For President Donald Trump, few goals on the world stage have been more explicit – he will not drag the United States into another "forever war." Yet Israel's massive strikes on Iran will test that promise as never before, potentially setting up a showdown with his base as Trump decides how much support the United States will offer.
Trump had publicly called for Israel not to strike as he sought a negotiated solution, and his roving envoy Steve Witkoff had been scheduled to meet Iranian officials for the sixth time Sunday. Trump, who hours earlier warned that an attack would cause "massive conflict," afterward praised Israeli strikes as "excellent."
He boasted that Israel had "the best and most lethal military equipment anywhere in the world" thanks to the United States – and was planning more strikes unless Iran agrees on a deal.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio insisted that the United States was not involved in the strikes and warned Iran not to retaliate against the thousands of US troops stationed in nearby Arab countries. A US official, however, confirmed that the United States was helping Israel shoot down retaliatory missiles fired Friday, June 13, by Iran.
"The US has calculated that it can help Israel and that the Iranians will obviously be aware of this, but at the end of the day, at least at the public level, the US stays out," said Alex Vatanka, founding director of the Iran program at the Middle East Institute in Washington.
The hope is that "the Iranians will do a quick cost/benefit analysis and decide it is not worth the fight," Vatanka said. He said Iranian leaders are for now focused on staying alive, but could decide either to swallow a tough deal – or to internationalize the conflict further by causing chaos in the oil-rich Gulf, potentially sending oil prices soaring and pressuring Trump.
Most key lawmakers of Trump's Republican Party quickly rallied behind Israel, whose prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is a hero for many on the US right and has long called Iran an existential threat. But Trump's populist "America First" base has been skeptical.
Tucker Carlson, the prominent media commentator who counseled Trump against a US strike on Iran in the first term, has called fears of Tehran building a nuclear bomb overblown, saying neither Iran nor Ukraine warrants US military resources. Carlson wrote on X after the Israeli strike that there was a divide in Trump's orbit between "those who casually encourage violence, and those who seek to prevent it – between warmongers and peacemakers."
Trump has brought outspoken non-interventionists directly into his administration. In an unusually political video this week, Trump's director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, warned after a visit to Hiroshima that "warmongers" were putting the world at risk of nuclear catastrophe.
In a speech in Riyadh last month, Trump denounced decades of US interventionism in the Middle East and said, "My greatest hope is to be a peacemaker and to be a unifier. I don't like war."