Date: 2025-07-05 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00028720
MIDDLE EAST
ISRAEL ATTACK ON IRAN
Israel’s attack on Iran underscores Trump’s failures as a peacemaker
ISRAEL ATTACK ON IRAN
Israel’s attack on Iran underscores Trump’s failures as a peacemaker
President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
at an April 7 White House meeting.
(Kevin Mohatt/Reuters)
Original article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/06/13/israel-attack-iran-trump-failure/
The president is no warmonger, but his clumsy attempts at making peace keep coming up empty.
June 13, 2025
Opinion ... Max Boot
Max Boot is a Washington Post columnist and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. A Pulitzer Prize finalist in biography, he is the author, most recently, of the New York Times bestseller 'Reagan: His Life and Legend,' which was named one of the 10 best books of 2024 by the New York Times.
You have to give President Donald Trump credit. For all of his bellicose bluster (remember when he threatened to rain “fire and fury” down on North Korea?), he is not a warmonger — except, possibly, in California. In the international arena, he clearly wants peace. He just doesn’t know how to achieve it.
Make sense of the latest news and debates with our daily newsletter Trump came to office promising to end the Ukraine-Russia war in a day. It has been 144 days since his inauguration, and the prospect of peace appears as remote as ever. Indeed, Russia is mounting a new ground offensive and staging its biggest air attacks on Ukrainian cities.
Trump has also gotten tired of Israel’s endless war in Gaza and told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to wrap it up. The Trump administration did help to broker a six-week ceasefire, but after it ended on March 18, the war resumed, as brutal as ever. And then, for the past two months, Trump has been trying to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran while pressuring Israel not to launch a military strike. Yet that is just what Netanyahu has done, sending some 200 Israeli aircraft to attack targets across Iran. On Friday, Iran retaliated by launching ballistic missiles against Israel.
Part of the problem is the inherent difficulty of ending any protracted conflict. But Trump has made it harder on himself with the slapdash way in which he conducts the negotiations. He has appointed the same man, his friend Steve Witkoff, as the U.S. envoy for all three sets of peace talks, involving Ukraine/Russia, Israel/Hamas and Israel/Iran. It would test the powers of even a veteran diplomat — a Henry Kissinger or Philip Habib — to conduct three disparate sets of negotiations at once.
The task is all the more onerous given that Witkoff is a real estate developer with no background in diplomacy. And, in a dismaying display of hubris, he has chosen not to avail himself of many of the resources available in the U.S. government. He has gone into meetings with Vladimir Putin by himself, without even having his own interpreter, apparently in the unwarranted confidence that he can outwit a devious despot who has seen five U.S. presidents come and go.
The White House’s ability to supervise these complex negotiations has been hobbled by Trump’s decision to purge the National Security Council and make Marco Rubio juggle the jobs of both national security adviser and secretary of state. Perhaps not surprisingly, there has been no sense of any administration strategy for the peace talks. It has been all improvisational, with the primary guidance provided by Trump’s erratic social media posts.
Trump’s search for peace has been further undercut by three other problems: He is trying to do too much at once (not only three sets of peace talks, but also trade talks with countless countries). He is unwilling to turn the screws on either Netanyahu or Putin, whom he considers his friends, for ignoring his entreaties. And he has a short attention span and wants instant results.
Peace negotiations demand patience. In the case of the U.S. negotiations with Iran, there were years of mutual mistrust that had to be cleared away. The administration also sent mixed signals over whether it would be willing to accept some residual Iranian nuclear-enrichment capacity. Yet a senior administration official described the talks as “constructive” last month. Then came the Israeli airstrikes on Thursday.
On Friday, Trump expressed a desire to continue the talks “BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE,” but indications are it’s already too late. Tehran announced that the talks are off. If Trump thought the Israeli attack would spur Iran to make concessions, he miscalculated, at least in the short-term.
Tehran committed its own miscalculation by not pausing its nuclear program while it was in discussions with the United States. The International Atomic Energy Agency declared on Thursday that Iran was in violation of its nonproliferation obligations. The international agency earlier reported that Iran had increased its stockpile of near-weapons-grade material by at least 50 percent since February. Netanyahu was alarmed enough by these developments that he risked a breach with Trump to launch an attack that he had been threatening to carry out for decades.
The early results were impressive, with Israeli airstrikes decapitating Iran’s senior military leadership and further degrading its air defenses. Israel reportedly prepositioned drones in Iran, much as Ukraine had earlier done in Russia, and there were no reports of any Israeli aircraft being shot down. Israeli intelligence on Iran is simply superb. But, in the initial attacks, only one major Iranian nuclear site, at Natanz, was targeted, and the degree of damage is so far unknown. Other sites, in particular the one buried under a mountain at Fordow, will be much harder for Israel to hit.
The Israelis can set back the Iranian nuclear program, perhaps substantially, but they can’t eradicate it. No matter how many Iranian scientists the Israelis kill, there is no way to erase the nuclear know-how that Iran has accumulated over the decades. Indeed, the Israeli attack could even accelerate a covert Iranian effort to weaponize its nuclear program — something it has so far refrained from doing. Then there is the danger of Iranian retaliation, which could include terrorist plots, attacks on U.S. bases or moderate Arab states, and attempts to close the Straits of Hormuz to shipping. Israel’s gambit in attacking Iran is paying off so far, but it’s still a risky move.
The best, if admittedly imperfect, answer to the Iranian nuclear program that anyone has come up with so far was the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action signed by President Barack Obama in 2015. This accord led to the elimination of 97 percent of Iran’s fissile material, the removal of two-thirds of its centrifuges, and the imposition of tight international controls on its nuclear program. The JCPOA lengthened Iran’s “breakout time” to over a year; more recently, the breakout time has been as little as a week or two.
Trump’s disastrous decision to exit the accord in 2018, even though the Iranians were abiding by it, lit the long fuse that resulted in the latest war between Iran and Israel. It is a conflict that Israel is likely to win, but the fact that the shooting has started is a sign of how ineffectual Trump’s diplomacy has been.
What readers are saying The comments overwhelmingly criticize President Trump's approach to international diplomacy, describing it as ineffective and chaotic. Many commenters argue that his actions, such as withdrawing from the JCPOA, have led to increased global instability. They characterize Trump as... Show more
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By Max Boot
Max Boot is a Washington Post columnist and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. A Pulitzer Prize finalist in biography, he is the author, most recently, of the New York Times bestseller 'Reagan: His Life and Legend,' which was named one of the 10 best books of 2024 by the New York Times.
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