Israel, Iran and the US are all stuck in traps of their own making

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and US President Donald Trump will be taking stock of their countries' recent actions. AFP

It was one of the most public, personalised and extraordinary schisms between the US and Israel, and certainly the first conducted on television and in real time.

US President Donald Trump found himself decisively in over his head, swearing at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and – largely for politically necessary balance – at Iran’s leadership, to maintain his ceasefire. On TV, then social media, and finally an angry telephone call. In a flurry of 20 minutes, Israel was compelled to call off a major air strike.

As Israel sent aircraft streaking towards Iran in response to a lone missile that, as he noted, may well have been erroneously launched, Mr Trump instantly recognised that he was about to be played.

Donald Trump expresses frustration with Israel as ceasefire with Iran hangs in the balance

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He wasn’t going to put up with it. The old dictum about “no daylight” between American and Israeli positions just can’t function with a US President as patrimonial as Mr Trump and an Israeli Prime Minister as prevaricating as Mr Netanyahu. Mr Netanyahu was compelled to hit a minor radar installation site instead.

That’s how a 48-hour whirlwind of real and phony attacks, theatrical and genuine threats, and an atmosphere of overall mayhem, saw Mr Trump flailing and frustrated.

The US President found himself trapped between his characteristically self-serving rhetoric and realities, and between his goals and Mr Netanyahu’s ongoing effort to lure the Americans into a protracted conflict with Iran that Mr Trump is still seeking to avoid.

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  Rescue and recovery crews at work at a residential site in Be'er Sheva following a missile attack from Iran on June 24. Reuters

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  Contrails from Israeli air defence system are visible as interceptor rockets are launched towards Iranian missiles during an Iranian attack on June 24. AP

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  Residents spend the night in an underground garage as a precaution against Iranian missile attacks in Tel Aviv on June 23. AP

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  Supporters of regime change in Iran rally outside the Wilshire Federal Building in Los Angeles, California. The Los Angeles area holds the largest Iranian community in the world outside of Iran. AFP

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  A US Air Force B-2 Spirit bomber takes off from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri to support Operation Midnight Hammer against Iran. AFP

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  Projectiles in the sky over Doha, Qatar, on June 23 as the US military base at Al Udeid is attacked by Iran. AFP

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  The remnants of an Iranian missile intercepted over Qatar. AFP

As the dust settles, it’s unclear what was really accomplished by Israel’s “war of the cities” with Iran launched on June 13, with the important but hardly decisive American footnote last Saturday. Israel did manage to at least postpone what appeared to be promising US-Iranian talks, with an American proposal of Tehran joining a regional “consortium” for nuclear energy production with key Arab countries as a potential workaround for the vexed problem of Iran’s “right to enrich”.

The idea alarmed Israel sufficiently to unleash its barrage, and that, in turn, was successful enough to prompt Mr Trump to join the fray with a single action that was never intended to be the opening salvo of a protracted US bombing campaign against Iranian nuclear sites.

All three parties now find themselves in traps of their own making.

It’s unclear how much damage was done to Iran’s nuclear programme. But Tehran has taken some potent blows, including the devastation of its paramilitary leadership and a generation of top nuclear scientists. Tehran paid a heavy price for playing games with highly enriched uranium, as noted in a damning report from the International Atomic Energy Agency, and more broadly for reckless rhetoric about “destroying” Israel and absurd slogans like “death to America”.

However, Israel has certainly not ensured that Iran will never become a nuclear power. On the contrary, it may have ensured that while Iran proceeds with greater caution, the war has only amplified the already evident lesson that adversarial countries that don’t have a nuclear deterrent, like Iraq and Libya, are likely to face external attack while those that do, like North Korea, aren’t.

Iran has sought a nuclear deterrent since the Shah and that determination will undoubtedly have sharply increased, even among those implacably opposed to the current establishment. The Israelis may have thrown their best punch, leaving Iran bloodied and battered but more determined than ever to eventually become the second nuclear weapons power in the Middle East – Israel itself having long since introduced those weapons to the region.

How Israel deals with this new reality, unless it finds a way to resume warfare despite Mr Trump’s angry objections, remains to be seen. A satisfactory solution appears farther off than ever.

Even Mr Trump, albeit clearly less than his Iranian and Israeli counterparts, has put himself in an unenviable corner without an obvious escape route. His administration is already tying itself into rhetorical contortions over his insistence that the three Iranian nuclear sites he struck were “completely and totally obliterated”, at least in terms of enrichment. Even at the time, it was obvious that he couldn’t have been relying on any serious preliminary evaluation, and was simply engaging in his trademark “truthful hyperbole”, as he described his form of self-serving remarks in his ghost-written memoir, The Art of the Deal.

Leaked reports from the Defence Intelligence Agency – based on actual preliminary assessments, including new surveillance footage, signals intelligence and very possibly human intelligence from inside Iran – suggest that, on the contrary, while the bunker-buster bomb attacks may have badly damaged entranceways to the Fordow mountainside network, they did not render the interior facilities non-functional or even hard-hit. They concluded that Iran’s enrichment work there, and at other sites in question, will be disrupted for months, but hardly “obliterated”.

This is consistent with what one would expect from a strike that would have been only the opening salvo in existing US plans to actually obliterate that facility. These called for round-the-clock bunker-buster strikes over many days, if not weeks, before the tunnel network was collapsed on itself or rendered otherwise fully non-functional. That obviously wasn’t going to happen from a handful of impacts, even with such powerful weapons.

Israel, too, cannot fully know how much harm it has caused to Iran’s nuclear research and development programme. Even Iranian officials are most probably still assessing the true extent.

Israel was surely seeking to deliver a knockout blow to the programme, or rather to get Washington to do that for it. Neither seems to have occurred.

So, less than two weeks after Israel launched its supposedly decisive war, we are effectively back to square one, albeit with Iran having absorbed significant and painful losses that will take energy, resources and time that the impoverished country can ill afford. Whether Mr Trump can get Iran back to the negotiating table with renewed seriousness remains to be seen, although it would clearly be in Tehran’s interests to strike a deal with Washington even now.

However, we may eventually look back at this conflict as the moment in which Israel ensured that it would have to live alongside a nuclear-armed Iran rather than having permanently eliminated the prospects for that.

Bitter irony is often the greatest victor in warfare. She may yet again have prevailed.