The gun is locked and loaded. His finger is on the trigger. All Donald Trump has to decide now is when to pull it — and destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities, buried deep underground, with giant ‘bunker buster’ bombs only America is able to deliver.
The prospect of yet another Middle East military venture, this time in cahoots with Israel, is causing some dismay in MAGA circles, which has a visceral dislike of foreign entanglements. After all, they elected Trump specifically to avoid another ‘forever war’.
But Trump has never wavered from his belief that under no circumstances can Iran be allowed to possess nuclear bombs — and that’s a popular position with the MAGA base.
If the destruction of Tehran’s nuclear capabilities is enough of a humiliation for the Iranian regime — on top of all the other humiliations Israel is currently inflicting on it — to lead to its demise then MAGA is ready to cheer that on too.
A poll out this week conducted by JL Partners found a massive 65 percent of self-styled MAGA Republicans backing US strikes on Iran, with only a meagre 19 percent opposed. That’s a much higher level of support for military action than among more traditional Republicans, who nevertheless back strikes against Iran by a more-than-comfortable 51 percent to 28 percent.
For all the sound and fury it is generating against US military involvement, the MAGA lunatic fringe — as exemplified by the likes of Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Candace Owen — is clearly in the minority. And Trump has won the day among his own supporters.
Now Bannon admits MAGA will ‘get on board’ if Trump unleashes US bombers on Iran, acknowledging that the President has always consistently insisted Iran cannot have nuclear weapons.
And those thought to have doubts inside the administration are being quietly sidelined. When Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, opined before Congress that she didn’t think Iran was trying to become a nuclear power Trump brusquely slapped her down: ‘I don’t care what she said’ he snapped on Air Force One.
That’s quite something to say about someone to whom the CIA and other intelligence agencies report. But White House aides indicate to me that Gabbard will soon be heading for the door marked ‘exit’.
Even Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is not entirely in the loop. Trump has taken to dealing directly with the US Central Command chief, Erik Kurilla, and the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Caine. From both he’s been seeking assurances that the bunker busters really will take out Iran’s nuclear facilities.
For Trump, it’s personal as well as political. Ever since January 2020, when he authorized a drone strike to assassinate Qasem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Quds Force, the regime’s terrorist-supporting foreign legion, Trump has gone in fear that Iran would try to assassinate him — just as Bush family members always feared Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein would come for them after the first President Bush ousted Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1990.
During the four years between his presidencies, when he had a lot less protection than he does now, Trump regularly took a special interest in how he was being guarded. He thought he was particularly vulnerable at his New Jersey golf club, where close associates say he even directed the deployment of agents and defensive vehicles himself.
Trump has good reason to be concerned. Even the Biden Justice Department saw a serious threat. Last November it unsealed charges against Farhad Shakeri, a 51-year-old Afghan national residing in Iran. It believed he had been tasked by the regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to draw up a plot to surveil and assassinate Trump during the 2024 presidential election campaign.
The DOJ described Shakeri as an ‘IRGC asset’ who maintained an overseas network of agents for Tehran’s surveillance and assassination plots. Trump was to be killed in retaliation for the assassination of Soleimani. The IRGC paused the plot, believing it would be easier to target Trump after the election, which it expected him to lose. Shakeri is still at liberty in Iran.
So it’s understandable for Trump to think that, if he can help remove the regime, he will eliminate a major threat to his life from an enemy with considerable resources when it comes to assassinations and terror attacks.
But there are compelling political pressures on Trump to go along with regime change too.
Israel wants to destroy Iran’s nuclear bomb capabilities not just because it removes a threat to Israel’s very existence but because it could destabilize the Iranian clerical-military dictatorship to the point of collapse. It is already severely weakened.
Over the past year or so it has seen Hamas, its proxy forces in Gaza, decimated; its even bigger proxy forces in Lebanon, Hezbollah, decapitated and neutralized; and its compliant ally in Syria, Bashar al-Assad, through which the IRGC did much of its dirty work, dethroned.
Over the past week the Israelis have taken out many of the regime’s leading commanders and nuclear scientists — plus a lot of military hardware and infrastructure. The Israeli Air Force roams the skies over Iran with impunity, hitting targets at will.
The Iranian people are already furious that billions were squandered on regime proxy forces for no return — while their living standards tanked. Much treasure has also been spent on a nuclear weapons capability. If that too was to go up in smoke it could be the ultimate disgrace for a regime that is already tottering.
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is now the Joe Biden of the Iranian government: old (85), unwell, isolated, doddery, not always entirely grasping what’s going on. Yet there is no succession plan. The favored heir apparent died in a helicopter crash last year. Khamenei’s son sees himself as a contender. But not many others who matter do.
All this Trump realizes. But he also knows that if Israel struggles to deliver a killer blow to Iran’s nuclear facilities then Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu will aim to bring the regime to its knees by destroying its oil facilities on Kharg Island, from which Iran exports most of its crude, worth over $50bn a year.
Without that revenue — over 50 percent of which goes on the military — an already clapped out economy could collapse entirely, provoking regime-change unrest on the streets. In that event, the mullahs and the military could easily decide they have nothing to lose by closing the Strait of Hormuz, through which a huge chunk of the world’s crude oil passes and launching missiles against the fossil fuel facilities of the Gulf States.
That would trigger a global economic crisis. Oil prices would soar well above $100 a barrel, US gas prices at the pump would spike, inflation overall would be back up over 6 percent and a US recession would beckon.
All of which are the last things Trump wants. So it’s not surprising he’s concluded that firing up the B2 stealth bombers and dropping the bunker busters is a lot less risky or painful when it comes to seeing off the mullahs than the Israeli alternative.
Of course anything can happen when a 50-year-old dictatorship falls. There is no guarantee of a speedy transition to a more peaceful, civilized government in Tehran. The mullahs might be finished but the military might decide to cling on to power.
However, unlike all those Arab states for which the Arab Spring was a false dawn, Iran has a massive middle class which is young, well-educated, entrepreneurial, pretty pro-West, not at all anti-Israel and yearning for some basic freedoms. That is not enough to ensure progress but it is a pretty solid basis on which to start.
A less bellicose government in Tehran would be transformative for the Middle East. Iran would cease to be a regional disruptor. The terrorists would have lost their biggest paymaster. Relations with the Sunni Arabs and Israel would be cordial. It would put rocket boosters under the Abraham Accords, the signal foreign policy success of Trump’s first administration, which began normalizing relations between Israel and Sunni Arabs.
Much could go wrong. Chaos and confusion cannot be ruled out. As always, victory will have many fathers and defeat will be an orphan. But I’m told Trump thinks it worth the risk, especially given the alternatives, and it has not passed his attention that there is the chance of a breakthrough of truly historic proportions.
