The Trump/Bibi Duet

Whatever unfolds next in the Iran/Israel conflict, alpha egos will play as big a part in the outcome as geopolitics. Trump may have declared “no foreign wars” as a foundational MAGA mantra, but nothing gets him more juiced up than the macho notion of dropping awesome, fiery bombs on “bad guys” in “shithole” countries.

Faced with the exciting action-movie words “bunker buster bomb,” how will Trump resist giving Bibi the 30,000-pound GBU-57 A/B massive ordnance penetrator Israel needs to blast through to the Iranian enrichment facility half a mile under a mountain at Fordow? That’s a big bang for the ages! And as for the decision of whether to go all the way and disappear the octogenarian tyrant, Ali Hosseini Khamenei—now that Trump has declared that we know where he’s hiding, there’s probably a drone headed for the Supreme Leader’s frothing, snowy beard any minute, whatever Trump avows.

The president who loves any military action he doesn’t have to fight in will have to be tied down rather than miss the chance of producing a news sensation as big as the sexiest achievement of Obama's presidency. “Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo,” the Navy Seals intoned as they unforgettably called in the code name for Osama Bin Laden after eliminating the 9/11 mastermind in Abbottabad.

Trump, no doubt, feels he never got full credit for lethal action in his first term when, in a raid in northwestern Syria, U.S. forces cornered ISIS evil genius Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi into blowing himself up in a suicide vest, enabling Trump to announce, "He died like a dog!” But the dauntless operation didn’t land here with the kind of sonic boom Trump had expected. And in January 2020, few Americans had heard of Trump’s other A-list first-term whacking: Qasem Soleimani, the shadowy commander of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard Quds Force, responsible for Iran’s proxy fighters in Syria and the deaths of American troops in Iraq. “He was supposed to be invincible,” crowed Trump after the malevolent Soleimani was killed by an American drone strike that Trump gleefully watched in real time back home. Fist bump…. and a shrug.

MAGA Malcontent

Now Trump has to staunch the grumblings of the likes of MAGA megaphones Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene about the prospect of U.S. involvement with the Iran conflict by offering a quick rewrite of the America First script. “Well, considering that I’m the one that developed ‘America First,’” (Uh, the phrase was actually coined by President Woodrow Wilson in his 1916 campaign that pledged to keep America neutral in World War I.) Trump told the Atlantic on his 79th birthday. “I think I’m the one that decides that.” On Tuesday, the White House reminded his critics that Trump has said twelve times since taking office in January– and dozens more times on the campaign trail– that he would never allow Iran to gain a nuclear weapon. Netanyahu showed they are working in political concert when he told ABC News, “I understand America First. I don't understand America dead.”

Bibi is currently riding the emboldening wave of united public support for ridding Israel of decades of nuclear threat from a theocratic messianic state that believes the sacrifice of its own people in a nuclear exchange would be worth the prize of wiping out Israel. But there is, like Trump, a powerful ego factor too. Bibi wants this preventative strike to clean up his legacy. Audacious, brilliantly planned, he hopes the Iran operation will expunge the memory of his own dreadful errors of judgment that failed to prevent the slaughter of October 7th. Fooled by Hamas’s feint of playing possum in Gaza, he had arrogantly depended on electronic surveillance of an enemy who used no cell phones or devices and he cut back on the human intel that could have alerted Israel to the Hamas master plan of building miles of impenetrable tunnels to hide their fighters. His response to that intelligence mistake has been to frame the killing of 55,000 Palestinians as mostly collateral damage.

War Room

As for Trump, he’s now facing a Churchillian moment of decision about unequivocal support of Bibi’s military solution. The much-vaunted 2015 Obama deal with Iran turned out to be too half-cocked and slack-spined to be anything more than a temporary holding pattern. Invoking Neville Chamberlain, Churchill biographer Andrew Roberts calls the deal, “the cringing, appeasing Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action…that was neither joint (because Iran cheated) nor comprehensive (because it did not require Iran to abandon its nuclear program).”

But Trump is no Churchill. He’s all about isolated moments of adrenaline and prime-time buzz, not the pondering of meaningful foreign policy. TACO usually backs down when faced with the mutiny of his base. He won’t find it easy to explain to MAGA fans why an American pilot is flying an American B-2 Spirit stealth bomber and dropping a big beautiful American bomb on a target six thousand miles away, in a country whose missiles can’t cross the Atlantic. Trump knows there will be no red baseball caps emblazoned with Bibi’s stirring catchphrase “Today, it’s Tel Aviv. Tomorrow, it’s New York.” And yet, if the Israeli operation is a feted success, one of Trump’s triumphalist social media posts on Tuesday— “We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran” — is preparing the ground to claim the victory for himself.

Besides, demanding an unconditional surrender from the mad mullahs in Tehran is a lot more diverting than hanging out with the mealy-mouthed G-7 Euro-stiffs in, for fuck’s sake, Kananaskis, Canada.