One week into the US-Israeli war against Iran that has plunged the Middle East into turmoil, President Donald Trump faces a growing list of risks and challenges that raise questions about whether he will be able to translate military successes into a clear geopolitical win, said a Reuters report citing experts.
Even after the killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and devastating blows against Iranian forces on land, at sea and in the air, the crisis has quickly widened into a regional conflict that threatens a more prolonged US military engagement with fallout beyond Trump’s control.
That is a scenario that Trump had avoided in his two terms in the White House, preferring swift, limited operations like the January 3 lightning raid in Venezuela and June’s one-off strike on Iran’s nuclear sites, they stated.
“Iran is a messy and potentially protracted military campaign,” said Laura Blumenfeld of the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies in Washington. “Trump is risking the global economy, regional stability and his own Republican Party's performance in the US midterm elections.”
Trump, who came to office promising to keep the US out of "stupid” military interventions, is now pursuing what many experts see as an open-ended war of choice unprompted by any imminent threat to the US from Iran, despite claims to the contrary by the president and his aides.
No clear endgame
Analysts say the administration has struggled to articulate clear objectives or an endgame for Operation Epic Fury, the largest US military campaign since the Iraq War. Trump has offered shifting explanations for the operation and differing definitions of what would constitute victory.
The White House rejected that criticism. Spokesperson Anna Kelly said Trump has clearly set out the goals of the campaign: destroying Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities and production infrastructure, crippling its naval forces, ending its ability to arm regional proxies and preventing it from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
Still, analysts warn that a prolonged conflict could carry growing political risks. If the war drags on, U.S. casualties rise and disruptions to Gulf oil flows push up economic costs, Trump’s biggest foreign policy gamble could also weigh on his Republican Party politically.
American casualties have been low so far, with six service members killed, and Trump has largely shrugged off the prospects for more to come while declining to completely rule out deployment of US ground troops.
Asked whether Americans should worry about Iran-inspired attacks at home, Trump said in a Time magazine interview published on Friday: “I guess … Like I said, some people will die.”
But Jonathan Panikoff, a former deputy US national intelligence officer for the Middle East, said: “Nothing is likely to hasten an early end to the war more than American casualties … That’s what Iran is counting on.”
Venezuela Miscalculation?
Many analysts believe Trump, who has shown an increasing appetite for military action in his second term, miscalculated that the Iran campaign would unfold like the Venezuela operation earlier this year.
US special forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, opening the way for Trump to coerce more compliant former loyalists into giving him considerable sway over the country’s vast oil reserves – without any extended US military action needed.
By contrast, Iran has proved a much tougher, better-armed foe with an entrenched clerical and security establishment.
Even the joint US-Israeli "decapitation" strike that killed Khamenei and some other senior leaders has failed so far to prevent Iran from mounting a military response and has raised questions whether they could be replaced by even more hardline figures.
Looming over the conflict, however, is whether Iran could slide into chaos and break apart if its current rulers fall, further destabilising the Middle East.
Oil Chokepoint
For now, however, one of the most pressing concerns is Iran’s threat to the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow chokepoint through which a fifth of the world's oil passes. Tanker traffic has halted, which could have grave economic consequences if it lasts.
Though Trump has publicly dismissed any concern about already-rising US gas prices, he and his aides have scrambled for ways to mitigate the war’s impact on energy supplies as voters tell pollsters that the cost of living is their top concern, said the Reuters report.
“It's an economic pain point on the US economy that it seems was not fully anticipated," said Josh Lipsky at the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington.
One former US military official close to the US administration said the widening of the war's economic impact had caught Trump’s team by surprise in part because those with knowledge of oil markets were not consulted ahead of the attack on Iran.
Trump made his decision to press ahead with the strikes despite warnings from some senior aides that the escalation could be difficult to contain, according to two White House officials and a Republican close to the administration.
Some traditional US allies were caught off guard. "It's a decision-making circle of one," said one Western diplomat.
The war’s duration is a major unknown likely to determine the extent of its repercussions. With the price tag of the Iran campaign mounting by the day, Trump has said that the operation could last four or five weeks or “whatever it takes” but has offered little explanation of what he envisions will follow.
Trump also has a lot riding on helping oil-producing Gulf states weather the Iran crisis given they have long hosted US bases and have made pledges of massive new US investments to him.
While Gulf allies appear to have fallen in line to support the campaign, especially after Tehran targeted them with missile and drone strikes, not everyone in the region is onboard with Trump’s war.
In an open letter to Trump published on Thursday, UAE billionaire Khalaf Al Habtoor, a frequent visitor to Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, asked: "Who gave you the right to turn our region into a battlefield?"
