Will Trump join Iran attacks?
NOBODY knows precisely how the pieces of the Middle East jigsaw will fall into place over the coming hours and days and whether some sanity comes into play or Israel’s naked aggression against Iran sucks in the US, potentially spreading across the entire Gulf.
Donald Trump says he will decide within the next two weeks whether the US will throw in its full military might behind Israel. Who’ll believe him?
Remember he was suggesting no hostilities were likely to break out till the round of indirect talks in Oman between the US and Iran on ‘Sunday’ (a week ago) and Israel struck by stealth a couple of days earlier on Friday, killing the top tier of the Iranian military leadership and nuclear scientists mostly with their spouses and children in their Tehran flats.
Wielding influence and policy control over the US is one thing, but it is impossible Israel would have attacked Iran without the knowledge and approval of President Trump. So, Tehran must ask itself if his stance was part of the Israeli deception possibly meant to lull the Iranians into believing they still had a couple of days to bunker down before Tel Aviv’s shock, criminal campaign.
The massive US military build-up in the region can generate its own momentum. The one thing that the US says would immediately draw it into the conflict is an attack on any American target. With US bases dotting Iran’s Arab neighbours, with thousands of ground troops and air assets, and with American naval ships including aircraft carrier groups converging on the area, there would be ‘targets’ galore.
One misstep, a misfired missile, or worse still a false flag operation, and boom! the region would go up in flames.
One misstep, a misfired missile, or worse still a false flag operation, and boom! the region would go up in flames. This, apart from the usually well-informed American journalist Seymour Hersh’s assertion that his sources in the US administration have informed him that the US will join hands overtly with Israel in attacking Iran over the weekend.
From Rafael Mariano Grossi, chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which had oversight of Iran’s nuclear programme, to US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, to Iran itself — all have asserted that Tehran was nowhere near acquiring a nuclear weapon. (The only irritant was Iran’s uranium enrichment levels, which was being thrashed out, with talks on the verge of a breakthrough when Israel struck. Iran was insisting that the agreement must also lead to the lifting of decades-old sanctions.)
Israel’s was the lone voice saying otherwise. Soon, its European backers and predictably the US president, all of whom have materially, politically and diplomatically supported the apartheid state unconditionally in its Gaza genocide and also in its Greater Israel project, started to echo Tel Aviv’s stance, in an endorsement of the ‘Global North’ of Israel whose real objective seems to be tied to how the West wishes to shape the future of the Middle East, which today supplies 20 per cent of the world’s oil.
Look up the JCPOA accord inked in 2015 during the Obama administration and unilaterally scrapped by Trump in 2018 to see for yourself if the nuclear programme was the real issue.
The real issue seems to be to get Israel to police the Middle East and have trading partnerships and amiable relations with the Arab nations as long as they don’t challenge its primacy or raise the issue of the occupation of Palestine or the Gaza genocide in any meaningful way. And it is abundantly clear they won’t. Iran was seen as the only obstacle, or let’s say, irritant, with its now more or less defunct Axis of Resistance, and needed to be brushed out of the way.
This ‘brushing away’ of Iran now appears underway. Iran will resist and exact some toll on Israel but, with the military backing of the West and all their aerial assets in play, in all likelihood it will be made to pay a heavy price for its ‘intransigence’.
Whether the West and Israel’s desired regime change happens or not, the Global North will try and ensure Iran loses its ability to offer resistance. The West’s exercises in regime change and nation-building have often left countries in ruins with mass-scale devastation, piles of bodies, civil strife and externally induced divisions.
Things could be headed that way in Iran too. Only a couple of mitigating factors might alter the course of events, and history for that matter. The first is Europe’s self-preservation instinct, despite its commitment to the apartheid state. Any turmoil in Iran will see a flood of refugees heading towards Europe, giving grist to the racist/ far-right mill and further destabilising their societies, already on the brink of a fascist takeover. Then there is the opposition of Trump’s MAGA base at home.
Another is Trump’s generous Gulf Arab friends. They have spoken out and decried the Israeli aggression against Iran. Since many of them host US forces, they might be wary of missile retaliation and the havoc that can be wreaked on the oil and gas infrastructure in case the US openly joins the military action.
Ergo, it will be pertinent to ask if Pakistan is a small, no matter how tiny, part of the huge jigsaw. You will have guessed the reference here is to President Trump’s White House lunch invitation to Field Marshal Asim Munir.
The lunch which was scheduled to last 45 minutes extended to 135 minutes. After the lunch meeting, Trump told reporters “they [the Pakistani leadership] are unhappy over it [the situation in Iran] as they know Iran better than most”. He stopped and said no more. But had he said enough by then?
Could Pakistan, supported by Saudi Arabia for example, have briefed the US leader on the likely negative consequences on his country and the region of a direct involvement and suggested dialogue as a more effective means of settling the matter? I know it is a stretch and an implausibly long one. But Trump’s two-week statement followed. So ask one must. Even if there are no answers.
The writer is a former editor of Dawn.
Published in Dawn, June 22nd, 2025