Determined to humiliate Donald Trump’s efforts to extract his country from a war he started, Tehran launched waves of attacks across the Arabian Gulf and sneered at his peaceful overtures.
No matter that Pakistan has said it hopes to host direct talks between the US and Iran sometime this week, Iran’s securocrats have seen an opportunity. Trump wants to get out of the conflict that Israel does not believe has achieved its aims.
Iran’s regime has fomented instability across the Middle East for decades. It has killed Americans and many other Westerners, run Hezbollah in Lebanon and backed Hamas in Gaza.
And yet the global perspective is that the war, which is already hobbling global fuel supplies and will have far greater economic consequences, is all the fault of America and Israel.
The ayatollahs blame the “Great Satan”, the US, and “Little Satan”, Israel, and even its enemies and rivals agree.
Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany’s largely ceremonial president, waded in with his assessment of the war being prosecuted by Trump and Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, calling it a “politically disastrous mistake”.
“In my view, this war is contrary to international law,” said the Nato member’s president.
Trump has variously claimed that Iran’s nuclear capability had been “obliterated” last summer, that Tehran was on the verge of attacking Israel with nuclear weapons in February, and that 100 per cent of Iran’s military capability had been destroyed, but that if it continued to throttle shipping in the Straits of Hormuz then it would suffer even greater levels of destruction.
The behaviour of the US president towards his allies in Nato – he has threatened to invade two of them and cut military support for Ukraine which is holding off Russian invaders who have designs on Nato members – has been noted in Tehran.
The extremist theologians and terrorist-backing gangsters in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) have seen that Trump is an incoherent and unreliable ally.
“We were surprised by an American ally, who remains an ally, but who is becoming increasingly unpredictable and doesn’t even bother to inform us when they decide to launch military operations,” Fabien Mandon, the French army chief told a security and defence forum in Paris.
“It has an impact on our security and it has an impact on our interests.”
That was mild stuff compared to what must be being said in the Tel Aviv headquarters of Israel’s Ministry of Defense of Israel, where planners still have a very long list of targets they intend to attack in Iran, but can see the US president backing out of any greater role in bombing their enemy.
US aims in Iran are opaque: regime change, protection of civilian protesters, breaking the military, ending Iran’s nuclear programme. The consequences of trying to do so have never been obscure, apart from to the White House.
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