Trump’s three excruciating choices on Iran

DONALD TRUMP promised to end the wars in the Middle East. Instead America’s president finds himself supervising a new one. No matter: he thinks the conflict between Israel and Iran, now in its fourth day, will be simple to stop. “We can easily get a deal done,” he wrote in a social-media post on June 15th. A few hours later he implied that peace between the two countries, bitter foes since 1979, was merely a matter of convincing them to trade more.

His breezy optimism is easy to dismiss, out of place with a war that has rained air strikes on Tehran and missile barrages on Tel Aviv. But Mr Trump will nonetheless have a big say in when and how that war ends. In the coming days he will have to make several decisions that will either restrain or embolden Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. Mr Netanyahu started the war, but he is relying on Mr Trump to end it; how the president plans to do so, though, is anyone’s guess.

The first decision is whether to demand a diplomatic solution. Before the war America was trying to negotiate a new nuclear pact with Iran, to replace the one Mr Trump abandoned in 2018. A sixth round of talks had been scheduled for this weekend. Unsurprisingly, it was cancelled. Still, Mr Trump continues to urge negotiations. Iran’s nuclear project is the ostensible focus of Israel’s war effort; an agreement to restrict it would be a key part of a ceasefire. But Mr Trump will face a string of obstacles.

For a start, neither warring party is ready to make such a deal. Israel has spent years planning this war. It will not want to stop fighting after a few days, with many of its goals unmet. And while Iran says it is willing to accept a mutual ceasefire, it is not yet prepared to make major concessions on its nuclear programme. America will want it to forswear uranium enrichment and dismantle many of its nuclear facilities, things it has resisted doing for decades.

Perhaps Iran will be more willing to capitulate as the damage mounts. The regime wants to survive. But it does not trust America in general, and Mr Trump in particular: he ditched the nuclear pact in 2018, assassinated Iran’s top commander in 2020 and allowed Israel to start a war.

The German foreign minister has offered, alongside Britain and France, to negotiate with the Iranians. But America would still have to play a central role in the talks. No one else could assure both Israel and Iran that an agreement would stick. If it is serious about a deal, it will need to be a more competent negotiator this time around. Steve Witkoff, the president’s Middle East envoy, managed just five meetings with Iran in two months, while juggling a portfolio that also included the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. He also scorned help from American allies (a European diplomat says he received more detailed readouts on the talks from Iran than from America).

If Mr Trump is not serious about diplomacy, his second choice is whether America should join the war. Satellite imagery suggests that Israel has destroyed the so-called “pilot-fuel enrichment plant” at Natanz, an above-ground facility where Iran enriched uranium to 60%, a small step below weapons-grade.

But it has yet to damage the enrichment facility at Fordow, which is dug into the side of a mountain, too deep for Israeli ordnance to reach. Israel could damage the entrances and ventilation shafts, in effect entombing the facility for a time. It would rather enlist help from America, which has specialised bombs capable of burrowing deep underground. It has asked Mr Trump to join strikes on Fordow (he has not yet agreed).

In the most optimistic scenario those sorties would both cripple the facility and spook Iran into submitting to a deal. Reality is rarely so tidy, however. Iran may fear that strikes on Fordow are merely the opening act in a broader campaign to topple the regime. That could lead it to retaliate against America or its allies in the region. Iran has so far refrained from such actions, fearing they would draw America into the war; if America was already involved, though, Iran may feel it had nothing to lose.

Some of Mr Trump’s supporters in Washington, and some analysts in Israel, suspect Mr Netanyahu has such a scenario in mind. When the war began, after all, Israel said it only needed America’s permission. Now it wants America to join a limited military campaign—one that could easily morph into something bigger.

The prime minister seems increasingly fixated on toppling Iran’s regime. In a statement addressed to the people of Iran on June 13th he urged them to “stand up” against their rulers. Two days later, in an interview with Fox News, he was asked if regime change was Israel’s goal. “It could certainly be the result, because the Iran regime is very weak,” Mr Netanyahu replied. Several of Mr Trump’s advisers have urged him not to approve American strikes, fearing it would become an open-ended campaign.

That points to Mr Trump’s third choice. Israeli leaders like to say that their country defends itself by itself. But it relies on America to protect it against Iranian ballistic missiles, to share intelligence and to resupply its army. If Mr Trump stays out of the war, and if he declines to pursue serious diplomacy—or if his efforts are aimless and futile, a hallmark of his administration—he will have to decide how much continued support to give Israel.

He could urge Israel to end the war anyway. Or he could allow it to continue, much as he has done in Gaza since March, when Israel abandoned a ceasefire there. Israel could probably continue its strikes in Iran for weeks, especially if Iran runs short of the ballistic missiles it uses to counter-attack. Would it eventually declare victory? Or would it keep bombing and hope it could destabilise the regime? And if Iran could no longer effectively strike back at Israel, would it widen the war to neighbouring countries?

The longer the war goes on, the more unpredictable it becomes. “There’s no end game for Israel unless it draws in the US or unless the regime falls,” says a Western diplomat. “Both are big gambles.” Eventually the only plausible way out may be a deal. But getting one will require diplomatic savvy from Mr Trump and flexibility from both Israel and Iran—things that none of them are known for. ■