The joint American-Israeli aggression against Iran is still raging more than a week after it started on 28 February in what is a repeat of the carpet bombing of Dresden in Germany during World War II of Guernica in Spain during the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939.
US President Donald Trump said last week that Iran “must surrender without conditions”, to which his Iranian counterpart expectedly insisted that Iran will not bow to Trump’s diktats.
The war unleashed by the Americans and the Israelis in the heart of the Middle East and the Iranian resistance to it have become a defining moment not only in the history of the region but also for a dysfunctional world order. I would also say that this is a defining moment for American foreign policy and the standing of the United States in the world.
If Trump does not stop the war soon, his legacy and that of his administration, and with it that of the Republican Party in the US, will be greatly tarnished on the international scene and will pay a heavy price in the scheduled mid-term elections in the US in November.
Before the war started on 28 February, the expectation was that the Republicans would lose their majority in one of the two houses of the US Congress in November’s elections. At the time of writing, the prognosis is that the Democrats will have a major win, securing a majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.
Trump will become a lame duck president. The master of the “art of the deal” will have dealt his own Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement a heavy blow, and it will be difficult for him or anyone else to bring it back to the days in 2024 that saw the re-election of Trump to a second term.
It seems that neither Trump nor his closest advisers have foreseen or calculated the grave and destabilising risks and consequences of going along with the Israeli plans, or, to be more precise, those of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to go to war against Iran. Netanyahu has been manoeuvering since his first day in power in May 1996 to push the United States into doing so.
On two occasions since then he has addressed a joint session of the US Congress when the Republicans had (and have) a majority in the House of Representatives. On those two occasions he broadcast a simple message – namely, that the Iranian nuclear programme poses an “existential threat” to Israel and international security. On both occasions, the sitting presidents were Democrats.
Netanyahu’s first address was in March 2015 when the administration of former president Barack Obama, in close coordination with the other four permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany, was negotiating a deal with Iran to prevent it from manufacturing a nuclear weapon and to make sure that its nuclear programme was solely for the peaceful use of nuclear energy.
The 5+1 group successfully negotiated what is known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran in July 2015. Three years later, Trump, during his first term in office, obliged the Israeli prime minister and decided to withdraw from the JCPOA in May 2018.
The second time Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress was in the midst of the presidential elections campaign in the United States in July 2024. He repeated the same accusations against Iran; however, this time around he framed the issue as a battle between barbarism and the “civilised world,” by which he implicitly meant Western civilisation against radical Islamic forces, whatever he may have meant by those.
When Trump entered the Oval Office for a second time in January 2025, his administration was receptive to the Israeli plan to go after Iran. The major difference was whether to target the nuclear installations in Iran and its ballistic missiles programme or to bring down the Iranian regime.
In June last year, Trump sent American B-2 bombers to destroy three major Iranian nuclear installations, joining an Israeli bombing campaign against Iran in what was known as the 12-day war. In retrospect, it was the precursor of the war against Iran that broke out on 28 February this year.
Former president Obama had worked to agree the JCPOA with Iran precisely to pull the rug out from under the feet of Netanyahu and to spare the United States another military entanglement in the Middle East. He saw that it was not in the national interest of the United States to go to war on behalf of Israel and some other countries in the region that were not completely against going after Iran in 2015. Possibly those countries became ambivalent later about provoking a war with Iran.
Although Trump promised during his last presidential campaign that he would not drag the United States into another “forever war” and that his administration would not get involved in any future plans for “regime change” in the Middle East, the war that he has unleashed against Iran with Israel pushes his country into a military adventure with incalculable risks for regional and international security, even as Iran was negotiating with his administration a modified version of the JCPOA.
This is an adventure in which Trump cannot reasonably claim that he has the upper hand about how it will end. Perhaps the Venezuelan precedent of a partial regime change in Caracas with the United States having the upper hand over Venezuelan oil encouraged him to join the Israelis under Netanyahu to finish the Iranian question once for all. But unlike Obama, he did not foresee the dire consequences of a war against Iran, one that he can barely justify or defend before his own MAGA supporters or the American people.
Members of the US Congress who attended a closed briefing on the war last week said that they had the feeling that the administration does not have a clue about how the war could end. It has already reverberated economically and financially in the United States. The price of a gallon of petrol is going up at the pumps, with growing fears that inflation will rear its ugly head once again in a situation that will make it harder for the Federal Reserve to agree to further cuts in interest rates, something Trump has been pushing for.
I would not rule out Trump claiming that he has achieved a resounding military victory in the war or that the “best military in the world” has achieved all the war’s objectives under his command. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt predicted last week that the war would end in six weeks’ time.
I am not sure that the American economy can sustain the consequences of a prolonged war against Iran. If only Trump had had the foresight of one of his predecessors, Barack Obama, who refused to go along with Netanyahu’s plans. His name, moreover, is nowhere to be found in the infamous Epstein files.
The writer is former assistant foreign minister.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 12 March, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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