“Trump must decide whether to go down in history as a loser.” Says Benny Morris

According to a report published yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, Donald Trump is sceptical that negotiations with Iran can produce a lasting peace and believes that the only thing Tehran understands is force. “I think he believes he has given peace a chance,” said Michael McCaul of the US House Foreign Affairs Committee. “He is returning to Plan A: military action.” “There are several possibilities, and they’re all in Trump’s head.” Speaking to *Il Foglio*, the Israeli historian Benny Morris explains how the war might continue. “One is that low-intensity bombing against Iran’s capabilities to attack ships in the Strait of Hormuz continues for a week or two. The other is that an escalation begins by striking one or two targets, such as Pickax Mountain, and waiting to see how the Iranians react. The third is to attack oil and gas facilities, desalination plants and power stations, which would bring the Iranian economy and regime to a standstill. There would be riots and millions of people would flee. Iran has reserves to last two or three months; after that, it will be chaos.”

So far, Trump has avoided attacking Iran’s economic infrastructure because he knows it would lead to a recession and rising prices in America and around the world.

“It would certainly harm his chances in the mid-term elections,” Benny Morris continues in “Il Foglio”. “He doesn’t want that. But neither does he want to go down in history as a loser. And that is what awaits him if Iran continues to obstruct, refuses to make concessions and refuses to relinquish its sovereignty over the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. So he must make a decision.”

Then there is the issue of Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is due to meet Trump on Tuesday at the White House. “The Iranians will try to drag Israel into the war, even if it means an attack by the Israeli Air Force,” says Morris. “And Israel must decide what it will do if the Iranians try to draw them in, or if Trump tries to mobilise the Israeli Air Force to assist the US Air Force against Iran.”

This is a dilemma for Netanyahu.

“Israeli generals do not want another war with Iran in which the Americans might call a halt halfway through – something they have already done twice. Israeli generals do not want this, nor does Netanyahu, partly for political reasons: he would once again look foolish for failing to win the war against Iran and for having wasted so many Israeli resources.”

The risk is that Trump will go down in history as a new Carter. “Carter attempted to free the hostages in 1979, failed and lost the election. Here we are not talking about hostages, but about something much bigger: the survival of the Iranian regime, the threat of a nuclear Iran and global economic chaos”.

Then there are the Arab countries: Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait (the latter having been threatened with invasion by Iran yesterday).

“They want two things,” Morris tells us. “In the long term, they want the Iranian regime to be eliminated. In the short term, they want Iran not to attack their oil and desalination facilities. They want the regime to disappear, just like America and Israel, but they don’t want to be bombed or see their economies devastated either.” Then there is the worst-case scenario. “That the Iranians emerge victorious, continue to control the straits and carry on producing uranium until they are able to assemble a bomb.”

Meanwhile, Islamists around the world are watching. “The Iranians have a messianic mindset and are gamblers willing to take risks. The entire Iranian nuclear programme has been a gamble from the outset. They knew that America and Israel would put up resistance and they gambled that America and Israel would not do what was necessary to destroy both the regime and the nuclear weapons programme. It was a huge gamble, and now they are making another one. They have declared sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz and, it seems, are doing the same at Bab el-Mandeb, hoping that this will persuade the West to back down and keep Israel out of it. I think the West, with its back against the wall – and with Trump, it’s also a psychological issue, a question of how he is perceived – will not back down. But I could be wrong. Trump might give in, Israel might not get involved, and then Israel will have to wait a few months or years to strike on its own once it senses that the Iranians are getting close to the bomb. Israel will undoubtedly attack them.”

Then there is the question of how they see us. “They see the West as decadent, confused and weak. Nasrallah put it well once when he described Israel as a spider’s web: something that is unravelling, like a spider’s web, not really solid. He believed that it could ultimately be defeated and that Israel would disappear. I think this is how Iranians and Islamists in general view the West. They also see what is happening on the streets of London and Paris, where Islamists commit all sorts of horrific acts and are neither punished nor stopped.”