President Biden’s apparent desire to calibrate the response and avoid a wider conflict with Iran offered plenty of grist for Trump’s spinning mill. “This brazen attack on the United States is yet another horrific and tragic consequence of Joe Biden’s weakness and surrender,” Trump posted on social media, adding that such a strike on U.S. forces in the region “would NEVER have happened” on his watch.
Attacks on U.S. positions in Iraq and Syria did take place while Trump was president. But that’s besides the point: Trump and a number of his Republican colleagues are pinning the sense of chaos in the region on the Biden administration, and setting that against the image of “peace through strength” that the former president sought to cultivate.
Taking a wrecking ball to diplomacy with Tehran, Trump broke the nuclear deal forged between Iran and world powers, restored a slate of sanctions on the Islamic Republic and assassinated influential Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qasem Soleimani in a 2020 drone strike. Trump’s policy on Israel, meanwhile, amounted to a tight bear hug of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the boosting of the agenda of the Israeli right. He was punitive to the Palestinians — markedly shifting U.S. policy against them by formally recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, shuttering a U.S. consulate intended for Palestinians, and brokering “peace” deals between Israel and a clutch of Arab monarchies that further sidelined Palestinian political aspirations.
After coming to office, the Biden administration muddled along in the Middle East. Its initial halfhearted rhetoric about restoring human rights to the center of U.S. policy soon melted away as the White House pursued closer cooperation with Saudi Arabia and maintained the status quo with Israel, eager to build on Trump-era normalization agreements. It struggled to make any headway on Iran — Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign led to an even more hard-line, uncompromising government taking hold in Tehran and the Iranian regime unshackling its nuclear program and dispensing with the measures of transparency that had been mandated by the nuclear deal.
Earlier this month, Rafael Grossi, the U.N.’s atomic agency chief, said Iran’s nuclear program was “galloping ahead” and urged for diplomacy to fill the breach “to prevent the situation deteriorating to a degree where it would be impossible to retrieve it.” Now, as the White House contemplates opening new fronts of conflict with Iran, diplomacy is not in the picture.
“Iran was not dissuaded from pursuing its nuclear quest — quite the contrary,” wrote Le Monde columnist Gilles Paris this week, referring to Trump’s legacy in the region. “America’s word has been devalued, which partly explains the inability of Biden’s administration to re-engage with Tehran. Nor has the Islamic Republic been driven back into its borders, as witnessed by the resilience of the ‘axis of resistance’ after October 7, which unexpectedly expanded with attacks in the Red Sea by its Yemeni allies, the Houthis.”
The likelihood of an Iranian…
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