The New Yorker:

How the President could drag the U.S. into a new war in the Middle East.

By Isaac Chotiner

Last week, Israel began an extensive bombing campaign on Iran, in what the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has claimed is an attempt to wipe out the country’s nuclear program. Iran has fired back missiles in response, but Israel’s military superiority has been clear: it has damaged nuclear sites and energy facilities across the country, and has assassinated key figures in Iran’s military leadership. President Donald Trump, who has for months been saying that he would like to sign a nuclear deal with Iran—and who, in 2018, pulled out of the agreement that Barack Obama’s Administration had negotiated—has nevertheless offered significant military and rhetorical support to Israel’s current campaign. Despite what seemed like some initial reluctance to support an Israeli attack, he has now repeatedly threatened Iran, and its Supreme Leader, and called for an evacuation of Tehran. He has indicated that the United States may formally enter the conflict, perhaps in an effort to destroy Iran’s Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant, which is considered reachable only with American weaponry.

To weigh this possibility, and to reflect on the United States’ role in the conflict, I recently spoke by phone with Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He previously worked at the State Department, and played a role in Middle East peace negotiations for decades, most notably at the end of the Clinton Administration. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why Trump decided to support Israel’s war against Iran, what the Iran conflict reveals about the U.S.-Israeli relationship, and why people continue to misunderstand Trump’s approach to foreign policy.

What is your understanding, as of now, of how the Trump Administration became embroiled in the conflict between Israel and Iran?

I think it reflects a President who basically does not want a major conflict, and who didn’t want to involve the United States in a major conflict, but has not tried or figured out a way to get out of the conflict or to make American intervention less likely. That is his dilemma. We’ve got F-35s out there. We’ve got Aegis missile systems. We’ve got Patriots. He’s given the Israelis a tremendous political margin for support. He’s beaten back many of the magaenthusiasts who think that supporting Israel is throwing good money after bad. And he has now even provided rhetorical support.

So, if he didn’t want to get the United States involved, why is he doing these things?

To Donald Trump, it’s always a question of, How do I look? Am I being played? Am I being perceived as weak? Did I overcommit or overpromise the possibility of a deal with Iran? I think he’s trying to make a virtue out of necessity. But, whenever Trump was briefed that the Israelis were about to strike, he had the capacity and the personality and the power to tell Netanyahu to wait and, at a minimum, to get time.

The Times reported, on Tuesday, that the Administration felt boxed in, essentially, and that Netanyahu was going to conduct a military assault on Iran regardless. And so, to some degree, they had to go along because they couldn’t stop it. You seem to be saying that, in fact, they did have a certain amount of power.

Let me tell you why I think that. It’s not a popular view, and it’s not a view that many people hold. Donald Trump, in the last six weeks, has done things in and around and to Israel that no Republican President and no Democratic President I ever worked for, from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush, has ever done. He has blown through two of the three basic political laws of gravity that have governed the U.S.-Israeli relationship. One is no daylight. In March, he, without Israel’s permission, authorized his hostage negotiator to open a dialogue with Hamas, a group that had already killed American citizens and had been responsible for the deaths of Israeli-American dual nationals. He cut a deal with the Houthis without the knowledge of the Israeli Prime Minister, which implicitly said that, as long as you don’t attack our naval assets, we have a ceasefire. He didn’t say anything about drones and ballistic missiles against Israel. Then, over the objections of Netanyahu, he removed sanctions on the new President of Syria. And he summoned Netanyahu to Washington from Budapest in April. Presumably, the Prime Minister thought he was coming to negotiate down tariffs. And then Trump announces, with the Prime Minister of Israel standing next to him, that he’s now opened direct negotiations with Iran. No other American President would have done something in this way. So that’s the no-daylight policy being discarded.

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