Tyler Pager and Luke Broadwater*
As Israel pummels Iran with waves of airstrikes, US President Donald Trump is navigating the divides within the Republican Party over whether the United States should get involved in another foreign conflict.
On one side are the isolationists who fear that Israel could pull the United States into another Middle East war. And on the other are the Iran hawks and Israel supporters who have been calling for just this sort of military action for years.
Trump appears caught between the two sides, veering back and forth as he tries to distance the United States from Israel’s assault while celebrating the success of the attacks and warning Iran that more is coming.
“This, right now, is going to cause, I think, a major schism in the MAGA online community,” Charlie Kirk, the right-wing activist and podcaster, said Thursday on his podcast.
Trump had several times this year dissuaded Israel from launching an attack, saying he wanted to pursue a negotiated settlement with Iran.
Shortly after the assault began, the White House sent out a statement from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, emphasizing that the United States was not involved in the initial military operation.
“Israel took unilateral action against Iran,” Rubio said. “We are not involved in strikes against Iran, and our top priority is protecting American forces in the region.”
But in subsequent interviews, the president said he spoke with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Thursday, knew the attacks were planned and called the strikes “excellent.”
In a post on Truth Social, he wrote Israel has “already planned attacks” that would be “even more brutal.” And the US military helped Israel intercept some of the ballistic missiles Iran fired in retaliation, an American official said.
While running for president, Trump promised to end wars around the world, and in his inaugural address, he said he wanted to be remembered as a peacemaking president.
So far, Trump’s diplomatic efforts have failed to end the war between Russia and Ukraine, which he had promised to do within 24 hours, or the war between Israel and Hamas.
Over the past several months, the Trump administration had been trying to strike a new nuclear deal with Iran, and the president had urged Netanyahu to hold off any military actions as the talks continued.
“I don’t want them going in because that would blow it,” Trump told reporters at the White House just hours before the attacks.
After Israel launched the missiles, Trump put the blame on Iran, faulting its leaders for refusing to accept a proposal that would have stopped it from enriching uranium.
“I gave Iran chance after chance to make a deal,” he wrote on Truth Social on Friday morning. “I told them, in the strongest of words, to ‘just do it,’ but no matter how hard they tried, no matter how close they got, they just couldn’t get it done.”
Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, noted that Trump had flipped his position on whether Israel should strike Iran. But he said Israel made a calculated gamble that Trump would go along with the idea.
“They made a bet on President Trump,” he said, adding: “Trump, for a long time -- most of the time he’s been in office -- has been saying ‘no, we’re negotiating, no, don’t do it.’ The Israelis strike, and today Trump called it excellent.”
For many Republicans, Israel’s military strikes were long overdue amid growing fears that Iran was moving closer to full nuclear capabilities.
“The number of Republicans who do not see a nuclear-armed Iran as a threat to Israel and the world is exceedingly small,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina and a close ally of the president. “The overwhelming majority of Republicans back Israel’s use of military force to neuter the Iranian nuclear threat.”
Another faction of Trump’s most ardent supporters see it differently. Israel’s strikes and the prospect of US involvement in the conflict, they argue, run counter to Trump’s “America First” foreign policy agenda.
“The emails are so largely overwhelmingly against Israel doing this, I’d say it’s probably a 99 to one,” Kirk said on Thursday night of feedback he was receiving from his listeners.
Some MAGA supporters argued that Israel’s targeted strikes of both nuclear sites and top military commanders were part of an effort to ignite a bigger conflict and draw the United States into it.
US officials said on Friday that the Pentagon was positioning warships and other military assets in the Middle East to help protect Israel and US troops in the region from any further Iranian retaliation.
“The bottom line is we cannot be dragged into, inexorably dragged into, a war on the Eurasian land mass in the Middle East or in Eastern Europe,” Stephen K. Bannon, a former top adviser to Mr. Trump who remains close to the president, said on Friday on his “War Room” podcast.
On Israel, he said: “Hey, you guys did it. You’re putting your country first. Your country’s defense first. That’s fine, but we’ve got to put our defense first.”
But Michael Rubin, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said the Trump administration was just “shouting from the sidelines.”
“Trump will likely keep the US out of conflict and offer mediation, but at this point, he’s just basically treading water,” he wrote in an email. “The big issue will play out in Congress during debates about Israel aid and replenishing Israeli stockpiles.”
*The New York Times
