November Election Looms Large Over Iran Strategy

President Trump’s plan to remake the Mideast, in part by defanging the Islamic Republic of Iran, is hitting a major stumbling block as the midterm elections — and an October election in America’s war partner, Israel — take center stage. Mr. Trump’s place in history could very well be decided by the outcome of the Iran war. To end it successfully, the president might need to amp up the military campaign. At least until November, though, he will be busy fending off growing public sentiment against the war. Iran is well aware of the president’s dilemma. “They think that they could outlast the Trump administration,” the policy director at United Against Nuclear Iran, Jason Brodsky, tells The New York Sun. “If the president wants to get to a better situation on the ground that will be more favorable to getting the kind of diplomatic settlements he’d like, he needs to escalate because he needs to do something to shake up and change the situation.”Politics, though, as well as geopolitical and regional considerations, are seemingly holding back any idea of escalation. Over the weekend the president cancelled a plan for military strikes that he says could have been the “biggest attack since World War II.” As markets opened Monday, global crude rates dropped by five percent to below $80 a barrel. “This is their last chance before decapitation,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Monday. Critics claim the president’s pattern is becoming overly familiar: As weekends near, the president orders attacks in Iran or, as in this case, threatens hard strikes. Once markets are about to open on Mondays, attacks are called off and the president announces new diplomatic breakthroughs. Mr. Trump said on Sunday that he made his decision after talking to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, who raised concerns about an Iranian retaliation that would harm the kingdom’s oil fields. Such caution cannot be said of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who visited the White House last week. For months, critics hounded the president, claiming the Israeli premier dragged America to what they claim is an unwinnable war. Mr. Netanyahu’s visit last week, therefore, was low profile, accompanied by leaks over tensions between the two leaders. As Israel’s campaign heats up ahead of the October 27 Knesset election, which will determine the country’s next leader, Mr. Netanyahu’s competitors attack him for what they say is a diminishing clout with the president. “Those political scoring points are made all the time,” the leader of a new and small, centrist Israeli party called Oz, or “Strength,” Einat Wilf, tells the Sun. They say, “‘We’ve lost our sovereignty. No one listens to us. Netanyahu’s made our situation worse.’ But I’m not hearing from anyone: what would you do?”Decision-Making Vacillates Amid Pesky PollsAs the November 3 Election Day nears, opinion polls show the public is souring on a campaign that was unpopular from the start. War approval wallows in the mid-30 percentage points. Almost two thirds of Americans would have preferred it would never have been launched, and significant majorities say they oppose the war because of the resulting inflation, including higher prices at the pump. “My real polling numbers, not those made up by the fake media, are the best they have ever been,” Mr. Trump boasted on TruthSocial Monday. Among the reasons, he cited “a giant victory in Venezuela, the denuclearization of Iran, unparalleled success and respect throughout the world, and much more.”Regardless of the veracity of Mr. Trump’s “real” polls, the post indicates that he is well-aware that party politics play a growing role in his war consideration. The president’s strategy is challenged on the left and right.Democrats have criticized Mr. Trump’s war since its launch. “At this point, he’s trying to get us back to February,” Senator Mark Kelly told CBS News on Sunday. “And I think if he could, if he had a big reset button he could hit, he would certainly take that option.”Feeling the heat from voters, some Republicans pile on. Striking a deal is hazardous because “the Iranian government learned to lie before they learned to talk,” Senator John Kennedy told NBC on Sunday. Hitting Iran, though, could “cause a lot of pain,” he added. “It’ll cause energy prices to go up, and a lot of inflation for the American people. They’re all hellish choices.” Politics and War: Can They Coexist?In April, after pounding Iran for a few weeks, Mr. Trump agreed to a two-week Pakistani-negotiated ceasefire. It was then extended for 60 additional days, launching the current cycle of on-again-off-again war. Iran hawks warned Mr. Trump against ceasefires from the start. Stopping the war to negotiate is “game over,” the CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Mark Dubowitz, warned back in May. It “pushes the crisis into late July or early August, when major military operations become far less likely ahead of the midterms,” he predicted, adding, “Tehran will have won at the negotiating table what it lost on the battlefield.”Now it’s August, and Mr. Dubowitz’s prediction seems to have materialized. Some of Mr. Trump’s supporters, however, claim that he is employing a grand strategy. By keeping economic pressure on Iran while listening to Gulf leaders’ war-halting advice, they say, the president is bolstering Mideast allies’ ties to America and creating new Mideast realities. “So it’s either going to be, in retrospect, a brilliant strategy, or it’s going to be exactly what it is, which is dilly dallying back and forth,” Ms. Wilf says.

November Election Looms Large Over Iran Strategy

November Election Looms Large Over Iran Strategy

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