As Geopolitical Realities Shift, Trump’s Power to Shape Events Recedes

Foreign Affairs The president is unlikely to get his way on Ukraine or Iran. (Brendan Moran/Sportsfile via Getty Images) Geopolitics are at a turning point. President Donald Trump desperately wants a negotiating win—either with Russia, by brokering a ceasefire in Ukraine, or with Iran, by getting Tehran to open Hormuz and seriously discuss nuclear matters. He will not get either. Neither Russia nor Iran believe seriously in the prospect of a deal; both countries will probably tell Trump he has no choice but to accede to their respective demands. Not only is Trump unlikely to get a diplomatic breakthrough, but he may actually find himself back at war. Netanyahu, wily fox that he is, may well pull the president into a further round of fighting in Iran. And despite their recent triumph in the midterms, Democrats are unlikely to stop this (especially given some senior Dem lawmakers’ seeming sympathy for Israeli aims). If this happens, it will show Trump’s essential vulnerability to shifting geopolitical vectors he is powerless to stop. Consider first that, in the aftermath of Israel’s October elections, the American president may actually be turning against Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Some figures in Trump’s inner circle, according to Israeli commentator Ben Caspit, have urged the Israeli opposition leader Gadi Eisenkot to form a government “urgently,” telling Eisenkot, “You don't have time; you're in trouble. You have to replace Netanyahu as soon as possible.” Caspit attributes this to both the advisors’ “personal dislike” of Netanyahu and the growing toxicity of his brand among the American electorate. Bibi, for his part, clearly feels cornered. The leading Israeli daily Ma’ariv quotes a former senior Netayanhu adviser, Nir Hafetz, saying that Netanyahu is in a state of panic: “Do you realize how much his life will change [should he lose power]?” Hafetz warned the Netanyahu triumvirate—comprising Netanyahu, his wife Sara, and his son Yair—will “simply explode.” Netanyahu’s gambit is to call people around Trump every day. Writes Caspit: He is exerting heavy pressure to resume the attacks on Iran… using whatever leverage he has in the US: Republican supporters, Congressional Democrats and public opinion-makers who remain loyal to him. Interestingly, many of Netanyahu’s own security officials appear considerably less keen on new strikes. “Even if Trump decides to launch a new wave of attacks on Iran together with us, it doesn't mean much,” one Israeli insider said, because “the Americans have completely different goals from ours. They are not trying to topple the regime.” In short, Israel’s national security establishment sees Trump as happy to walk away with a “win” short of the regime change Netanyahu has identified as his ultimate aim. And while the midterm results suggest the war hurts Trump’s political standing, for Bibi its renewal would be politically beneficial, since it would bolster the case for a unity government that would keep him in power. He wants to sabotage a putative opposition coalition, and if Eisenkot fails to put together a government, Netanyahu may yet succeed. Nothing is certain. The aforementioned midterms may have made Trump keener on a deal that he can tout on Truth Social as a success. Yet structural forces keep him hemmed in. The former U.S. counterterrorism chief Joe Kent has warned of “policy by CONOPS,” a reference to how the Pentagon can structure its day-to-day activities (elucidated by its “concept of operations,” or CONOPS) in such a way as to accomplish policy goals at odds with what higher civilian leadership may actually intend. Under existing authorities, for example, CENTCOM chief Admiral Brad Cooper could conduct increasingly assertive air missions that expose U.S. assets to hostile fire, as we see happening often in the Strait of Hormuz. If Iranian forces fire back, the U.S. military could retaliate in turn, escalating the situation even without a decision from Washington. In a similar vein, the Atlantic recently revealed the stark disconnect between Trump’s clear attempts at rapprochement with Moscow, on the one hand, and efforts by the U.S. intelligence community—particularly the CIA, under the leadership of John Ratcliffe—to simultaneously scale up its operations against Russia. The national security bureaucracy, in other words, may be contravening the will of the president through what is known in military parlance as “dumb insolence.” Why doesn’t Trump act to shut down these operations? The hostility toward Russia, the desire to see Iran defeated, and China weakened, has not diminished amongst the uniparty war hawks. Already, in wake of the midterms, as Trump talks of a ‘Big Deal’ coming soon with Russia, Senate Democrats are pushing back hard. To go up against these ‘deep forces’ is far from easy, even for a president. Vance may be supportive of Trump on Iran, but Rubio is out there publicly saying that negotiations with Iran are “making little progress” and characterizing Iran’s demands to date as “unacceptable and in some cases, outrageous.” Hawks, who are present in both mainstream American parties, have the tools by which to face down any president whom they regard as getting out of line. Consider the implications of the very public outing of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s affair with an alleged Chinese spy. Huang, who has zealously pushed for lax export controls on the U.S.-designed chips his company wishes to sell to the Chinese market, is widely despised among China hawks. Up to this point, he has been fairly successful in winning President Trump over to his line of thinking; his downfall, therefore, presents a major opportunity for those who would like to take a harder line on tech exports to Beijing. (It should be noted, too, that there is an irony here, as the Chinese government itself is actively blocking Nvidia chips from entering the country, seeking instead to promote indigenous chipmakers.) And if the scandal deals lasting damage to Nvidia—the second largest company in the world by market capitalization—that could be bad news for the U.S. economy, and, consequently, for President Trump. Finally, there is China’s reading of this episode to consider. Are the hawks now ascendant in Washington, the CCP will wonder, and are we heading back to the trade war? A final strategic shift to consider derives from the obvious, but often overlooked fact, that Moscow and Iran will also have a say in the manner in which both wars end. Both states want to be able to shape the overall security architecture of their respective regions; both reject what they view as their consistent exclusion under the status quo antebellum. Subscribe Today Get daily emails in your inbox Russia and Iran have drawn bright redlines. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov recently made clear that no truce would be acceptable unless it addressed the broader security architecture in Europe, saying that Russia “will not agree to a new truce or a ceasefire—whatever you choose to call it—without a clear understanding of what comes next.” And the Iranian government has been equally insistent on incorporation into a new Mideast security architecture, hosting representatives from the members of recently formed Mecca Joint Defence Agreement (Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey) and demanding that Washington “stop denying the West Asian NEW ORDER.” It is unlikely that Trump can acquiesce to these new realities, or accept that his own “art of the deal” no longer suffices. Now it is real diplomacy or none at all—and Trump is temperamentally unfitted to this new era.