In Trumpworld, toppling rulers is taboo

With so much at stake, it is tempting to dismiss one more area in which Mr Trump’s reputation is at stake, namely, his vaunted prowess as a negotiator

BY THE TIME the Iran crisis ends, President Donald Trump risks breaking some solemn promises about war and peace. Large-scale American help to destroy Iran’s deeply buried nuclear sites would imperil his pledge to keep America out of Middle Eastern conflicts. Yet if his caution allows a wounded Iran to successfully sprint for a bomb, that would challenge Mr Trump’s stated belief that “you can’t have peace if Iran has a nuclear weapon”.

US President Donald Trump.(Bloomberg)

With so much at stake, it is tempting to dismiss one more area in which Mr Trump’s reputation is at stake, namely, his vaunted prowess as a negotiator. Even as Iran and Israel exchange salvoes of missiles, Mr Trump keeps urging Iran’s leaders to resume talks and cut a deal “before there is nothing left”. That puts him at odds with Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, who is openly rooting for the overthrow of the Islamic regime. In a televised address to the Iranian public, Mr Netanyahu declared that Israel’s attacks are “clearing the path for you to achieve your freedom”.

More on the war between Israel and Iran:

Yet Mr Trump is serious about getting Iran’s leaders back to the negotiating table, say officials and diplomats who have watched him up close. He has a deep aversion to regime change. Days after his first victory in 2016 he announced a Middle Eastern policy focused narrowly on fighting terrorists, saying: “We will stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about.”

According to Reuters, a news agency, Mr Trump recently vetoed an Israeli plan to kill Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, declaring political leaders off-limits unless Iran attacks American targets. That reflects a horror of creating power vacuums in dangerous places, rather than any love for hardline clerics. Mr Trump is a man with complicated views of war. He sees conflict as wasteful and often irrational, destroying lives and property. But he is willing to kill foreigners who threaten America, as when he sent drones to assassinate Iran’s most important general, Qassem Suleimani, in Baghdad in January 2020. In the words of an insider: “Trump hates war, but he’s not afraid of it.”

A distaste for regime change sets Mr Trump apart from traditional conservative hawks. John Bolton was Mr Trump’s national security adviser in 2018-19. Now a critic, he admits that he and his former boss did not agree on the likely endgame when in 2018 Mr Trump pulled out of the JCPOA, a multinational agreement to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions brokered by his predecessor, Barack Obama. Nor, Mr Bolton says, was Mr Trump bent on breaking the regime in Tehran when he replaced the JCPOA with a “maximum pressure” campaign of harsh economic sanctions. “I certainly thought that getting out of the JCPOA and maximum pressure were all logical steps towards the only strategy that can bring lasting peace in the Middle East, which is the overthrow of the ayatollahs in Iran,” Mr Bolton reports. “He never got to that logical step.”

In time, Mr Trump fired Mr Bolton. Explaining that dismissal, Mr Trump grumbled that Mr Bolton had asked North Korea to surrender its entire nuclear-weapons programme before receiving American concessions. Specifically, Mr Trump said it was “a disaster” that Mr Bolton had publicly called this the “Libyan model”. North Korea reacted badly, possibly because after Libya’s unilateral disarmament a NATO-led coalition bombed the country, leading to the toppling and killing of its dictator, Muammar Qaddafi.

In his first term, the closest that Mr Trump came to endorsing regime change was when he declared an opposition leader in Venezuela, Juan Guaidó, to be the country’s legitimate president. He hinted that America might use force against Venezuela’s thuggish left-wing ruler, Nicolás Maduro. In part, Mr Trump was trying to please anti-communist voters in Florida, suggests Mr Bolton. He concedes that his boss later lost confidence in Mr Guaidó, believing that he had been led to back “the wrong horse”.

There are two pillars to Mr Trump’s dislike of regime change, suggests Elliott Abrams, a veteran of several Republican administrations who served as special envoy to Venezuela and Iran during the first Trump presidency. First, Mr Trump is responding to policy failures in Afghanistan and Iraq. Second, Mr Abrams believes that Mr Trump is influenced by Henry Kissinger and other cold-war practitioners of realpolitik. According to that school of statecraft: “All of these countries, Iran, Russia, China, North Korea, are black boxes and they have a person at the top, and you must negotiate with that person.” Mr Abrams calls this a “club of leaders” view, which attaches little significance to ordinary citizens’ wishes. In this worldview: “We deal with people who’ve risen to the top of the greasy pole, no matter how they got there: by winning elections, by murdering people. It doesn’t matter.”

Jaw-jaw, with added arm-twisting

In Mr Trump’s first term some European allies mistook maximum-pressure sanctions on Iran as a “stalking horse for regime change”, says Brian Hook, America’s Iran special envoy in 2018-20. They were mistaken: Mr Trump sincerely prefers dealmaking to conflict, he says. Mr Hook thinks that allies also underestimated the power of unilateral American sanctions to gravely weaken Iran’s economy and its overseas armed proxies. If Mr Trump had secured a consecutive second term in 2020, “the Iranians would eventually have had no choice but to call him and cut a deal”, he argues.

Allies still struggle to understand Mr Trump. In places such as Europe, modern-day diplomacy is seen as a multilateral endeavour, needed to check aggression by rogue bullies. But Trumpian diplomacy is an expression of raw American power. Mr Trump could be a silk-coated potentate at the Congress of Vienna in 1814, carving up the world with fellow rulers, guided by the interests of great powers and a horror of disorder. Dealmaking may not save Iran’s leaders, for events are moving fast. But if the regime falls, cheers in Mr Trump’s White House will be tinged with alarm.

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