Trump the ‘peacemaker’ becomes wartime President

US President Donald Trump addresses the nation after American forces attacked Iranian nuclear sites. AFP

Pakistan has announced it will formally recommend US President Donald Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize for his “pivotal leadership” and role as “peacemaker” during the recent Kashmir crisis.

Setting aside India's denial that Mr Trump facilitated an end to the hostilities in the region, Islamabad's timing could hardly have been more awkward.

It could not have known, of course, but by the time Pakistan had issued its Nobel recommendation, US B-2 stealth bombers were already en route from an air base in Missouri to Iran. Mr Trump had ordered the Pentagon to attack three Iranian nuclear sites, taking a strategic gamble that four presidents (and he himself, during his first term) had shied away from.

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Mr Trump and his administration had repeatedly warned that Iran could never obtain a nuclear weapon, and he stressed that the strikes were calibrated to avoid a broader conflict with Iran. He said “now is the time for peace”, while his Vice President, JD Vance, said the US was “not at war with Iran, we're at war with Iran's nuclear programme".

But it could well be a distinction without a difference for Tehran, where supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will feel enormous pressure to retaliate, at least to some degree, after the US joined Israel's air campaign that had already blunted much of Iran's military capabilities.

If Tehran were to try to blockade the Strait of Hormuz, or if one of its proxies were to attack any of the 40,000 US military personnel stationed across the region, a conflagration could easily be sparked that would make Mr Trump a wartime president whose military is dragged into another massively destructive regional quagmire.

It was not supposed to be this way. The Republican bucked his party's hawkish tendencies during the election campaign, furiously denouncing America's “stupid endless wars” and promising his legacy would be that of “peacemaker and unifier".

And just last month in Saudi Arabia, he attacked America’s foreign policy record in the Middle East, saying the neocons who tried to “nation build” had wrecked far more countries than they had constructed.

Mr Trump, predictably, has come under criticism from Democrats, mainly because the US Congress was largely kept in the dark about the precise nature and timing of the strikes against Iran. Influential Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Mr Trump's “disastrous decision” to bomb Iran without authorisation was a grave breach of the US Constitution and Congress's war powers.

“He has impulsively risked launching a war that may ensnare us for generations,” she said as she called for his impeachment. Republicans say the secrecy was necessary to avoid telegraphing an coming attack.

There is another faction Mr Trump needs to pay attention to – his most loyal followers in the isolationist Make America Great Again, or Maga, movement.

“Every time America is on the verge of greatness, we get involved in another foreign war,” Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a passionate Trump supporter and prominent member of the Maga movement, wrote on X.

But Marc Thiessen, a conservative author, wrote in The Washington Post on Sunday that too much has been made of any schism in the Maga movement, pointing to recent polling. He said large majorities of regular and Maga Republicans say they do not want Iran to have a nuclear weapon, and that they regard Israel's security as important to the US.

A look on Mr Trump's Truth Social feed is instructive, too. When he demanded Iran's “unconditional surrender” last week, many of his followers expressed dismay that the US appeared set to get involved in a conflict in the Middle East again.

But in posts since the American strikes, his Maga base now appears, for the most part, to be rallying around the flag and unifying in support of the decision to attack Iranian nuclear sites.

Still, here we are. For all his talk of diplomacy and deal making, Mr Trump has become entangled in another Middle East conflict with consequences that are impossible to predict.

"I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize no matter what I do," Mr Trump said in a Truth Social post last week. "Including Russia/Ukraine, and Israel/Iran, whatever those outcomes may be, but the people know, and that’s all that matters to me."

Trump supporters appear to be split over US involvement in the Israel-Iran war. Reuters