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Trump’s World War III

What happens when a failing dictator is on the ropes? He imagines winning World War III.

Donald Trump is besieged on several fronts. His Ukraine policy has failed, as has his alliance with Putin and his foray against China. His tariff bluffs are backfiring, making it hard for U.S. manufacturers, importers, and consumers to plan. His executive excesses are mostly being overturned by the courts.

After making a commitment to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins to spare farmworkers from ICE raids, later extended to hotel and restaurant workers other than suspected criminals, Trump impulsively reversed course and directed ICE to double down on arrests. And his Big Beautiful Bill has fractured his Republican allies in Congress.

Trump’s approval ratings are now deeply underwater. As Trump becomes more unpopular, he becomes more reckless. But his impulsive shift, from trying to contain Israel’s all-out war on Iran last week, to hankering to join it this week, is dividing his party MAGA base like nothing else.

Polls show the vast majority of Americans want the U.S. to stay out of the war. A new YouGov poll released Tuesday found that only 23 percent of Republicans say the U.S. should be involved in the conflict between Iran and Israel, while 51 percent want the country to stay out. Just 16 percent of all Americans support U.S. involvement, while 60 percent are opposed. The majority of Republicans—61 percent—support negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia wrote in an extensive post on X, “Anyone slobbering for the U.S. to become fully involved in the Israel/Iran war is not America First/MAGA. Wishing for murder of innocent people is disgusting. We are sick and tired of foreign wars. All of them.”

And this brings me to my old pal Steve Bannon. He has already done one service for Trump and the country by helping escalate the feud between Trump and Elon Musk, which ended with Musk’s ignominious exit. And while Bannon remains close to Trump as a trusted back-channel adviser, Bannon has gone public with his scathing critique of Israel’s Iran war and Trump’s impulse to join it.

Speaking on Tucker Carlson’s podcast Monday, Bannon said, “Who are the warmongers? They would include anyone who’s calling Donald Trump today to demand airstrikes and other direct U.S. military involvement in a war with Iran.”

Bannon, as much as anyone, was Trump’s tutor in the run-up to the first Trump victory in 2016. Bannon had a cogent theory of how to connect economic nationalism and isolationism to racist nationalism. As he told me in the too-candid August 2017 phone call that led to his firing from the White House, “The Democrats—the longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

But Trump has no cogent theory of nationalism and internationalism. He functions basically as a shock entertainer, tacking from one impulsive and inconsistent policy to another.

Trump’s China strategy is an incoherent blend of isolation and aggression. He has destroyed the “soft power” exemplified by USAID that is consistent with a military pullback and a rebuilding of the domestic economy. He has promoted tariffs while dismantling the sort of industrial policies that the right sort of economic nationalism can facilitate, from subsidies to biotech via NIH and NSF to the bipartisan green industrial policies enacted under President Biden.

Benjamin Netanyahu is every bit as much a crazed megalomaniac as Trump, but a far more strategic thinker and planner. Think of it as the proxy war of the puppets. Trump is the dummy, but a dummy who commands the world’s largest military. The two competing ventriloquists are Bannon and Netanyahu.

Having created a fait accompli and what seems to be a nearly costless victory, Netanyahu is enticing Trump to join in and reap some of the credit. Trump is sorely tempted. Following one fiasco after another, he dearly needs a win.

Trump’s impulsive actions remind me of the old Irish joke about a brawl in a pub. A bystander asks the barkeep, Is this a private fight or can anybody get into it? After temporizing, Trump has concluded that he wants to get into Bibi’s brawl.

Bannon, meanwhile, in public and in private, is reminding Trump of the grave risks. Direct U.S. military involvement in a Mideast war will achieve one thing that Trump’s other blunders couldn’t do. It is seriously dividing MAGA, and could leave Trump with even less popular support, not to mention the international risks.

Nor, as the expression goes, will this be good for the Jews. When Israel manipulates the U.S. into joining an unpopular war, a lot of right-wing faux friends of the Jews will revert to their usual antisemitism. Israel will be even more of an international pariah, dividing the U.S. from what’s left of American allies.

Netanyahu, seconded by Trump, could end up doing what no other Israeli leader has done, uniting Shiite and Sunni states that hate each other but don’t want to see the Zionist nation dominating the region. Israel can perhaps defeat Iran, whatever that turns out to mean, but Israel can’t win a simultaneous war against the entire Middle East. Other nations in the region will not be pleased by this brutal assertion of U.S. military might—which could be turned against them on a presidential whim.

However much Saudi Arabia may be gloating about the annihilation of Iran and its subsidiaries in Hamas and Hezbollah, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has an astute sense of the regional balance of power. Israel’s all-out war on Iran is also annihilating the fledgling Abraham Accords, which created a cynical and corrupt alliance between Israel, the Saudis, and other regional powers such as the Emirates.

Since 2023, the Saudi governnent has pursued détente with Iran. The kingdom’s government last week issued a “denunciation of the blatant Israeli aggressions against the brotherly Islamic Republic of Iran.” Yesterday, the Emirati ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, called the Iranian president to express “solidarity with Iran and its people during these challenging times.”

If things work out, Trump will get credit for demolishing Iran’s uranium enrichment labs buried deep underground at Fordo, using the 30,000-pound bunker busters that only the U.S. possesses. Maybe he will also join Netanyahu in assassinating Ayatollah Khamenei, and a grateful Iranian nation will rise up against the theocracy and become a pro-West democracy at peace with Israel.

What could possibly go wrong?

~ ROBERT KUTTNER

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