US president and the ayatollah deserve a joint Nobel Peace Prize for averting a third world war or at least Iraq 2.0, if general ceasefire holds
I love Mexican food, especially Tacos. So it pains me and spoils my appetite whenever media pundits mention the acronym for “Trump always chickens out”. It must be admitted that most of the time, the president’s erratic pronouncements and obsessive-compulsive tweets, from universal tariffs and China sanctions to military support, or the lack thereof, for Ukraine betray a complete absence of clear thinking and actual policy.
But with his highly controversial strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities, you have to wonder whether he had not been thinking or at least hoping a few steps ahead of most others, for once. Maybe Taco this time isn’t so bad.
Let me, for argument’s sake, just put it on the table. Trump, against most of his advisers – both the supposedly wise as well as foolish ones, whether Maga or neocons – has escalated to de-escalate. And Tehran gets the message and is playing ball, hence its latest missile volley, in a symbolic retaliatory gesture, on an American military base in Qatar in which everyone came out relatively unscathed.
Consider the previous sequence of events. First, Trump forced the Iranians to negotiate. Then, when the Israelis attacked, he tried to use that as leverage and continued negotiations. Then he joined the Israelis with the heavy US strike on nuclear-related targets and threatened to broaden the war to impose regime change in Tehran.
The Iranians talked tough but responded with remarkable restraint, having warned friendly Qatar and therefore the Americans, about its forthcoming attack. Trump immediately reciprocated afterwards, and tweeted for world peace.
He thanked Iran “for giving us early notice, which made it possible for no lives to be lost, and nobody to be injured”.
“CONGRATULATIONS WORLD,” he wrote in all caps. “IT’S TIME FOR PEACE!”
So, we may yet avoid the third world war or at least Iraq 2.0. Is Trump crazy or is there a method in the madness?
When it comes to Israel, the United States has no foreign policy autonomy. What Israel wants, Israel gets, including almost total US support to commit genocide.
Like most presidents after Jimmy Carter, Trump could not resist pressure from Israel and its powerful friends in the US. Benjamin Netanyahu has spent most of his time in office fantasising about an Iranian Armageddon. Now, he finally gets the war he has always wanted. Unfortunately, he can’t deliver a win without US help, that is, by dragging America into what everyone knows will be another quagmire.
What was Trump to do? He campaigned as an anti-war president and probably personally fears war much more than the usual warmongering type in Washington. I consider that a plus in a US president, despite all his other terrible and even terrifying flaws.
But Trump couldn’t very well just say no to Netanyahu. And yet, launching a war favoured by the pro-Israeli lobby in the US threatened to fracture the whole anti-war, “America first” Maga movement.
So, regardless of whether Iran was really developing a nuclear bomb, he delivered a powerful blow which may or may not have knocked out the country’s bomb-making capabilities. If it did, good, but if not, the strike was costly and powerful enough to shut up Netanyahu and his American pals. Trump has kicked the can down the road.
Iran understood, and made no more than a symbolic retaliatory strike. It responded in a similar way in April last year, after Israel, in open violation of international law, bombed the Iranian embassy in Damascus, killing two senior Iranian military officers; and before that, in 2020 after Trump 1.0 ordered the targeted killing of top Iranian General Qassem Soleimani.
Both Tehran and Washington want out. We will see if Trump’s claim of a general ceasefire holds.
If it works out, I say Trump and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei deserve a joint Nobel Peace Prize. Crazy? They gave one to Barack Obama for nothing, and a joint prize to Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho for their conduct in the Vietnam war.
