Alex Callinicos: Trump hesitates as risk of war heightens

Donald Trump and his secretary of war Pete Hegseth

“I call all the shots. He doesn’t call the shots,” Donald Trump told the Financial Times newspaper on Sunday. He was talking about Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

But Netanyahu immediately defied Trump’s instructions and ordered his armed forces to retaliate against Iranian missile strikes on Israel. A full-scale resumption of war in West Asia looks dangerously close.

Tangled together in this drama are two different threads.

The first is Trump’s efforts to get out of the war he and Netanyahu started in February. To their surprise, the Islamic Republic regime in Iran survived the air strikes and hit back.

US bases all over the region were damaged, Israel’s ally the United Arab Emirates was hit particularly hard, and the Strait of Hormuz—a key chokepoint in global energy flows—was closed. Trump and the US military learned that the original objective of regime change in Iran that Netanyahu had sold them was a pipe dream.

Trump needs to reopen the strait soon to prevent inflation taking off before increasingly restive US voters get a chance to pass judgement on his presidency in November’s mid-term elections.

He needs a deal with Iran fast. But he’s been trying to get it on the cheap, offering Iran as little as possible. This isn’t simply to avoid personal humiliation. Giving Iran too generous terms would threaten US hegemony, not just in the Gulf, but globally.

The Iranian regime meanwhile, has no interest in helping Trump out. The assassination of its previous leaders has put an ideologically tougher team in charge. Their confidence is high after successfully enduring the US-Israeli assault.

And they don’t trust Trump as far as they can throw him. The US and Israel attacked them twice while negotiating over Iran’s nuclear programme.

Here the second thread enters the story. This is the spoiler role played by Israel. Netanyahu has been lobbying the US to attack Iran for a generation.

His substitute for a strategy since 7 October 2023 has been to use ultra-violence to force all the other states in the region to submit to Israeli domination.

This policy failed with Iran. So Netanyahu wants the war to resume and is trying to sabotage the US-Iran negotiations.

The New York Times newspaper reports, “Recent US intelligence reports have raised concerns about Israeli spy agencies eavesdropping on US negotiators working on a peace deal with Iran, amid rising concern over a more general counterintelligence threat by Israel”.

Netanyahu has pursued the normal Israeli approach to ceasefires—to ignore them on spurious grounds of “self‑defence”—in Gaza and Lebanon in the hope of provoking an Iranian reaction.

The Israelis want to destroy the Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah in any case. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have occupied a strip of southern Lebanon where Hezbollah has killed quite a lot of their soldiers using wire‑operated drones.

After further Israeli bombardments of Beirut on Sunday, Iran launched its missile attacks on Israel. Trita Parsi, a leading critic of US foreign policy, commented, “This is the first time in decades that a regional power has the means, capacity and willingness to put hard power against Israeli military manoeuvres or aggression against a third party.”

Since the 1980s, leading Arab powers such as Egypt, Iraq and Syria have avoided any risk of becoming the target of Israeli air power. The new Sunni Islamist regime that forced out Bashar al-Assad in Syria has allowed the IDF to seize strategically important swathes of its territory.

But an emboldened Iran is beginning to assert itself at the regional level. Trump famously told Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, “You don’t have the cards”.

The Iranian leadership reckons it does have the cards—a formidable arsenal of missiles and drones, the ability to keep the strait shut and the ideological legitimacy that comes from defying the US and Israel.

Trump does have the power to call the shots with Israel. But it’s an open question whether he has the political will or skills to use it. If he doesn’t, it could sink his presidency.