Trump Started a War He Can’t Control

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U.S. President Donald Trump has become a passenger in the Iran war, despite insisting that he remains behind the wheel after months of failed efforts to reach a peace deal. And by attempting to portray himself as in control and denying complex realities on the ground, he has only made it more difficult to reach an agreement.

Trump’s limited ability to dictate the war’s direction was on display overnight as Israel and Iran traded fire for the first time since a truce began in early April. After Israeli strikes in Beirut on Sunday, which Trump said he was “not happy” about, Iran fired a barrage of ballistic missiles at Israel. The Iranian missiles were intercepted, with no reports of casualties or damage to infrastructure. Following the Iranian missile attack, Trump suggested that he was in control of the situation and that he would ask Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to hit back. “I call the shots. I call all the shots. He [Netanyahu] doesn’t call the shots,” Trump told the Financial Times.

U.S. President Donald Trump has become a passenger in the Iran war, despite insisting that he remains behind the wheel after months of failed efforts to reach a peace deal. And by attempting to portray himself as in control and denying complex realities on the ground, he has only made it more difficult to reach an agreement.

Trump’s limited ability to dictate the war’s direction was on display overnight as Israel and Iran traded fire for the first time since a truce began in early April. After Israeli strikes in Beirut on Sunday, which Trump said he was “not happy” about, Iran fired a barrage of ballistic missiles at Israel. The Iranian missiles were intercepted, with no reports of casualties or damage to infrastructure. Following the Iranian missile attack, Trump suggested that he was in control of the situation and that he would ask Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to hit back. “I call the shots. I call all the shots. He [Netanyahu] doesn’t call the shots,” Trump told the Financial Times.

But Israel ultimately moved forward with retaliatory strikes across Iran. “Iran fired 11 ballistic missiles at Israel,” Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, wrote on X. “No self-respecting country in the world would tolerate such an attack, and neither will Israel. Israel is now targeting Iranian surface-to-surface missile launch sites.”

On Monday, Trump called for both sides to reach an immediate cease-fire, and they’ve stopped shooting at each other for now. However, Iran warned that continued aggression, including in southern Lebanon, would lead to “far more severe and crushing measures.” Meanwhile, Israel has vowed to continue fighting Hezbollah.

With Trump eager to reach a peace deal and avoid a return to full-scale war, Iran is seemingly aware that it can now use both the stalemate over the Strait of Hormuz (and the related energy crisis) and Israel’s offensive in Lebanon as leverage in negotiations.

Tehran has established “a new equation in the Middle East,” in which an Israeli attack on Hezbollah can trigger Iran to attack Israel, said Ofer Shelah, a research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), a think tank affiliated with Tel Aviv University in Israel.

The situation is indicative of the difficulties Trump will continue to face in attempting to steer an intractable and interwoven set of circumstances in the Middle East. Even though the United States is Israel’s closest ally, Washington’s influence over Israeli leaders only goes so far.

The White House has continued to defend Israel’s right to self-defense in its statements on the Lebanon conflict. But it remains a headache for Trump as he continues the search for an off-ramp from the Iran war, which has tanked his approval numbers and could hurt the Republican Party in November’s midterm elections.

The Trump administration has been at pains to separate the Lebanon conflict from the Iran war, but Iran has made a peace deal contingent on a cessation of hostilities in Lebanon. “We are trying to view the Lebanon-Israeli talks as separate and distinct from Iran, and what Iran wants to do is mix it all together,” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told senators last Tuesday.

Trump has expressed impatience with Netanyahu as Israel escalates operations against Hezbollah. Trump reportedly cursed at Netanyahu and called him ungrateful during a recent phone call on Lebanon.

But Netanyahu has factors closer to home to consider. The Israeli prime minister, who is fighting for his political future with his polling numbers in the gutter and a national election on the horizon, is facing strong domestic pressure to continue taking the fight to Hezbollah and to defy calls from Washington to pump the brakes on the offensive.

Residents in northern Israel, which has borne the brunt of Hezbollah’s attacks, have been especially critical of Netanyahu and have called on him to take an even tougher approach. This is a broadly shared sentiment across Israel. A majority of Israelis (59 percent) believe that Israel should intensify the fighting against Hezbollah, according to a poll released in late May by the INSS.

Trump’s attempts to get Netanyahu to pull back on the Lebanon offensive in order to avoid derailing chances for a peace agreement with Iran only bolster Tehran’s position that the issues are inseparable. And the reality is that the Lebanon conflict and Iran war are fundamentally linked. Israel and Hezbollah have been fighting on and off for years, but the latest iteration of the conflict began after the onset of the Iran war.

It’s been evident since the earliest days of the Iran war’s cease-fire that Lebanon would be a problem for Trump and an obstacle to an eventual agreement. The truce almost collapsed after the United States and Israel initially refused to include Lebanon as part of the deal. Israel and Lebanon eventually signed off on a cease-fire in mid-April, but the situation has remained tense, and there have been ongoing exchanges of fire between Hezbollah and the Israeli military ever since.

Hezbollah, which carries immense influence in Lebanon as both a political entity and a militant group, has defied calls to disarm. The Lebanese military is widely seen as incapable of getting Hezbollah to drop its arms, which Netanyahu has pointed to as justification for the Israeli military’s continued presence and activities in the country.

“What Netanyahu understands, what Israel understands now, is that for President Trump the war is over, and the only thing he cares about right now is some kind of settlement with the Iranians that will allow him to declare the war over,” Shelah said.

After the success of the raid that resulted in the capture of then-Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January, Trump saw a chance for an “easy victory” in Iran, Shelah said. This “Maduro situation” has not materialized, he added, and Trump appears to have lost interest and wants to move on. But as multiple U.S. presidents before Trump have already learned, wars in the Middle East have a habit of morphing into quagmires with no easy exit.

This post is part of FP’s ongoing coverage. Read more here.

John Haltiwanger is a staff writer at Foreign Policy. Bluesky: @jchaltiwanger.bsky.social X: @jchaltiwanger

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