For third time in a year, the president wants to cut a deal that ends fighting before Israel is ready. Now Netanyahu has to make sure regime truly cannot get to the bomb, and that Hezbollah doesn’t get off the hook as well
The White House has repeatedly sounded a simple but effective message: Trust the plan.
Trump’s decision to unleash an all-out bombing campaign against Iran alongside Israel seemed to confirm the wisdom of putting trust in the US leader. Sure, Trump might have engaged in direct talks with Iran, but, they reasoned, he saw right through their attempts to prevaricate and delay and embarked on a war that could damage him politically because he knew it was right.
After delivering a seemingly unequivocal deadline to Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz on Saturday, Trump seems to have equivocated.
In a bombshell announcement Monday, Trump revealed that his administration has been engaged in “productive” talks with Iran regarding a “complete and total resolution” of hostilities, leading him to postpone his pledge to bomb Iran’s energy sites.
Israelis who had trusted the plan now fear there is no plan and wonder if Trump can still be trusted.
It seems that Jerusalem was caught off guard by the announcement from the mercurial president.
There are precedents over the past year for Trump accepting a hasty deal that solves nothing in order to extricate himself from a situation, even if it leaves others in the lurch.
With the war weighing on Trump’s political prospects and his economic agenda, his domestic allies had been pushing for an exit strategy. At the same time, key US partners in the Middle East, such as Turkey, had stepped up efforts to find a diplomatic way out of the fighting, creating a ramp that could work for Trump, even if not for Israel.
