Israel attacks Iran – will the US join the conflict?

“Donald Trump faced one of the most monumental decisions of his presidency on 17 June as he debated whether to join a war against Iran that risked sucking Washington into a new Middle Eastern conflict but also offered the chance to eliminate a foe’s nuclear programme,” says Michael Birnbaum in The Washington Post.

Posting throughout the day on social media, Trump said the US had “complete and total control of the skies over Iran”, warned Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei that he was an “easy target”, and demanded Iran’s “unconditional surrender”. He had hurried home early from the G7 summit in Canada to attend an 80-minute meeting in the White House situation room, after a conversation with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Israel and Iran have been exchanging fire since 13 June, when Israel launched air strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities and infrastructure, shortly after Iran had “brazenly flouted” the two-month deadline Trump had given Iran for engaging in talks, says Newsweek’s Dan Perry.

Long seen as a “mighty power”, Iran’s ambitions for regional dominance “have been destroyed in just five days by a country with a tenth of its population and an 80th of its land mass”, says Adrian Bloomfield in The Telegraph. Most of its missiles have been intercepted while Israel has “wiped out” Iran’s air defences, its drones have destroyed more than 120 ballistic missile launchers, and 11 of Iran’s generals and the country’s top nuclear scientists have been killed. Israel’s attack on its launch sites may have more than halved its missile capacity. Thousands have fled Tehran.

Will Trump join the conflict between Israel and Iran?

Netanyahu’s attack has been years in the making, says William Hague in The Times. The idea that a theocratic regime in Tehran that threatens to destroy other nations should never be allowed to possess nuclear weapons is “sound”. However, Netanyahu’s insistence that “diplomacy could never work” has “severely undermined” efforts by the US and others. Trump abandoned the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in his first term and, although “second-term Trump” has been trying to “stick a deal back together”, Iran now has “far more” enriched uranium. The increasing likelihood of nuclear “breakout” made Israel’s attack easier to justify. It helped that Iran’s key ally, Bashar al-Assad, has fled Syria, and proxies in Lebanon and Gaza have been “hammered by the Israelis”. The Iranian leaders are “cornered.”

Only the US has weapons powerful enough to blow up Iran’s main nuclear site at Fordow, says Roger Boyes in The Times. Without its involvement, Iran, with Russian and Chinese backing, remains a “wounded big beast”. Khamenei has warned of “irreparable harm” if the US military becomes involved. There is also the risk that any intervention that “appears externally driven” backfires, says Dan Perry. The Islamic Republic is run by an “unaccountable clerical elite” which controls its people through censorship and repression, but if Iran’s globally minded citizens “despise” the regime, society remains “deeply nationalistic”.

Civil society is fearful and fragmented, and many people are economically dependent on the state. This means the “most plausible scenario is a palace coup: a rupture within the military”. Trump is averse to protracted military engagements, but the success of Israel’s strikes and his love of “dramatic” wins may incline him to take steps that would allow him to position himself as the “architect of Iran’s ‘freedom moment’”. “At a moment of grave uncertainty, one thing is not in doubt” – Iranians deserve “better than the theocratic prison” to which they’ve been consigned since 1979.

This article was first published in MoneyWeek’s magazine. Enjoy exclusive early access to news, opinion and analysis from our team of financial experts with a MoneyWeek subscription.