President Trump is grappling with his own version of the sort of Middle East crisis that beset his predecessors, and that he promised to avoid.
President Trump has defined his career in politics with displays of dominance and control. But in the Middle East, he faces a rolling crisis that keeps thwarting those impulses.
On Sunday, Mr. Trump lashed out at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, telling The Financial Times that the Israeli leader “won’t have any choice” but to accept a U.S.-negotiated deal with Iran. “I call all the shots,” he said. But early Monday, Mr. Trump was still trying to rein in Mr. Netanyahu, writing on social media just after 5:30 a.m.: “Israel and Iran must immediately stop ‘shooting.’”
One hundred days after starting the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran on Feb. 28, Mr. Trump is grappling with his own version of the sort of Middle East military quagmire that beset his predecessors — and that he promised to avoid. (On Sunday, Mr. Trump tried to deny that he had ever made such a pledge, telling NBC News that “I don’t like these endless wars” but also that “this is not an endless war.”)
He won a tactical reprieve on Monday when Iran and Israel both said they would hold their fire after their first strikes on each other since April. But the fundamental deadlock remains, as Iran hawks in Washington warn that the president faces a strategic defeat and as polls show broad disapproval of the war as the midterms approach.
“Trump launched a war of choice overestimating America’s military capacity and underestimating Iran’s,” said Aaron David Miller, a former State Department official who is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “That is a box that Trump cannot get out of right now.”