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BBC News
9 hours ago
- Politics
- BBC News
Is Trump now more likely to use military force?
Has US President Donald Trump found a new security doctrine with big air strikes taking the place of conventional wars? Should other countries expect more of this from the American military? Even though we don't have all the information yet, President Trump has suffered very little blowback and won considerable praise for his actions last weekend. In the aftermath of the strikes, US Vice President JD Vance took to social media to say that "we are seeing a foreign policy doctrine develop that will change the country (and the world) for the better," adding that the US will use "overwhelming force" if necessary in the future. Iran has barely responded and the US public hasn't taken to the streets in protest, despite the fact that polls show Americans are fed up with military entanglements in the Middle East. So, it's worth asking whether this mission will lead President Trump to move away from diplomacy and embrace more of this sort of military action moving forward. Or, was the hit against Iran's nuclear programme really just a one-off, an exception to his isolationist tendencies? I recently put that question to Richard Haass, a veteran US diplomat who has advised four presidents. Haass spent 20 years as president of the Council on Foreign Relations and is the author of more than a dozen books. He now writes the weekly newsletter Home & Away. You can watch – or read – more of our conversation below. Below is an excerpt from our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity. Katty Kay: Richard, I wanted to frame this conversation in the context of what this strike on Iran means for Trump and his appetite, potentially, for these kinds of military strikes moving forward. Do you think he risks paying a price either here or abroad for airstrikes of this nature? Richard Haass: I'm not sure how replicable it is in other circumstances. The only area where he may have done himself a slight disservice is in perhaps potentially exaggerating what they've accomplished, using words like "obliteration". Even if we destroyed a lot, we don't know how much material, enriched uranium, centrifuges the Iranians may have parked elsewhere. So, I think he has to be a little bit careful that he doesn't oversell this as a mission accomplished, problem solved. But other than that, I think he's OK because, one, it was limited. Two, a lot of people would say Iran had it coming in the sense that it had misled the IAEA inspectors for a long time. No one on God's green Earth thought what the Iranians were doing was enriching uranium to generate electricity. So, I think people had just gotten tired of the whack-a-mole or kind-of cat-and-mouse game with the Iranians. But again, I'm not sure this approach is replicable in terms of other countries potentially going nuclear, if it comes to that, or other situations. It doesn't lend itself to Ukraine. It doesn't lend itself to something with Taiwan or North Korea. I'm not sure this is a model or a template for American foreign policy going forward. KK: If you were looking at this and had some concerns about this approach and that this might embolden President Trump to think, "Right, I found a new way of conducting American national security policy," you seem to be suggesting that actually this might not embolden him to think, "I'm going to use strikes like this again elsewhere." RH: I really don't see it for a couple of reasons. One is his MAGA base. Their enthusiasm for this is constrained. I think in some ways he got through this one. They don't like to challenge him, but also it was bookended in terms of scale and time. I'm a little bit hard-pressed when I look at the menu of things the United States faces. How many situations are analogous to this? I don't see too many. North Korea has passed this point in terms of its nuclear and missile programs, plus it has this massive conventional force. So, a use of force against North Korea could well lead to a second Korean War. That's not in Mr. Trump's playbook. He doesn't want direct confrontation with China or Russia if he could avoid it. He's talked about certain things in this hemisphere, but he's not going to attack Canada. He's not going to attack Mexico. I doubt he's going to do anything with Panama or Greenland. I just don't see it. KK: In your experience working in presidential administrations, does having some kind of military success tend to give presidents a feeling that it's worth trying for something else, whether it's these massive airstrikes or not? Let's say he really did want to take Greenland. Does what's happened in Iran over the last five days make him feel emboldened to put pressure on Denmark to give us Greenland? And other countries can now look at President Trump and say, "Wow, this guy actually means what he says, and he's not afraid to use force." RH: My short answer is: I hope not. What was unique about Iran is they were something of a pariah, and there was a very limited specific target set, which many people were quite sympathetic to our attacking. I don't see any of that analogous in Greenland. You also can't attack the Panama Canal in order to gain control of it. Let me take a different president: George Herbert Walker Bush, the 41st president. He used force quite successfully in the Gulf War. Yet, he was quite hesitant later on to use force in the Balkans. So, it obviously depends on the president. And this president tends to go more by his gut than he does with careful interagency analysis. It's really a top-down administration, much more than a bottom-up one. That's not a criticism. It's just an observation. But I would be nervous if too many people around him, much less himself, thought that this was a formula that could be easily applied elsewhere. Whether you think about tariffs or these strikes or pulling out of an international arrangement or doing something else, this is not an isolationist presidency. The more I look at Trump 2.0, the more I see it as unilateralist, having a very narrow sense of what is America first and then applying it. The word I keep coming back to is "unsentimental". If you're a friend, you shouldn't necessarily assume that it buys you anything. And if you're a foe, you may be treated in a very open way. It's a surprisingly unbiased foreign policy, which I've never quite seen before. KK: Do you still think that Trump himself is isolationist? You talked about the MAGA base being so, but from what he has done so far, would you call Trump himself an isolationist? RH: Probably not. I would say more unilateral than isolationist. He has an allergy of sorts to big, open-ended military interventions. He has a narrower view of US interests. But he's used force several times. He's certainly not isolationist in the diplomatic sense, whether it's using tools like tariffs or sanctions or launching this or that proposal. So no, I don't think isolationism captures his foreign policy. KK: You mentioned that you see this administration as a very top-down administration. What strikes me about the last couple of days, Richard, is the degree to which we have seen people around the president falling over themselves to flatter him. What are the risks of that approach? RH: The downside of it is just what you would think: I wonder how many people tell the president what he doesn't want to hear. How many people speak truth to power, saying, "Hey boss, if you do something this way, you may be creating problems for yourself down the road." I don't see a lot of people doing that. The reading I get is that a lot of individuals are worried about losing access or losing jobs. That's unfortunate, because the president won't be well served by that. For any CEO, whether you're president of the United States or president of a company, it's important to hear things you need to hear, rather than want to hear. Sometimes, you need to be saved from yourself. You never want to be surprised when you're president. That's my bottom line. You never want to be surprised by what something triggers or costs. And I worry that this president is not going to get that kind of advice, certainly from his staff. I think foreign leaders are worried that if they antagonise him – everybody saw what happened to President Zelensky – I think they're worried that if they press their case too far, the bilateral relationship or their personal relationship will suffer. I always thought the characteristic of a good relationship is not how often you agree, but it's your ability to disagree. I worry that if that goes away, then in many cases, the president simply won't have the benefit of hearing what he needs to hear. --
Times of Oman
3 days ago
- Politics
- Times of Oman
From Iraq to UAE, Iran is surrounded by US military hubs
More than 40,000 US soldiers are currently deployed in the Middle East, with many of them on ships, according to the US think tank the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The number of troops is slightly lower than in October, during the previous escalation of tensions between Israel and Iran. In earlier years, there were far fewer US troops in the Middle East, totaling about 30,000. According to the recent overview by the CFR, the US has military facilities and troops spanning Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria and the United Arab Emirates — and beyond. US troops also use large bases that are formally operated by allies, such as in Djibouti, in East Africa, and in NATO partner Turkey. The largest US air force presence is the Al-Udeid airbase in Qatar, which was recently targeted with missiles by Iran. Operated by the Qatari air force, the airfield is also used by British and Australian air forces, as well as the US military. Adding all locations together, the US armed forces are either temporarily or permanently stationed at nearly 30 bases across the Middle East. Security and interventions The presence of US troops in the region is often linked to past deployments. The United States has operated several bases in Kuwait since the Gulf War in the early 1990s, when, Iraq attacked its small oil-producing neighbor and was repelled by US forces. After the second Iraq war in 2003, the United States retained its presence in two locations, partly to protect the Kurdish and Yazidi population in the northern region of Erbil. US troops are also still to be found in neighboring Syria: in the south and in the Kurdish-dominated north. In 2015, during the civil war, the United States began deploying special forces to the Rojava region, which is predominantly populated by Syrian Kurds. The Kurds faced extreme persecution by the terror organization the "Islamic State" during the civil war. So far, Iran has limited itself to its rather symbolic attack on Al-Udeid. Casualties were avoided as Tehran alerted the United States in advance, and the missiles were apparently intercepted by air defense. It remains doubtful whether Iran could threaten US troops in the region with ballistic missiles on a wider scale, missile and drone expert Fabian Hinz told DW. Hinz, who conducts research for the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), referred to reports from the United States that Iran could produce 50 ballistic missiles every month. "Although this is a considerable production rate, it is still not enough to maintain Iran's current rate of fire," he said — which means that the attacks on Israel since mid-June would quickly decimate its stock.
New York Times
4 days ago
- Politics
- New York Times
A Show of Unity May Be the Best That NATO Can Hope For at Summit
NATO opened a high-level meeting on Tuesday against the backdrop of one war in the Middle East overshadowing another on the military alliance's doorstep. A tentative cease-fire between Israel and Iran is expected to dominate discussions, while Russia's invasion of Ukraine might muster merely a mention. But NATO has other things to worry about at its annual summit of alliance leaders in The Hague, the Netherlands — namely, maintaining a unified front amid an internal spat over defense spending. The new cease-fire, announced by President Trump late Monday, could rally NATO states toward a common goal. It also provides Mr. Trump the opportunity to take a victory lap at the brief gathering, which is designed to avoid diplomatic disruptions over his defense spending demands. 'Counter-intuitively, this could have a positive effect on the NATO summit,' said Liana Fix, a Europe expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. At the least, Ms. Fix said, the new American role in Israel's enduring conflict with Iran could distract from 'escalation on other issues' at the NATO meeting, which wraps up Wednesday. Yet exhaustive efforts by Mark Rutte, NATO's affable secretary general, to keep the summit sweet as well as short are far from assured. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
CBC
4 days ago
- Politics
- CBC
What we know about the U.S. airbase in Qatar targeted by Iran
Social Sharing Iran retaliated Monday for the U.S. attacks on its nuclear sites by targeting Al Udeid airbase, a sprawling desert facility in Qatar that serves as a main regional military hub for American forces. U.S. President Donald Trump said in a social media post that no Americans were harmed and "hardly any damage was done." A Qatari military officer said one of the 19 missiles fired by Iran was not intercepted and hit the base. As of this month, the U.S. military had about 40,000 service members in the Middle East, according to a U.S. official. Many of them are on ships at sea as part of a bolstering of forces as the conflict escalated between Israel and Iran, according to the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations, a research and policy centre. Bases in the Middle East have been on heightened alert and taking additional security precautions in anticipation of potential strikes from Iran while the Pentagon has shifted military aircraft and warships into and around the region during the conflict. The U.S. has military sites spread across the region, including in Qatar, Bahrain, Iraq, Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria and the United Arab Emirates. Al Udeid hosts thousands of service members The base hosts thousands of U.S. service members and served as a major staging ground for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. At the height of both, Al Udeid housed some 10,000 U.S. troops, and that number dropped to about 8,000 as of 2022. The forward headquarters of the U.S. military's Central Command, it also was used in the fight against the Islamic State. or ISIS, in Iraq and Syria. Al Udeid is built on a flat stretch of desert about 30 kilometres southwest of Qatar's capital, Doha. Over two decades, the gas-rich Gulf country has spent some $8 billion US in developing the base, once considered so sensitive that American military officers would say only that it was somewhere "in southwest Asia." WATCH | Why some say the U.S. couldn't afford to wait to strike Iran: Israel, U.S. couldn't afford to wait to hit Iranian nuclear sites: former commander 2 hours ago Duration 8:13 Trump has visited Al Udeid Trump visited the airbase during a trip to the region last month. It was the first time a sitting U.S. president had travelled to the installation in more than 20 years. Al Udeid cleared its tarmacs Last week, ahead of the U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, Al Udeid saw many of the transport planes, fighter jets and drones typically on its tarmac dispersed. In a June 18 satellite photo taken by Planet Labs PBC and analyzed by The Associated Press, the airbase's tarmac had emptied. The U.S. military has not acknowledged the change, which came after ships off the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet base in Bahrain also had dispersed. That's typically a military strategy to ensure fighting ships and planes aren't destroyed in case of an attack.
The Independent
4 days ago
- Politics
- The Independent
A look at Al Udeid Air Base, the US military site that Iran attacked
Iran retaliated Monday for the U.S. attacks on its nuclear sites by targeting Al Udeid Air Base, a sprawling desert facility in Qatar that serves as a main regional military hub for American forces. A U.S. defense official says no casualties have been reported. As of this month, the U.S. military had about 40,000 service members in the Middle East, according to a U.S. official. Many of them are on ships at sea as part of a bolstering of forces as the conflict escalated between Israel and Iran, according to the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations research and policy center. Bases in the Middle East have been on heightened alert and taking additional security precautions in anticipation of potential strikes from Iran, while the Pentagon has shifted military aircraft and warships into and around the region during the conflict. The U.S. has military sites spread across the region, including in Qatar, Bahrain, Iraq, Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria and the United Arab Emirates. Here's a look at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar: Al Udeid hosts thousands of service members The sprawling facility hosts thousands of U.S. service members and served as a major staging ground for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. At the height of both, Al Udeid housed some 10,000 U.S. troops, and that number dropped to about 8,000 as of 2022. The forward headquarters of the U.S. military's Central Command, Al Udeid is built on a flat stretch of desert about 20 miles (30 kilometers) southwest of Qatar's capital, Doha. Over two decades, the gas-rich Gulf country has spent some $8 billion in developing the base, once considered so sensitive that American military officers would say only that it was somewhere 'in southwest Asia.' Trump has visited Al Udeid Trump visited the air base during a trip to the region last month. It was the first time a sitting U.S. president had traveled to the installation in more than 20 years. Al Udeid cleared its tarmacs Last week, ahead of the U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, Al Udeid saw many of the transport planes, fighter jets and drones typically on its tarmac dispersed. In a June 18 satellite photo taken by Planet Labs PBC and analyzed by The Associated Press, the air base's tarmac had emptied. The U.S. military has not acknowledged the change, which came after ships off the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet base in Bahrain also had dispersed. That's typically a military strategy to ensure your fighting ships and planes aren't destroyed in case of an attack. ___
