In a stunning reversal of his long-professed "America First" foreign policy, President Donald Trump ordered massive airstrikes on Iran's key nuclear facilities late Saturday night, plunging the United States into a direct military confrontation with Tehran and risking a catastrophic, wider conflict in the Middle East.
The move undermines the President's doctrine, which for years has criticized the "endless wars" of his predecessors. According to an analysis by Philippe Coste in the French newspaper Libération, "the President who promised to pull the United States out of 'endless wars' has just bombed Iran's nuclear sites, at the risk of committing his country to a new, lasting conflict in the Middle East." This action repudiates the core promise to his base that he was the only President in recent memory not to start a new war, a central plank of his 2024 campaign platform.
The American assault followed a tense two-week period initiated by an Israeli offensive, codenamed "Operation Rising Lion," against Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile infrastructure. Initially, the Trump administration, through Secretary of State Marco Rubio, publicly distanced itself from the Israeli action, calling it a "unilateral act." However, in a whiplash-inducing shift, President Trump appeared to pivot, first attempting to claim partial credit for Israel's move before launching his dramatic military engagement. This came just two days after he claimed he would take two weeks to decide on a course of action.
While the White House hopes this show of force and consequent ceasefire will push Tehran back to the negotiating table, it has also placed 40,000 U.S. troops in the region in immediate peril of retaliation. Critics argue the action is a direct result of the administration's diplomatic failures and a predictable outcome of Trump's 2018 withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, which gave Tehran the pretext to restart its atomic program. The President may have sought a decisive blow, but he has now ceded control of what comes next to a fragile ceasefire and instability in the region.
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