By Harrison Mann\Zeteo
Photos: YouTube Screenshots
America’s arsonist-firefighter President Donald Trump has once again resolved a crisis of his own creation – at least for now. But what did he break along the way?
Trump has termed the US-Israel-Iran war the “12-Day War” in cheeky reference to Israel’s 1967 Six Day War (remembered by Palestinians and Israel’s neighbors as the Naksa, or “setback”), when Israel quickly defeated several Arab armies, captured the West Bank and Gaza, and displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. The comparison is more apt than Trump realizes. The 1967 war was also an unprovoked Israeli war of aggression, greenlit by a US president, that destabilized the region for decades.
Here are six ways Trump’s sequel promises to further endanger people in the Middle East – and around the world:
1. Iran has more reason than ever to build a nuclear weapon in secret.
By greenlighting Israel’s attacks in the middle of US-Iran nuclear talks, and then joining the war himself, Trump embarrassed the moderates in Iran’s government and vindicated hardliners who have long argued that negotiating with America was a losing proposition. The war elevated the influence of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps and convinced Iran’s parliament to curtail international observers’ access to Iran’s nuclear program. Iran has likely relocated and hidden some of its highly enriched uranium and may still possess intact centrifuges and other key equipment needed to work toward a nuclear weapon. What is certain is that the Iranian government now has every incentive to conceal its nuclear activities.
2. Other countries also have more incentive to covertly build a nuke.
Regimes with an uncertain relationship with Washington are drawing the same lessons as Iran: The United States is not a reliable negotiating partner, so the only way to guarantee survival is through nuclear weapons. Kim Jong Un looks like an increasingly appealing model when compared to the fates of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi.
US allies in the Middle East are also coming to the realization that the United States may not be willing or able to protect them if they land in Israel’s sights. After Israel launched its operation, Turkey’s president announced he was boosting production “to bring our medium- and long-range missile stockpiles to a level that ensures deterrence, in light of recent developments.” Gulf States like Saudi Arabia are also questioning their bet that a partnership with America and Israel will keep them safe. Increasingly viewing Israel as an unrestrained rogue state, and reminded that Iran’s missiles can reach them, the Gulf monarchies will more seriously consider improving their own deterrent capabilities.
3. After discovering they can convince the US president to bomb Iran for them, Netanyahu and DC hawks will try even harder to convince him again.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ideological allies in DC have achieved a goal they’ve worked toward for decades. Though Trump’s military intervention fell far short of the full-scale regime change operation they seemingly hoped for, they have been energized by their genuinely unprecedented accomplishment. Israel’s defense minister is already hinting that Israel could resume bombing Iran, and hawks like Senator Lindsey Graham are trying to press their advantage and talk Trump into tearing up his ceasefire.
4. And Trump may be easier to convince since he thinks that bombing Iran isn’t as risky as everyone told him it was.
Trump has likely learned all the wrong lessons from this misadventure: that directly striking Iran – a red line for previous administrations, including his first – is not nearly as risky as he was led to believe. Judging from his Truth Social post thanking Iran for communicating and choreographing its retaliatory strikes on a US airbase in Qatar, Trump has concluded that bombing Iran’s nuclear sites was a fairly consequence-free endeavor, uproar from sectors of his MAGA base notwithstanding. In the future, Trump will see direct strikes on Iran as a valuable policy option and his June 21 strikes as a baseline from which to escalate further. Trump said on Friday that he would consider bombing Iran again if he learned Iran was able to enrich uranium to weapons-grade levels – something Iran almost certainly retains the capability to do, which hawks are sure to remind him.
5. Trump sacrificed the integrity of the US intelligence community to justify getting into and then out of the war.
The “12-Day War” began with Trump forcing his director of national intelligence (DNI), Tulsi Gabbard, to recant her assessment earlier this year that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon, and ended with the Trump administration disputing a leaked preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency assessment that US strikes had only set back Iran’s nuclear program by a few months. Gabbard and CIA director John Ratcliffe (who lost his nomination for DNI in Trump’s first term over concerns he would politicize intelligence) quickly backed Trump’s claim that Iran’s nuclear facilities had been “obliterated,” and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth gave an emotional press conference. While I obviously object to some of the missions performed by the DIA – that’s why I resigned – undermining the credibility of U.S. intelligence assessments only gives Trump more license to invent his own facts.
6. Trump used the war to undermine democracy in the US and Israel
With the war as a pretense, the Trump administration launched a new wave of racist ICE roundups, this time against Iranian asylum-seekers and other Iranian immigrants. And while Israel is hardly “the only democracy in the Middle East” (a tagline that ignores Israel’s brutal apartheid rule over Palestinians and its northern neighbor Lebanon, which is a democracy, if a deeply dysfunctional one) Democratic rule for even its Jewish citizens took another blow when Trump implied in a Truth Social post he would cut military aid to Israel if prosecutors didn’t abandon Netanyahu’s long-running corruption case. The threat apparently worked, with the Jerusalem district court agreeing on Sunday to postpone Netanyahu’s upcoming court appearance. While Netanyahu has regularly used Israel’s security situation as an excuse avoid court – his corruption trial has been a key motivation for starting or prolonging Israel’s post-October 7 wars – this is the first time he’s gotten Trump to threaten his own country on his behalf.
Harrison Mann is a former US Army major and executive officer of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Middle East/Africa Regional Center who resigned in protest of his office’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza under the Biden administration. He is currently with Win Without War.
