Trump has exposed the limits of his own power

The US and Israel have been weakened by the use of their massive military power – world affairs editor Sam Kiley explains why this matters
C ritics of the US president will see the latest extension of a ceasefire over Iran as yet another “TACO” moment because Trump Always Chickens Out.

But to criticise Donald Trump for not behaving like a madman or an idiot is a sign that his critics are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Trump has threatened genocide against Iran when he said that “tonight an entire civilization will die” on social media.

Making such statements is criminal and involves his armed forces in potential violations of international law.

For now, Trump has backed away from a more recent threat that, if Iran does not open the Straits of Hormuz and agree to a peace deal, “the whole country is going to get blown up”.

That might be an end state that Israel ’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, may favour, but the US-Israeli attacks on Iran, and Israel’s simultaneous war in Lebanon , have served to weaken both nations in the long term.

That the outcome of an attack by the US and Israel would be bad for – among others – the US and Israel was obvious to previous presidents George W Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden.

Which is why they rejected Netanyahu’s Oval Office pleas to get Americans to attack Iran.

Israel, which is now involved in smashing Lebanon, consequently causing widespread civilian deaths and destroying infrastructure, is attracting worldwide condemnation for its efforts to destroy Hezbollah.

It is likely to end up occupying southern Lebanon , as it did from 1982 to 2000 – an occupation for which Hezbollah was created to fight.

So Israel will not have punched its way to security, but generated a reason for some of its neighbours to carry on fighting.

In Iran, Israel and the US have not seen the regime change that Netanyahu, indicted in 2024 for crimes against humanity over Gaza, pitched to Trump.

The result of the attacks on Iran’s regime and the killing of its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been that the nation has gone into pre-planned resistance mode .

The whole place is now run like a massive partisan operation.

Iran’s nuclear capabilities have been set back by American and Israeli bunker busters.

But the ambition to have nuclear weapons remains.

Any nation that was ever worried about its future security and the reliability of its allies would be wise to start building nukes now.

Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, even the UK now know that they need to race to build the kind of “medium power" alliances Canada’s PM Mark Carney foresaw as necessary at the last Davos gathering of world leaders.

Iran’s capacity to hit back at military attacks by strangling the flow of fossil fuel products through the Straits of Hormuz, which have driven up crude oil prices to around $100 (£74) a barrel from a pre-war $70, has enhanced the power of the theocracy in Tehran.

The US and Israel is being blamed, along with Iran, for economic shocks that have driven the UK’s inflation rate up to 3.3 per cent .

Trump’s campaign against green energy has been set back, too.

In the UK there has been a 50 per cent increase in domestic solar panel sales since the start of the war.

He may be demanding that the UK drills more in the North Sea, but Britons seem to believe that free power that no one can turn off makes more sense.

In almost every arena, the standing of the US and Israel has been weakened.

Their combined capacity for mass destruction has revealed that violence on a gigantic scale does not achieve its ends.

The near automatic support for Israel in the US, especially in politics, is being undermined by seismic shifts in polling, especially among younger voters.

For Americans, the relationship with Israel is being increasingly seen as not what they have been taught for years – that it is a strategic asset in a roiling Middle East – rather that it is a strategic liability that contributes to the mess that is the Middle East.

This is not to ignore the responsibility of Iran’s regime for spreading chaos and violence over many decades.

The principle tragedy is that Iran now suffers from the twin nightmares of aerial attack and intensified oppression.

America’s tragedy is that Trump has exposed the limits of US power, which the Pentagon understood until he defenestrated all the generals and spies that could have warned him not to repeat Afghanistan and Iraq.

So now Trump is taking stock and realising that this is a problem that the US has to talk, not fight, its way out of.

The global tragedy of that is Iran’s fanatics know that too, and will continue to bring chaos and derangement to the world.

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