Donald Trump's ultimatum is a threat to Iran and the Middle East
What this means, one assumes, is that the Iranian government must – within the next 12 days – open all areas of its nuclear enrichment facility at Fordo to investigators from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), thereby proving that it is not developing a nuclear bomb. Failure to do so will risk the site being hit with a US 'bunker buster' bomb – or a GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, to give this particular weapon of mass destruction its proper name.
The dangers of such a development are, obviously, grave, not only for the environment and people of Iran (who would likely suffer catastrophic radioactive contamination), but also for the geopolitics of an already deeply unstable Middle East. The world recoils from the prospect.
Even Keir Starmer – who has made himself Trump's sycophant-in-chief – has urged restraint. There is, however, one regime which greets the possibility of such a reckless escalation with the glee of an excited toddler in a sweetie shop.
That regime is, of course, the Benjamin Netanyahu administration in Israel. Ever since the attacks of October 7, 2023 – in which Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and, I suspect, self-organised groups of young Palestinians killed 300 Israeli military personnel and 900 civilians – Israel has sought opportunistically to extinguish, not only the Palestinian people of Gaza but all of the Zionist state's many enemies across the region.
The US is, needless to say, deeply involved in Israel's regional war efforts, which have – over the last 20 months – involved military action against Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran. Without American weapons, intelligence and finance, it is unimaginable that Netanyahu could have been able to conduct war on so many fronts.
Nevertheless, the Israeli prime minister would prefer that the US was already engaged directly, alongside Israel, in military action against Iran. He has been urging US attacks on Iranian nuclear sites for well over a decade.
Trump's two-week deadline expresses tensions within the US security establishment and within the president's own MAGA movement. The property developer-turned-politician was re-elected to the White House on the promise that he would keep the US out of foreign wars.
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Much of the MAGA base rallies enthusiastically to Trump's promise that, on his watch, the US will not suffer the ignominy of seeing one of its diplomatic missions overrun and its ambassador killed (as was the case with John Stevens, the US ambassador to Libya, in 2012).
Never again, the president has vowed, will US forces be seen withdrawing from a foreign country in disarray (as occurred in Afghanistan in 2021).
Many of Trump's supporters – including the ultra-conservative journalist Tucker Carlson – are pushing back against the prospect of US attacks on Iran. Trump is caught between presenting himself as the 'peace president' and – to use his own words – being 'very, very pro-Israel' (so 'pro-Israel', indeed, that he has openly advocated the mass expulsion of the Palestinians in Gaza who have, thus far, survived Israel's genocide of more than 56,000 people).
There are, however, a series of problems with the insistence by both Trump and Netanyahu that Iran is on the immediate brink of having a nuclear bomb. As recently as March of this year, Trump's now director of national intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard testified to US lawmakers that Iran had not restarted its nuclear weapons programme.
Indeed, in June, Gabbard tweeted a video in which she warned against the 'political elite and warmongers' who are 'carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers'.
Referring, perhaps, to the war in Ukraine, tensions between India and Pakistan and/or the Middle East crisis, she opined that the world is 'on the brink of nuclear annihilation'.
However, Gabbard's March testimony – made when she was Trump's trusted nominee for DNI – is now proving so inconvenient to the president that, on Friday, he felt it necessary to reject her comments of less than three months ago. Trump has averred that he 'doesn't care' what Gabbard said in March, and that her testimony on Capitol Hill was simply 'wrong'.
For her part, Gabbard has sought to save her job by resorting to the MAGA playbook. Blaming 'the dishonest media', she accused journalists of 'intentionally taking my testimony out of context and spreading fake news'.
Gabbard's testimony in March was a reflection of the analysis of the US intelligence establishment. It was entirely at odds with Netanyahu's claims.
Speaking at the UN, the Israeli prime minister said that Iran was 'months away' from having nukes. At another meeting of the UN, he insisted that the Tehran administration was just 'weeks away' from having 'an entire arsenal of nuclear bombs'.
The problem with these pronouncements – as was pointed out last week by American satirist Jon Stewart on his always well-researched Daily Show – is that they were made in 2012 and 2015, respectively. When it comes to Israeli claims regarding the supposed Iranian nuclear weapons programme, Netanyahu has less credibility than Liz Truss denying that she crashed the UK economy.
There are, in all of this, more than a few shades of Tony Blair's 2003 'dodgy dossier', the entirely discredited file with which the UK government sought to prove that the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq had 'weapons of mass destruction'.
Back then, the Labour prime minister claimed that Saddam could deploy chemical or biological weapons against UK military installations in Cyprus in just '45 minutes'.
Blair's later claim that he fell victim to erroneous intelligence would struggle to convince an unusually naïve five-year-old. The Iraq debacle exposed the leader of 'New Labour' as a lying warmonger.
If the Blair dossier was dodgy, the Israeli claims about Iran (claims which are now backed by the US) amount to a multi-volume encyclopaedia of malevolent falsehoods.
Yet, if – as Trump told journalists on Friday – 'my intelligence community is wrong', one can only assume that the US president's source of supposed 'intelligence' on Iran's nuclear programme is the Netanyahu regime.
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The irony in all this is that the governments in West Jerusalem and Washington insist that Iran cannot become a nuclear weapons state because its government is untrustworthy and unstable. This from an Israeli coalition government that comprises: Netanyahu's far-right, ultra-nationalist Likud party; the fascist Jewish Power party of national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir (who is a lifelong supporter of the late leader of fascist Zionism Meir Kahane); and the fascist-theocrats of the Religious Zionism party (which is led by Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich).
The idea that this ragtag collection of genocidal fanatics should be considered a trustworthy custodian of the 90 to 400 nuclear warheads Israel has sitting in the Negev Desert is beyond laughable. Likewise the notion that Trump – who is currently at war with much of the population of Los Angeles – is a statesman with whom the nuclear codes of the world's most powerful military should be considered safe.
On the issue of Iran's nuclear programme – as on so many other geopolitical questions – US policy is characterised by flagrant hypocrisy. The demand that Iran open up its facility at Fordo to IAEA examiners can only be made because the Tehran government is a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
Israel, by stark contrast, has never signed the NPT. Mordechai Vanunu – the former nuclear technician who blew the whistle on Israel's secret nuclear weapons programme in 1986 – spent 18 years (11 of them in solitary confinement) in Israeli jails for his brave and principled actions.
As Marwan Bishara – Al Jazeera's excellent chief political analyst – said recently, Israel's influence over the White House is a case of 'the tail wagging the dog'. This influence is not down to the clout in Washington DC of the much-vaunted 'Israel lobby', much less to the conspiratorial power of a supposed 'Jewish lobby' (an antisemitic trope that insults every Jewish person who speaks out against the Israeli genocide in Gaza).
Rather it is explained by the crucial role Israel plays – and has always played – for Western, particularly US, imperialism in the oil-rich Middle East. In 1943 – five years before Zionist forces visited the Nakba (Catastrophe) of mass murder and 'ethnic cleansing' upon the Palestinian people – Sir Ronald Storrs (former British administrator in Jerusalem) expressed his hope and belief that a future Israeli state would be a 'little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism'.
In 1953 the Israeli newspaper Haaretz described the Zionist state as the Middle Eastern 'watchdog' for the Western powers, and the US in particular. The State of Israel's highly militarised, belligerent role in the Middle East makes it an extremely valuable asset for Western imperialism.
That was true during the Suez Crisis in 1956, in which – against the urging of an unconvinced US – Israel joined its patrons France and the UK in the disastrous invasion of Nasser's Egypt (following the Egyptian leader's nationalisation of the Franco-British-owned Suez Canal). It was also the case in the Six-Day War in 1967, in which US president Lyndon Johnson's administration assisted Israel in its victory over Egypt, Iraq, Syria and Jordan, and in its consequent illegal occupations of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.
Ever since then, Israel has been relied upon to use military force, or the threat of it, to keep Arab states and Iran in line. That is why the US finances Israel to the tune of $3.8 billion annually.
Israel is the number one recipient of US foreign aid, accounting for 5% of the total US international aid budget (and rising, given Trump's cuts to aid spending). This to a country which – with a population of around 9.7 million – accounts for just 0.1% of the world's population.
Israel's watchdog role makes it indispensable to US interests in the Middle East. However, its interests and US interests are not identical, and, from time to time, the watchdog slips its leash and acts in ways that make life difficult for Washington.
Trump is currently caught on the horns of this dilemma. His MAGA base is split between 'no more foreign wars' isolationism and 'very, very pro-Israel' militarism.
He has given himself 12 days to decide whether to set light to the tinderbox of the Middle East by involving US forces in direct attacks on Iran or simply continue to 'green light' Israel's bombardment in Persia. His choice will come down to his estimate – in his own extremely right-wing, nationalistic terms – of what best serves the economic and political interests of the US imperium.
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