead to devastating escalation; if the action could even bring about the collapse of the Iranian regime, then this would quickly make the operation the all-time model for successful, limited US military intervention. But those are three big ifs. There are others.
What if the Iranian nuclear programme limps on after a US attack, only now continuing without even the semblance of international scrutiny? What if an inflamed Islamist regime survives and is able to launch even small destructive assaults against US military bases or terror attacks in the US itself? What if the political effect of this at home would be a public demand for retribution and more steps up the escalation ladder?
After a century of aviation, there are few examples of air power alone achieving an objective as large as wiping out a country’s principal military capabilities or changing its government. Can Trump’s generals really be sure this will be different?
But perhaps evidence of the astonishing work Israel has already done in eliminating the vectors of Iranian aggression that have long deterred the US from an attack - Hamas, Hezbollah; Iran’s military itself – is overcoming Trump’s cautious instincts. This president may not be able to resist the temptation to reverse 50 years of American failure.
The Times
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