After deferring a call on joining the Iran war by a fortnight, US President Donald Trump displayed diplomatic duplicity by dropping bunker buster bombs and firing Tomahawks on three nuclear sites, including the otherwise impregnable Fordo. By doing so, he turned his mandate on its head. In the run-up to the polls, he had positioned himself as a peace messiah, promising an end to intractable global wars in a day and ushering in prosperity. Yet, none of the wars is over, not the Russia’s Ukraine invasion nor the Israel-Hamas flare-up. The only fire he claimed to have doused was the one after Pahalgam. Even on that, he finally walked back, saying two very smart people (Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Pakistan Army Chief Asim Munir) decided not to keep going with the war.
If Munir massaged his elephantine ego with a Nobel Peace Prize nomination, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took apple polishing to another level, saying the forces of civilisation thanked him for his intervention. While Modi called Trump out for taking credit for ending the Indo-Pak conflict, Netanyahu had no compunction in giving him bragging rights for defanging Iran. Be that as it may, history may well record Trump as a scar on democracy who fell into a warmonger’s trap and jettisoned peace for self-aggrandisement. By bombing Iran, he violated the rulebook on respecting sovereignty, exposed American nationals and their freight to asymmetric warfare in the Strait of Hormuz and increased human hardship as oil prices are set to go further north. There is no easy exit.
Much like the phoney claims of Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction led to the disastrous Iraq invasion, Netanyahu and Trump asserted that Iran was days away from building a nuclear bomb despite the American intelligence department and the IAEA determining otherwise. Though the ongoing attacks further weakened Iran as a regional hegemon as Israel took out Hezbollah, crushed Hamas, choked supply lines from Syria and degraded the Houthis in Yemen, it may have solidified Tehran’s intention to pursue nuclear deterrence, irrespective of the war delaying its ability for now. Assassinations of scientists cannot smoke out institutional knowledge assimilated over decades. As for India, it must carefully navigate the new geopolitical reality and adopt a position that serves the supreme national interest.