Author: Alexander Detev
"Help is on the way", Donald Trump wrote to protesters in Iran during the brutal repression against them in early and mid-January. This help never arrived.
In recent weeks, however, the United States has been building up armed forces around the Persian Gulf - including the aircraft carrier "Abraham Lincoln", as well as numerous fighter jets and tankers. According to media reports, the "Gerald Ford" is also traveling there - the world's largest aircraft carrier.
During the first meeting of his Peace Council, which was held in Washington on February 19, Trump threatened that "bad things" would happen to Tehran if it did not reach a nuclear deal. For many, this is an indication that military intervention is imminent. But is the American president really preparing for war and what goals would it pursue?
Trump wants a deal better than Obama's
The recent protests in Iran were brutally crushed, with some organizations and observers estimating that over 20,000 people were killed. Trump has repeatedly promised support and threatened Tehran, but no concrete action has been taken. Like Venezuela, where the overthrow of Nicolas Maduro was not accompanied by overt support for the opposition, critics of the regime in Tehran can hardly hope for unconditional help. In the weeks following the large-scale protests, however, the US began to amass serious military power in the region, and according to experts, an escalation would lead to a very serious military clash.
At the same time, negotiations over Iran's nuclear program are stalling, and the US president has made it clear that the country has a few days to reach an agreement or "bad things will follow." After the United States, together with Israel, bombed key nuclear infrastructure in the Islamic Republic in June, Trump announced that the country's nuclear program had been delayed for years. "All nuclear sites in Iran have suffered colossal damage," he wrote at the time.
Currently, delegations from Iran and the US are negotiating over Iran's nuclear program in Geneva, but Trump is clearly not satisfied with the progress. He is a sharp critic of the previous nuclear agreement that Barack Obama reached in 2015. In 2018, Trump pulled the US out of it, calling it the "worst deal" ever. Iran has since increased its uranium enrichment level and expanded its nuclear capacity.
Will Iraq 2.0 follow?
The protests in Iran have already been suppressed, and overthrowing the regime in Tehran would be "very difficult", as Secretary of State Marco Rubio admitted in January. What goal would the US then pursue with military intervention in Iran?
This question contains many unknowns. On the one hand, diplomatic sources tell the "New York Times" that Washington is not consulting its allies on the subject, which is unusual. He has not launched a communications campaign in the country itself to convince Americans to support a potential intervention, as Bush did before entering Iraq in 2003.
However, if they attack Iran, which will lead to serious consequences for the Middle East region, and probably for the entire world, the United States will largely abandon its leading doctrine after the Vietnam War - not to intervene militarily in countries without a clear goal of what they want to achieve.
Most likely, the intervention in Iran would only be by air, since ground operations would be too reminiscent of the endless and extremely expensive US intervention in countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq, which is far from the strategy of Trump and his team. It is not excluded, of course, that the current threats will turn out to be just a bluff, like the promised aid to protesters in Iranian cities in January.