Washington, DC – The president of the United States, Donald Trump, has surrounded himself with a cabinet and an internal circle that is remarkably less aggressive in Iran than during his first term.
But analysts told Al Jazeera that it is not clear if the composition of the new Trump cabinet will make a difference when it comes to how the administration responds to the growing conflict between and Israel.
Last week, the fight broke out when Israel launched surprise attacks on Tehran, which led Iran to retaliate. That exchange of missiles and explosions has threatened spiral in a broader regional war.
“I think there are less traditional republican hawks in this administration,” said Brian Finucane, senior analyst at The International Crisis Group, a group of experts. “And you have more prominent people oriented to restrictions or restoration grilled.”
“The question is: how noisy they will be?”
Until now, the Trump administration has adopted a relatively practical approach to Israel’s attacks, which the Secretary of State Marco Rubio emphasized that they were “unilateral.”
Although the United States has increased military assets to the region, it has avoided being directly involved in confrontation. Trump also publicly opposed an Israeli strike against Iran in the week prior to attacks, saying that he preferred diplomacy.
However, on Sunday, Trump told ABC News: “We may be able to get involved,” citing the risk for US forces in the region.
He has just frame Israel’s bombing campaign as an asset in Onsking conversations to reduce Iran’s nuclear program, despite the fact that several main negotiators are killed by Israeli strikes.
Meanwhile, Iran’s Foreign Minister accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or “playing” Trump taxpayers and the United States for “dumb”, saying that the president of the United States could end the fight with “a phone call” to the Israeli leader.
‘Our interest is not going to war with Iran’
Analysts agree that any course of action that Trump takes will probably transform the conflict. It will also reveal how Trump is responding to the deep ideological crack within his republican base.
One side of that division encompasses Trump’s “America First” ideology: the idea that the domestic interests of the United States are presented to everyone else. That perspective greatly avoids foreign intervention.
The other side of the Trump base supports a neoconservative approach to foreign policy: one that is more anxious to pursue military intervention, sometimes with the aim of forcing the change of regime abroad.
Both views are represented among Trump’s closest advisors. Vice President JD Vance, for example, stands out as an example of a Trump official who has requested a restaurant, both in terms of support from Iran and the United States to Israel.
In March, Vance opposed us in Yemen’s hutis, as evidenced in filtered messages of a private chat with other officials in the application signal. In that conversation, Vance argued that the bombing campaign, an “error” and “inconsistent” with the Trump message of global uncontrolled was.
Duration The presidential campaign of 2024, Vance also warned that the interests of the United States and Israel are “sometimes different … and our interest is not going to war with Iran.”
According to experts, that son of declaration is strange to listen to a senior official in the Republican party, where support for Israel remains largely sacrosanct. Finucane, for example, described the “very notable” Vance statements.
“I think your office can be critical to boost the reverse,” he added.
Other Trump officials have built similarly that races against foreign intervention, including national intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard, who testified in March that the United States “continues to evaluate that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.”
Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, who did not have a previous diplomatic experience, had also presented the possibility of normalizing relationships with Tehran in the early days of LED nuclear conversations.
On the contrary, the Secretary of State and Interim National Security Advisor, Marco Rubio, was established as a traditional neoconservative, with a “hard in Iran” position, duration of his mandate of years in the Senate. But since the Trump administration joined, Rubio has not broken ranges with the President’s Foreign Platform “CRAC” of the president.
That loyalty is indicative of a broader trend between Trump’s internal circle killing his second term, according to Brian Katulis, main member of the Middle East Institute.
“I think Trump 2.0 has a cabinet or chameleons whose main rating is loyalty and ugly to Trump more than anything else,” he told Al Jazeera.
Katulis said that the days of officials who faced Trump, such as former defense secretary James Mattis, had mostly gone a relic of Trump’s first mandate, from 2017 to 2021.
The current Secretary of Defense, former Fox News presenter, Pete Hegseeth, has shown the appetite for conducting air attacks in groups aligned with Iran, including the hutis in Yemen.
But Hegesh told Fox News on Saturday that the president continues to send the message “that peace prefers, prefers a solution to this is resolved at the table.”
‘More aggressive than antiwar magician’
In total, Trump continues to operate in an administration that is “likely more aggressive than Maga Antiwar”, according to Ryan Costello, director of policies of the National Council of American Iran, a group of lobby.
At least one official, the United States ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, has tried to equate the reprisals of Iran against Israel with the orientation of US interests, highlighting the large number of US citizens living in Israel.
Costello acknowledges that Trump’s first term also had its fair share of foreign policy hawks. At that time, former National Security Advisor John Bolton, his replacement, Robert O’Brien and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo advocated militarized strategies to deal with Tehran.
“But there is a big difference between Trump’s first term, when he raised the voices and very aggressive in Iran, and Trump’s second mandate,” Costello said.
He believes that this time, skepticism about the participation of us in the Middle East extends through the rows of the administration.
Costello pointed out a recent conflict between the head of the US Central Command., General Michael Kurilla, and the Secretary of Defense of Colby Policy. The media Semafor reported on Sunday that Kurilla was pressing to move more military active to the Middle East to defend Israel, but that Colby had opposed the move.
The schism, argues Costello, is part of a larger change in the Trump administration and in the Republican party in general.
“You have many prominent voices that make the case that these wars of choice pursued by neoconservatives have an exploration of republican administrations and prevention that they focus on issues that really matter,” said Costello.
Finucane has also observed a pivot of Trump’s first mandate to his second. In 2019, his first four years as president, Finucane, said that Trump’s national security team gave a “apparently unanimous recommendation” to attack Iran after he went to an American surveillance drone.
Trump finally retired from the plan in the last hours, according to multiple reports.
But a year later, the Trump administration murdered General Iraní Qassem Soleimani in a drone strike in Iraq, another case that led the United States to the edge of the war.
Who will Trump listen to?
Undoubtedly, experts say Trump has a notoriously mercurial approach to politics. The last person to talk to the president, the observers have said for a long time, will probably be the greatest influence.
Trump also regularly seeks guidance from outside the White House when he faces consequent decisions, consulting main media such as Fox News, experts of the extreme right, personalities of social networks and the main donors.
That was the case before the possible 2019 American strike against Iran, with Fox News presenter, Tucker Carlson, according to the reports, among which they urged Trump to move away from the attack.
Since then, Carlson has been a main voice that asks Trump to abandon the “hungry government” or Netanyahu, urging the president to have Israeli officials “fight against their own wars.”
But Carlson is not the only conservative media figure with influence on Trump. The presenter of the conservative media, Mark Levin, has advocated military action against Iran, saying in recent days that Israel’s attacks in case the beginning of a campaign defeats Iran’s government.
Polrico reported that Levin visited the White House for private lunch with Trump in early June, a few days before the president of the United States offered his support for Iran’s attacks.
But Katulis in the Institute of Middle East predicted that the Neinder Trump cabinet or the media figures such as Levin would be the most important to guide the president’s elections. On the other hand, Trump’s decision on whether to participate in the Israel-Iran conflict is likely to be reduced to which the world leader puts his ear, and when.
“It is a favorite game from Washington Parlour to pretend that the members of the cabinet and employees are more important than they really do,” Katulis told Al Jazeera.
“But I think, in Trump’s second administration, it is less who is in his team formally and more who has spoken more recently, either Netanyahu in Israel or some other leader in the region,” he said.
“I think it will be more a determining factor in what the United States decides to do next.”
About The Author
