Reading between the lines of President Trump’s social media posts is an art, not a science.
But whether by intention or not, there is always insight in his posts. His Truth Social words reacting to the Israeli attack on Iran are intentionally ambiguous.
When was he told by Israel that they would strike Iran? Did he give them a green light, or was it more amber?
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Was his insistence, as recently as 48 hours ago, that a strike would “blow” the chances of a deal with Iran actually just a ruse to afford Israel the element of surprise? That’s what the Israelis are claiming.
Clearly, President Trump does not want to give the impression that his ‘don’t strike’ advice was ignored by Netanyahu.
His social posts are filled with enough ambiguity to allow him to maintain his good cop stance alongside Netanyahu, the bad cop: “I gave Iran chance after chance to make a deal. I told them, in the strongest of words, to ‘just do it’…”
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Trump’s ‘art of the deal’, whether it be in real estate or nuclear weapon negotiations, requires unpredictability and ambiguity.
Both of those, as it happens, are useful to hide ineptitude too. The line between diplomatic masterstroke and disastrous diplomacy is thin.
The president is claiming that the Israeli attacks make a deal more, not less, likely because of the pressure Iran will now be under.
Maybe, but many regional watchers are very unconvinced.
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An alternative path to negotiations for Iran would be to go fully down the North Korea route, comforted in the knowledge that China – as a big Iranian oil customer – and Russia – as a weapons customer – will be on side.
Trump may think that the pressure of bombardment will force Iran to heel. But the other pressure the Iranian supreme leader is under is the pressure of survival.
Self-preservation necessitates the Iranian response that we’re now seeing before any prospect of renewed negotiations can come.
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The Israelis and the Americans are calculating that Iran and its proxies are now sufficiently degraded, and so the response will be limp and containable.
They might be right in terms of conventional attacks, but asymmetrical operations are another fear – against Israeli targets or more broadly, softer Western targets in the region or beyond.
Step back from the chaos of the past 24 hours. The broader picture here is regime change.
Netanyahu said as much in his Friday speech, calling for an internal uprising. He ignored history – which suggests people tend to rally round their flag – but more than that, that foreign air strikes alone don’t work.
Look at Libya in 1986, Iraq in 1991, or Yugoslavia in 1999.
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Netanyahu wants to go further. Will he take out the supreme leader? Trump does not want another full-scale conflict in the Middle East. Of all the things he is accused of being, a hawkish warmonger he is not.
But there are plenty of politicians on Capitol Hill – on both sides of the divide – who support regime change in Iran.
I was at an event in Congress in December organised by Iranian exiled opposition leaders. I was struck by the cross-party support for regime change in one form or another.
Israel this weekend announced that its military had achieved total air superiority from western Iran to the capital Tehran. That’s remarkable.
Could Trump be persuaded to pursue regime change? Peace, eventually, through strength? His motto adapted.
We are at yet another unsettlingly tense moment for the region.
