Drawing by Patrick Chappatte/Globecartoon.com, Switzerland/CagleCartoons.com 2018, via Washington Post.
UPDATE 8:15 PM: Looks like he made a decision.
David Rothkopf may be the most respectable person coming out to say this, and he says it well:
as much as we may condemn the actions of the regime in the Islamic Republic and feel its government is a threat to the stability of the region, Israel started this war. Furthermore, Israel started it not for the reason it gave—the imminent threat posed by the Iranian nuclear program. That threat has existed for many years and U.S. intelligence did not feel Iran had made any notable new strides recently. Rather, Netanyahu decided to strike for three reasons. 1.) He remains in political jeopardy and war has proven an effective means of helping him to stay in power. 2.) Rather than fearing an Iranian breakthrough on nukes, he feared one on a potential nuclear deal. He opposed the one negotiated under Obama. He goaded Trump into abandoning it. And he was deeply troubled that Trump was now advocating re-entering just such an agreement. 3.) He has made the conflict between Israel and Iran a centerpiece of his politics throughout his career. He is Ahab. It is his Great White Whale.
Of which point (1) is the most obvious to me, as you might expect, and the most offensive to the respectable, because of the moral implications that that is the kind of person the Israeli prime minister is, OK with killing a substantial number of human beings (something like 600 in Iran as of yesterday, including at least 239 civilians, and 24 in Israel, under Iran's retaliatory strikes, which seem to have been more effective than usual), as the price of office, and escaping prison in his corruption cases. That's exactly how I've seen him, though, for the last 18 months of slaughtering Gazan civilians (something like 50,000 at this point) and abandoning the kidnap victims from Israel still held in Gaza, so I'm not especially shocked.
Point (2), on the possibility of a US deal reviving the 2015 JCPOA or something like it, in which Iran would stop enriching uranium in return for some sanctions relief, hasn't been taken very seriously by the punditry at large, though newspapers loyally reported the five rounds of talks between the two countries in April and May, of which the last, held May 23 in Rome, was described by the Americans as "constructive—we made further progress" and by the Iranians as "one of the most professional rounds of negotiation," though they held out little hope of an agreement any time soon.
The Trump administration had already startled Israel greatly when they went to direct negotiations with Hamas leading to the release of the last living American hostage, Edan Alexander, on May 12, and apparently struck a truce with Yemen's Houthi militants, announced May 8. On May 28, Trump personally asked Netanyahu not to attack Iran while the negotiations were going on. Israeli anxieties over their relationship were said to be soaring ("It's total panic," said Shalom Lipner of the Atlantic Council), and US Ambassador Mike Huckabee felt obliged to reassure them:
the new U.S. ambassador to Israel... pushed back on the assertion that the administration was overlooking Israeli concerns and told an Israeli television channel that “the United States isn’t required to get permission from Israel” to reach a ceasefire with the Houthis. A day later, Huckabee took to his X account to denounce what he described as “reckless & irresponsible” media reports that suggested Trump and Netanyahu were “not getting along.”
Meanwhile, Israel was coming under increasingly severe criticism especially in Europe over what seemed to be intentional starvation of the population in Gaza, where the World Food Program had been prevented from delivering 11,000 tons of aid in trucks in corridors in Jordan, Israel, and Egypt for three months, and the European Union announced it was conducting a formal review of Israel's human rights compliance, which could affect its free trade agreement with Israel (the EU is Israel's largest trading partner).
A relaxation of the IDF's blockade on May 20 and 22 did almost nothing to help. Another initiative, the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, run by private US contractors, began operations on May 26, but seemed to be tied to the Israeli military's efforts to concentrate the besieged people in two or three small areas in the south of the strip, requiring people to come to just a few places to pick up their boxes of prepackaged meals, hygiene kits, and medical supplies. This quickly turned out to be mostly a disaster, as the famished rushed the boxes and IDF troops stationed at a distance opened fire; as of June 17, some 400 Palestinians had been killed this way at the distribution sites and over 3,000 wounded.
Also, on Sunday June 15 the US-Iran talks were scheduled to resume.
It's in that context that news began to come out on June 12 that Israel might strike Iran; Trump expressed worry about the possibility of a "massive conflict" and urged Iran, in what seemed like a reference to the negotiations on Sunday, to come to a an agreement quickly
Asked if such strikes could be imminent, Trump told reporters, "Well, I don't want to say imminent, but it looks like it's something that could very well happen."
"Look, it's very simple, not complicated," Trump said. "Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. Other than that, I want them to be successful. I want them to be tremendous. We'll help them be successful. We'll trade with them. We'll do whatever is necessary."
and issued a "Truth" on the subject early that evening:
It was only a couple of hours later (but after midnight Israel time) that IDF began its first wave of air assaults on Iran, and Rubio quickly put out a statement:
Tonight, Israel took unilateral action against Iran. We are not involved in strikes against Iran and our top priority is protecting American forces in the region. Israel advised us that they believe this action was necessary for its self-defense.
But the next morning Trump was suggesting to The New York Post that he was not so uninvolved; Trump had given Iran a two-month deadline to accept a deal and Iran had failed to meet it:
“I always knew the date” Israel would strike Iran, Trump said, “because I know everything. I know everything. I know everything. I gave them 60 days and they didn’t meet it,” Trump went on. “Today’s 61, you know. Today’s day 61.”
The president had never publicly revealed the 60-day deadline — though its existence had been reported by Israeli media — until after Israel launched Thursday’s attack, and had been coy on whether he fully supported giving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the green light to strike.
That's not exactly right—the deadline is real, sort of, from a letter Trump reportedly sent to Ayatollah Khamenei sometime in March demanding that Iran "make a deal", but the story was scooped from anonymous sources for a March 19 article about the letter by Barak Ravid in Axios, from which CNN picked it up later that day (I looked really hard for it in Times of Israel and Haaretz, but found nothing). If the countdown began on the first day of negotiations, April 12, it's reasonable to think day 61 would have been the first day of air raids, June 13.
But then if it was an American-imposed deadline, how come it was up to the Israelis to enforce it? Why hadn't Rubio and Trump seemed to know about it the night before? If the deadline was so irrevocably blown on the 13th that it was time to start the war, why had they scheduled a negotiation round with the Iranians for the 15th?
What I figure isn't too complex: it's that Israeli intelligence saw a copy of that letter from Trump to Khamenei—that's obviously where Ravid, Israeli himself with a background in IDF intelligence (that's what Axios and CNN pay him for), got it from, and so did Netanyahu. Or maybe Netanyahu was directly involved in the drafting of the letter, and worked in the deadline himself, with the specific intent of using it to put the kabosh on the negotiations before they accomplished anything (the negotiation of the original JCPOA under Obama took two years, and that was remarkably efficient).
In contrast, I don't suppose Trump had much to do at all with the drafting of "his" letter to Khamenei, but Netanyahu is understood to have spent a lot of time on the phone with Trump as the air assaults were going on on Friday. That suggests a particular reconstruction for what might have happened:
Netanyahu chose the date to coincide with the end of the deadline period, in the interests of having that explanation, to force canceling of the renewed US-Iran "deal" negotiations;
Israel hadn't bothered to inform Rubio or Trump at all before launching the attacks, so that it came to them as a complete surprise;
they reacted by covering their asses as best they could, Trump entrusting his version to the friendly Post, naturally pretending he wasn't surprised at all, even if it meant contradicting himself;
deploying the deadline story Netanyahu had given him or reminded him of over the phone (note how incoherently he narrates it, a story he's never told before—but "I know everything" is the point he leans on).
Bringing us more or less to where we are now, a week later, with the continual rain of fire in Iran and Israel, crazy losses by targeted assassinations in Iran, including of scientists, and heavier losses in Israel than they expected—that "Iron Dome" isn't perfect—and Trump tergiviserating, at one moment expressing the. hope that the US and Iran will make a "deal" after all, at another moment issuing death threats against Ayatollah Khamenei:
"We know exactly where the so-called 'Supreme Leader' is hiding. He is an easy target, but is safe there — We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now," Trump said in a post — one in a series of statements he made before meeting with his national security team in the White House Situation Room about the conflict.
Who is "we"? Why is he telling people this stuff before a meeting?
On Wednesday,
he scoffed at the idea that he’d reveal his plans to the press ahead of time. “You don't know that I'm going to even do it. You don't know. I may do it. I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I'm going to do,” he said.
“I can tell you this, that Iran's got a lot of trouble.”
he indicated, I thought, that he didn't know what he was going to do himself, and Thursday he confirmed that:
“Based on the fact that there’s a substantial chance of negotiations that may or may not take place with Iran in the near future, I will make my decision whether or not to go within the next two weeks,” he said in a statement issued through White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
Many Trump observers, not just me, latched on to that two-week time frame as a sign that he most likely wouldn't be doing anything at all, if he could get away with it. As with his plan for a healthcare program to replace the Affordable Care Act, or his proffer of proof that President Obama had had his Trump Tower phone tapped, or the completion of his frequently promised infrastructure bill. Whenever he says something is going to happen in two weeks, it's a thing he feels should happen but he hasn't been able to envisage how—and it most likely won't. "We'll see what happens," he also likes to say, a fascinated observer of his own unpredictability.
I have no doubt that the idea of bringing peace to the Middle East appeals to him very, very strongly; not so much out of a hatred of war as his hatred and envy of Democratic presidents, Bill Clinton and the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Barack Obama, and I suppose Joe Biden, who defeated him in the 2020 election, especially. He has these projects of wiping out their achievements, as with the NAFTA agreement, where you might have thought his anger was directed at the thing itself, but all he really wanted to do was to reassemble it with his own name instead of Clinton's. And I think the same applies to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, JCPOA, regulating Iran's nuclear activities, from which he withdrew the United States in 2018, bringing on Iran's return to producing highly enriched uranium.
It's about dealmaking: he doesn't have any ideas about these very complicated policy matters, but he does have certain ways he likes to think about himself, of which maybe the preeminent is the one his ghostwriter Tony Schwartz created for him, as the master dealmaker. Is he "transactional"? Make that a heroic characteristic, brilliant and dangerous, something nobody else can do. Comparable to war or sports, with clear winners and losers, an activity in which you can show your superior manhood. This is a huge aspect of his addiction to trade policy, for instance, though it's based on a complete misunderstanding of what trade policy is about economically. He treats it as a contest in which he represents his country. He likes the concept of being a mighty warrior, too, I won't call him a pacifist, and he'd love to be recognized as as first-class intellectual, like his MIT uncle, and an exemplar of exquisite taste for the interior design of his Manhattan triplex and his programming at the Kennedy Center, but those aren't happening. But everybody knows that Trump makes deals, and yet he's continually frustrated; the American history of the past 30 years is studded with all these dramatic Democratic deals, while he's unable to bring One Big Beautiful Bill across the line, and the glory of the NAFTA-erasing United States–Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) was so fleeting that he can't even remember doing it himself ("Who would ever sign a thing like this?" he complained in February).
Of course there's an obvious reason for the failure, in his own incapacity. He doesn't understand anything about the details, and in his narcissism he lacks what cognitivists call a theory of mind to help him read the intentions of the person he's negotiating with. He's a terrible dealmaker. The only thing he's any good at is bullying. But you can't expect him to understand that.
I'm discovering that it's my mission, or obsession, to add whenever someone mentions Trump as a "deal-maker," this: Trump's ability to make deals--his willingness to agree to them--is in part contingent on the fact that he is perfectly willing to abrogate, ignore, or violate them if it suits his purpose. It's the same as when he cheats at golf, and then declares he's "won." The idea that a six-time bankrupt is an expert negotiator is laughable, although of course it's not funny.
Excellent breakdown. I can’t really disagree with anything, especially that Tubby & Co. knew little or nothing before the first Israeli strikes went out. I will however suggest one further item for consideration as to why Bibi pulled the trigger: Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb. Ukraine pulled that off by smuggling drones into Russia and pre-positioning them near military targets for a surprise attack, which went off on the first of June. As we know it was a spectacular success and overnight every military in the world was asking themselves if they were vulnerable to such attacks and how could they counter this new threat?
And what shouLd come out after the first day of strikes on Iran? That some of Iran’s air defenses and missiles had been taken out by (wait for it) drones that had been smuggled into Iran and pre-positioned near military targets for a surprise attack.
If I’m the Israeli in charge of that particular covert op on June 1 when Ukraine launches Spiderweb, I’m definitely hitting the panic button. The chances that Iranian security will be on the lookout of tactics like this just shot through the proverbial roof, and the odds the whole op gets blown go way up. So now there’s “use it or lose it” pressure to part of the attack plan as well. I have to think that played into Bibi launching such a risky gambit.