President Donald Trump has received an enormous amount of pressure over the last week to join Israel’s war against Iran. The conservative radio host Mark Levin has used his show, as well as a private lunch with Trump, to highlight the dire threat a nuclear-armed Iran poses to Israel, the United States, and world civilization. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has jumped on Fox News at every opportunity to press Washington either to provide the Israeli Air Force with the big, 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) munitions that are required to level Iran’s underground nuclear facility at Fordow or to bomb the site itself. Some of the more delusional thinkers have spouted off about using Israel’s bombing campaign to change the regime in Tehran or to disarm the Islamic Republic. And then there’s Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who despite his assertions to the contrary is no doubt trying to convince the White House to become a belligerent.
Trump, however, didn’t get elected to a second term to start new wars—he was elected to end them. He said so himself during his inaugural speech. Trump may talk about killing foreign leaders like the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un (during the first year of his first term) or the Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but his actions are more restrained than his rhetoric suggests. Yes, he inherited an air war against the Houthis in Yemen and chose to accelerate it by widening the scale and pace of strikes, but he also decided to call it quits after less than two months, partly because the operations weren’t doing much of anything to protect freedom of navigation in the Red Sea. When Trump does decide to use force, he has favored quick, theatrical displays—like the 2017 and 2018 U.S. airstrikes on Syrian military assets—instead of the kind of drawn-out wars that epitomized the George W. Bush and Barack Obama presidencies.
Earlier this week, Trump declared that nobody knew what he was going to do on Iran. On June 19, he made his decision: War will be averted, for now. “I have a message directly from the president: ‘Based on the fact that there is a chance for substantial negotiations that may or may not take place with Iran in the near future, I will make my decision on whether or not to go within the next two weeks,’” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt stated on June 19. Trump, it seems, is willing to give the Iranians two more weeks to show up to a serious negotiation and find a diplomatic way out of the crisis.
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