Trump's Unexpected Restraint Toward Iran Keeps Diplomacy Alive
Trump’s decision to hold retaliation against Iran kept diplomacy hopes alive and revealed his rarely displayed side: restraint.
(Bloomberg) -- Donald Trump’s decision to hold off on retaliating against Iran this week kept hopes for diplomacy alive and revealed a side he’s rarely displayed over his decades in the public eye: restraint.
The president’s reversal of course, calling off plans to attack Iran after it shot down a U.S. Navy drone on June 20, heartened American allies in Europe and many lawmakers. They took the episode as a signal of Trump’s true intentions with Iran -- not to start a war, but to cut a deal.
“Two of President Trump’s pretty strong convictions bumped up against each other on Thursday -- he’s a counter-puncher who’s going to hit back twice as hard, but going back decades he’s criticized the U.S. for getting into stupid wars,” said Matthew Kroenig, the deputy director for strategy with the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security at the Atlantic Council.
“He saw himself on the verge of making what he thought was a mistake that previous presidents had made,” Kroenig said.
Critics of the president’s hard-line approach toward Iran argue that Trump has an opportunity now to ease tensions they say he’s partly responsible for after abandoning a 2015 nuclear deal, imposing a punishing array of sanctions on the Islamic Republic and moving more military assets to the region.
And despite their fears that Trump would be swayed by hawks led by National Security Advisor John Bolton and Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, they now point to the latest move as an indication that when the threat of an explosive conflict loomed, Trump blinked.
Officials familiar with the president’s thinking said that Bolton and Pompeo supported air strikes on a limited number of targets involved in the shooting down of the Navy RQ-4 Global Hawk drone. U.S. and Iranian officials continue to dispute whether the drone was in international airspace when it was struck.
Trump called Iran’s move a “very big mistake.” But people familiar with the president’s thinking said that he left a national security briefing in the White House Situation Room on Thursday feeling trepidation and unconvinced that it would be worth risking the possibility of a wider conflict over a drone.
In an interview with NBC News on Friday, Trump said the strikes were “about ready to go,” but when he heard that about 150 people would have been killed, he said, “I didn’t think it was proportionate.” In one of his Friday tweets, Trump said “I am in no hurry, our Military is rebuilt, new, and ready to go, by far the best in the world.”
Trump’s actions were only the latest example of his desire to tamp down rhetoric and tension. He had earlier called Iranian attacks on two oil tankers near the Strait of Hormuz “minor,” and later suggested that the U.S. drone may have been shot down in error by a “loose and stupid” individual even as Iran took credit for the action.
“I would imagine it was a general or somebody who made a mistake by shooting that drone down,” Trump told reporters during an Oval Office meeting Thursday with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. “I find it hard to believe it was intentional.”
Trump has for weeks called on Iran to come to the negotiating table, something it has resisted so far. While the U.S. continues to ramp up pressure on Tehran, imposing new sanctions aimed at choking off its economy and compelling it to negotiate with the U.S., officials have also begun to moderate the U.S. stance to a degree.
Pompeo, who set out 12 demands last year that he said the U.S. was insisting were required for Iran to become a “normal country,” recently took a more moderate tone, saying in Switzerland that the U.S. was prepared to talk without preconditions.
Moderation has also found advocates among some Republicans who have argued that the president’s decision to hold off provides an opening for each side to back down.
“Let’s have a freeze on the increasing pressure that the United States is putting on Iran,” Stephen Hadley, who served as national security adviser for President George W. Bush, said June 20 on PBS’s NewsHour. “Let’s have a freeze on the steps the Iranians have taken to increasingly move out of the nuclear agreement, and let’s have a negotiation, and with all issues on the table.”
The reaction from allies was varied. For European nations such as France, which have preached calm, the news was greeted with relief. Others, which had openly girded for conflict, were more equivocal.
An Israeli official said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government wasn’t disappointed by Trump’s decision because deciding the terms of a response is up to the U.S. Israel is focused instead on keeping the pressure on Iran’s economy through sanctions, said the official, who asked not to be identified discussing the government’s thinking.
Stopping Short
Iran’s targeting of a pilotless aircraft may have been a calculated decision not to risk harming Americans, stopping just short of a red line that would have forced Trump to respond militarily.
Amir Ali Hajizadeh, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Aerospace Force, said Friday his forces decided not to shoot down a Boeing P-8 Poseidon, a maritime patrol aircraft with people aboard that he said was accompanying the drone, according to the semi-official Tasnim news agency. U.S. Central Command said the plane was actually about four miles (6.4 kilometers) away and at a lower altitude.
The question is whether Iran’s professed restraint will work. Even Trump’s closest allies fretted that the decision to back down at the last minute made the president look weak. Hard-liners such as Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton have publicly urged “a retaliatory military strike” against Iran for the tanker attacks even before the drone shootdown.
South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, a close Trump ally, tweeted Friday that while he appreciated Trump’s “desire to be measured and thoughtful,” the U.S. should make Iran’s vow to produce more enriched uranium a red line. That would violate the multinational nuclear deal that Trump renounced a year go.
The danger is that Iran may interpret Trump’s move as a sign of weakness, not restraint, and may feel it has new room to maneuver -- and possibly to provoke the U.S., according to Ali Vaez, Iran project director at the International Crisis Group.
“I worry that the Iran has interpreted this as the president’s extreme aversion to getting the U.S. in another war and come to the conclusion that they still have some space to push back,” Vaez said. “If they don’t get what they want, they will continue to escalate and sooner or later there will be a pattern of behavior that becomes intolerable for the U.S.”
--With assistance from Jennifer Jacobs, David Wainer and Tony Capaccio.
To contact the reporter on this story: Nick Wadhams in Washington at nwadhams@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Bill Faries at wfaries@bloomberg.net, Larry Liebert
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