Trump’s Iran strikes mark biggest foreign policy gamble

With his full-scale attack on Iran, Donald Trump has seized a legacy-defining moment to demonstrate that the United States is ready to use its raw military might.

But in doing so, he is also taking the biggest foreign policy gamble of his presidency, full of risks and unknowns.

Trump joined Israel on Saturday to seek war with Iran, making little statement to the American public about what could be the biggest U.S. military action since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Trump has shifted from favoring quick, limited operations, such as last month’s lightning raid on Venezuela, to operations that risk escalating into a regional conflagration engulfing the oil-rich Middle East, which experts warn could lead to a more protracted conflict with Iran.

He also laid out a daunting goal of regime change in Tehran, pushing the idea that airstrikes could incite a popular uprising that would overthrow Iran’s rulers.

This is an outcome that foreign air power has never directly achieved without the intervention of some form of armed force in the field, and which most analysts doubt it will succeed this time.

“Most Americans will wake up Saturday morning and wonder why we’re at war with Iran, what the goal is, why U.S. bases in the Middle East are under attack,” said Daniel Shapiro, a former senior Pentagon official and U.S. ambassador to Israel who now serves at the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington.

Trump’s obsession with Iran has emerged as a stark example of how foreign policy, including the expanded use of military force, has been at the top of his agenda in the first 13 months of his second term; has often eclipsed domestic issues such as the cost of living, which polls show are much higher priorities for most Americans.

His own aides have been privately urging him for weeks to focus more on voters’ economic concerns, highlighting political dangers ahead of November’s midterm elections in which Trump’s Republican Party risks losing one or both houses of Congress.

The short pre-dawn video that Trump posted on the Truth Social platform, announcing what the Pentagon called “Operation Epic ‌Rage,” offered only general reasons for now going to war and preventing all-out hostilities with a country that the United States has been grappling with for decades.

He insisted he would end Tehran’s ballistic missile threat, which most experts say poses no threat to the United States, and give the Iranians a chance to overthrow their rulers.

To achieve his goals, Trump said US forces would decimate Iran’s military and prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Iran denies that its nuclear program has military purposes.

It seemed almost certain that Trump’s sudden resort to force, using the massive US military assets established in the region in recent weeks, would close the door to diplomacy with Iran for now.

There was no progress in the last round of nuclear talks held in Geneva on Thursday.

Some of Trump’s aides have previously suggested that Trump could bomb Tehran, bring it back to the negotiating table and make deep concessions.

Instead, Iran responded on Saturday by launching missiles at US allies Israel and oil-producing Gulf Arab states.

Trump’s focus in the video on the urgency of the threat posed by Iran’s ballistic and nuclear programs echoed President George W. Bush’s 2003 lawsuit for war on Iraq, which was later found to be based on faulty intelligence and false claims.

Trump’s claim in Tuesday’s State of the Union address that Iran will soon have a missile capable of hitting the United States is not supported by U.S. intelligence reports, according to people familiar with the assessments, and experts have also cast doubt on recent claims by Trump aides about Tehran’s ability to rapidly advance its nuclear capabilities.

Trump, who initially threatened in January to strike Iran in support of street protesters facing a violent crackdown, also dispelled any doubt with Saturday’s attacks that part of what he is now seeking is regime change in Tehran.

But analysts question whether Trump, who has refused to deploy US troops on the ground, has a strategy that could unseat Iran’s long-time clergy-dominated government, which has proven resilient in the face of crippling sanctions and periodic mass protests.

A source familiar with the matter said that the first wave of attacks mainly targeted Iranian officials.

A source with knowledge of the matter said that religious leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was not in Tehran at the time of the attacks and was transferred to a safe place.

However, an Iranian source close to the institution said that many senior commanders and political officials in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard were killed.

Even if the attacks succeed in eliminating top leaders, analysts said, it could have unintended consequences such as sowing chaos in a sprawling country of 93 million people and even lead to a military-run government that could be more intransigent towards the West and oppressive towards its people.

“He wants to change the government,” said Jon Alterman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington.

“But it is difficult to change the government from the air. It is difficult to change the minds of Iranians from the air.”

Former senior US official Tyson Barker, who now serves at the Atlantic Council, said Trump’s call for the Iranian people to revolt probably did not work either.

“By saying, ‘Stand up and overthrow your government. We’ve got your back,’ they’re really exposing these poor Iranian people,” Barker said.

Trump, whose appetite for military operations has grown since the start of his second term, received briefings ahead of the Iranian strikes that not only gave frank assessments of the risk of major U.S. casualties but also touted the possibility of a shift in the Middle East in favor of U.S. interests, a U.S. official told Reuters.

Trump appears emboldened by the U.S. bombing of Iran’s main nuclear facilities in June, which he considers a resounding success, and by the in-and-out raid in January that captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and gave the U.S. considerable sway over the OPEC nation’s vast oil reserves.

He may have forced Iran’s hand with frequent threats of military action while establishing a massive naval power in the region that it cannot maintain indefinitely.

Analysts view Iran as a much tougher and better-armed adversary than Venezuela, even though its air defense and missile capabilities were severely weakened by joint US-Israeli strikes in June.

“Iran is a much more formidable military power, and the reaction in the Gulf right now is that they are willing to cross lines that they weren’t willing to cross before,” said Nicole Grajewski of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

But Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a nonprofit research institute considered pro-Israel and hawkish on Iran, said Tehran is in such a weakened state that it is worth Trump taking the risk of restricting Tehran’s nuclear capabilities.

Whether or not the Iranian government falls, seriously disrupting Iran’s nuclear and missile programs could be a victory for Trump, he said.

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