
President Donald Trump swept into office vowing to end wars around the world, but his efforts to strike a nuclear deal with Iran appear to have spurred Israel to start a new one, as the U.S. military on Friday helped shoot down Iranian missiles headed toward Israeli territory.
A White House envoy has been negotiating for months with Iranian leaders to try to impose limits on their nuclear program over pointed objections from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The president declared that a deal with Iran would be preferable to “violence like people haven’t seen before.” But the high-stakes diplomacy always had a clear weakness at its heart: If Israel wanted to derail talks, all it needed to do was attack Iran itself.
Now, five months into a second Trump term that began with his attempt to be a peacemaker and a unifier, fresh conflict is roiling the Middle East with no end in sight to the violence in Ukraine. And Washington was quickly being pulled into the new fight, as it mustered an effort to defend Israel against the Iranian counterstrikes while Trump conferred with his national security team.
Trump said Friday that he was informed of Israel’s plans to strike Iran, and it does not appear that he sought to dissuade Netanyahu from the attack. Though Trump urged Iran to continue negotiating or face even more Israeli attacks, the prospects of a deal seemed further away than ever. Past negotiations depended in part on credible U.S. assurances that Washington would hold back Israel and guarantee peace, and now, as Trump noted, some leaders with whom the United States was trying to strike a deal are dead.
During several public comments Friday, Trump cast the Israeli attacks as retribution for Iran not making a deal with the United States, saying that his 60-day window to strike a bargain had just closed.
“I think it’s been excellent,” he told ABC News’s Jonathan Karl of the attacks. “We gave them a chance, and they didn’t take it. They got hit hard, very hard. They got hit about as hard as you’re going to get hit. And there’s more to come. A lot more.”
Netanyahu, in several private phone calls to Trump and visits to the White House, had made clear to the president in recent months that he supported a preemptive strike, said three administration officials, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail sensitive internal discussions.
The message from the Trump administration had been “don’t do it” to allow U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff to explore a diplomatic solution with Tehran, said the officials. Trump in recent weeks has repeatedly said a deal was imminent and counseled Netanyahu to avoid any disruptions.
“I told him this would be inappropriate to do right now because we’re very close to a solution,” Trump told reporters in late May. “Now, that could change at any moment, could change with a phone call. But right now, I think they want to make a deal, and if we can make a deal, save a lot of lives.”
That message may have changed in recent days, one official said, though the White House and State Department declined to comment on how Trump’s position evolved. It was not immediately clear when this week Trump learned of Netanyahu’s plans or what exactly he counseled the prime minister. The White House and the Israeli prime minister’s office did not reply to requests for comment.
Trump and Netanyahu spoke again Friday, according to the White House.
Trump had been seeking a deal to limit Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, which has placed Tehran within striking distance of assembling enough enriched uranium to make a nuclear weapon. Iran says its nuclear program is strictly for civilian purposes. In Trump’s first term, he withdrew from a 2015 deal struck by President Barack Obama that put limits on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.
The Israeli strikes were of such ferocity that they were likely to draw a far larger Iranian response than a previous exchange last fall. Starting Thursday, Israel targeted Iran’s nuclear enrichment facility in Natanz and killed Hossein Salami, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps; a swath of its top nuclear scientists; and other senior officials. Iran’s U.N. envoy said that 78 Iranians had been killed and more than 320 injured by the attack. Iran responded by firing dozens of missiles at Israel. A U.S. defense official said U.S. assistance to Israel on Friday included ballistic missile defense, such as the use of the Patriot and THAAD systems.
The operation marked yet another blow to Trump’s efforts to be a peacemaker. In Ukraine and Gaza, two other territories where the president vowed to stop the fighting, war has continued to rage, with Trump at times seeming to be reduced to the role of a passive commentator rather than the leader of the world’s most powerful military.
“Israel’s unprecedented strikes across Iran overnight were designed to kill President Trump’s chances of striking a deal to contain the Iranian nuclear program,” said Ellie Geranmayeh, an Iran expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
The president appeared to be trying to reclaim the narrative Friday, though he seemed to offer little that would bring Iran to the table. A Witkoff spokesman said that Sunday talks with Iran in Oman remained on schedule, though it was hard to imagine that the meeting would occur with a full-scale war brewing.
“There is still time to make this slaughter, with the next already planned attacks being even more brutal, come to an end,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Iran must make a deal, before there is nothing left.”
But that may be a misreading of how past diplomatic success with Iran has worked, analysts said. Iranian hard-liners who are inclined to mistrust Washington need assurances that Trump can credibly prevent Israel from attacking them. Allowing an attack in the middle of negotiations undermines that effort.
“This completely destroys U.S. credibility in negotiations with Iran and potentially in negotiations with other countries,” said Rosemary Kelanic, the director of the Middle East program at Defense Priorities, a think tank that advocates for a more restrained approach to U.S. military engagement. “What value does a U.S. pledge have if it can’t keep Israel at bay?”
Neither Trump nor his top aides made public attempts Friday to hold Israel back from further strikes, though Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Thursday sought to distance Washington from the war effort, saying that Israel had acted alone.
The mixed messages seemed unlikely to be strong enough to halt Israel’s attacks or to persuade Iran not to strike U.S. interests in the region and draw Washington deeper into the war, analysts said.
Trump has also at times been at odds with himself.
On Thursday, he told reporters that an Israeli attack could soon occur and, if it did, could ruin his efforts at a deal. But in the next breath, he suggested that an attack could have the opposite effect, perhaps in ways that would nudge rattled Iranians toward a diplomatic off-ramp.
“Might help it actually,” he said. “But it also could blow it.”
Foreign policy analysts said it was too soon to tell how the Israeli strikes may reshape the region, and whether the United States may get dragged into a foreign conflict. But they suggested that Trump’s patience for a deal may have worn thin.
“I think President Trump certainly wanted diplomacy. I think he really wanted to try and make a deal. I think it also was starting to become clear that it just wasn’t going to happen,” said Jonathan Panikoff, a former senior U.S. intelligence official who is director of the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East program. “There was just no universe in which the Iranians were going to be willing to give up enrichment and their right to enrichment, as they’ve claimed. And I think that really was a driver here in how he’s engaged on this.”
“I don’t believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu could have gone forward with this without at least U.S. acquiescence,” he added. “I think it’s clear that happened.”
Accepting an Israeli war against Iran would be a departure from Trump’s campaign rhetoric and also from some of his actions during the first months of his administration. Trump during his campaign vowed to end wars and get the United States out of foreign entanglements. During a campaign event in September, he said, “We will quickly restore stability in the Middle East, and we will return the world to peace.”
His inaugural address featured themes of a new era of broader global cooperation.
“My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier,” he said. “That’s what I want to be: a peacemaker and a unifier.”
Trump dismissed his first national security adviser, Michael Waltz, in part because of a perception that Waltz had coordinated with Netanyahu ahead of a February Oval Office meeting to swing the president toward military options against Iran, officials said last month.
Some people who have been involved in Trump’s strategy said that the Israeli attack may drive a wedge through Trump’s foreign policy coalition, with traditional hawkish Republicans embracing the confrontation and advocates of restraint pushing for a more decisive break with Israel.
“I’ve texted with people who’ve just been essentially saying, ‘I’m done with Israel,’” said a former senior Pentagon official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly about sensitive discussions. “I don’t think that’s going to lead necessarily to some good places. I actually am worried about that.”
During Trump’s trip last month to a trio of Middle Eastern countries, he met with Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, discussed a peace agreement between Israel and Hamas, and said he was on the verge of a deal with Ukraine and Russia.
“I will tell you that the world is a much safer place right now,” he said at the time. “And I think it will be even safer in two or three weeks.”
That was four weeks ago.
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John Hudson and Dan Lamothe contributed to this report.