What will Trump do?
Today’s video on Dan Senor’s YouTube channel, Call Me Back, features a discussion among (from the left, above) Senor, Karim Sadjadpour, and Nadav Eyal. According to Wikipedia, Senor was the “chief spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and senior foreign policy adviser to U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney during the 2012 election campaign.” He is well-connected in US foreign policy circles.
Karim Sadjadpour is (also according to Wikipedia) “an Iranian-American policy analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C.”
Nadav Eyal is (also according to Wikipedia) “an Israeli journalist and commentator.” He was on a Call Me Back video I linked to earlier.
The video was recorded on 6/17, Tuesday morning.
The discussion centered on the Israel-Iran “end game,” the possibilities for the state of affairs a few months from now.
It is taken as given that Israel has won the military side of the conflict. I have heard concerns (NYT, 6/19) that even with all the damage Israel has done to the Iranian military, Iran may still have enough offensive missiles to outlast the Israeli defensive missiles. That issue was not discussed. The consensus seemed to be that this was not an issue.
The worst-case result is that Iran will string the US and Israel along until the Israelis stop their bombing. After that, Iran expects that it will be able to rebuild and continue its war against Israel and the US.
Will the US and Israel find a way to avoid that result? As this is being written, the White House announced that Trump is giving Iran two more weeks to come to a negotiated solution before deciding what the US will do next. Since this is two weeks on top of the 60 days Trump originally gave Iran, this appears to signal that Iran’s best strategy is to delay as long as possible. In other words, another TrumpTACO move.
This, I’m sure, disappoints Israel, which will likely use the next two weeks to look for ways to convince Trump to commit to doing something to end the war on terms Israel can accept.
I’m very interested to see what sorts of Israeli moves Dan Senor and his guests think are most promising. Israel’s problem is that, as in Gaza, it does not have the means to destroy either Iran or Hamas on its own.
Will Israel begin to target Iran’s oil infrastructure? (So far, it has not done so.) Will Iran, in the meantime, accelerate its race to build a nuclear weapon? That’s Israel’s primary fear. Will Israel be able to convince Trump that the risk of Iran getting a nuclear weapon is high enough that the US should not take that risk? As Trump is fond of saying, we’ll see what happens.