On the tinderbox that is the Middle East

Before the G7 conference, Donald Trump seemed uninterested in Iran. Israel was going after Iran’s military leaders and nuclear research sites, and Trump seemed happy to let them do it while suggesting negotiations. Two weeks ago, he seemed confident a nuclear deal with Iran was easily within reach.

Then, Israel became more successful, really successful, having pulverized the country’s nuclear sites and killed both the top military and scientific Iranian leadership.

Trump had just endured a deflating, poorly attended, lackadaisical parade where parade troops merely ambled, rather than marched. On returning to the White House, he had also had to suffer through TV coverage of 2,000 No Kings demonstrations around the country, where people seemed joyful in their protesting. A lot more joyful than anyone who’d attended his embarrassing, shrivelled-up parade.

What’s a narcissistic sociopath to do? Donald Trump’s whole life has been devoted to controlling everything and placing himself at the center of it all. And now he wasn’t at the center of anything, especially Israel’s success.

I’ll say this for the man: he can pivot on the head of a pin. In about a nanosecond, he went from calling for a cease-fire and urging negotiations to demanding on his Truth Social platform “unconditional surrender” from Iran and to saying “we now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran” and “we” know the whereabouts of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Then, saying something no president has ever said in public about a foreign, sovereign leader, Trump wrote, “We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least for now.”

He added, “Our patience is growing thin.”

Suddenly, third-person talk of Israel became first-person plural. And all eyes were once again where Donald Trump wanted them — on him.

When Trump returned to Washington following his early departure from the G7 conference, he attended a one-hour meeting with his national security team in the White House Situation Room. Afterwards, although Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had previously said U.S. forces in the Middle East remained in a “defensive posture,” he ordered the deployment of the refueling KC-135 and KC-46 aircraft to air bases in Italy, Spain, Germany, and Greece. U.S. officials said that the Air Force was building an “air bridge” in Europe should installations in the Middle East come under Iranian attack. In addition to the refueling tankers, the Pentagon is deploying F-16, F-22, and F-35 fighters to the Middle East.

No one knows where this is going, or to what degree the U.S. military will be involved. However, lost in the Trump starburst was a joint declaration Monday by all the nations attending the G7, including the U.S., which got less attention than it deserved. In that statement, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, and Japan stated clearly that “Iran is the principal source of regional instability and terror,” and that “We have been consistently clear that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon.”

In other words: The view that this Iranian regime is dangerous, and that it can’t be permitted to have a nuclear weapon, isn’t an idiosyncratic view of Israel, or of Israel and the United States. It’s the correct and measured judgment of what we might still call the Free World.

It is apparent that Israel has, in this last week, gone a long way toward removing the threat of Iran having a nuclear weapon. How can that be a bad thing? Yesterday, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said, “This is the dirty work Israel is doing for all of us. We are also victims of this regime. This mullah regime has brought death and destruction to the world.”

Donald Trump wants to take credit for all this. Can he muck it up for everyone? Yes, he can, and here’s how.

About a decade ago, inside Mount Fordo, Iran built its nuclear enrichment site. It is unreachable and impenetrable by every conventional weapon except possibly one: the U.S. 20-foot-long, 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator. The immediate decision is whether to drop the Penetrator on Fordo. Trump could decide to do this on his own. Who’s to stop him? Or, the U.S. and our allies could jointly come to a decision about whether to use the Penetrator. Trump could go it alone or be part of a decision coalition. Which way do you think he would jump?

The trouble is that right now, unlike Trump 1.0, there isn’t a soul in the Trump 2.0 administration who has the competence to do the job they’re in or the capacity to disuade Trump from doing whatever crazy thing pops into his squishy brain, like dropping the world’s biggest conventional weapon on Fordo or killing Iran’s leader.

Never mind that killing foreign leaders violates executive orders signed by a series of presidents dating to Gerald Ford. The operative one says: “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.”

America should support the impressive “dirty work” Israel is doing for everyone. It should support the collegial statesmanship of our allies. It should join the effort in a way that assists, not overwhelms. Unfortunately, Donald Trump has never been known to play well with others, and his natural inclination is to avoid prudence and outshine everyone else.

If only he had advisors who could and would restrain his natural inclination.