Saunders: What Trump is seeking is an Iran with no nukes

By Debra J. Saunders / Las Vegas Review-Journal

President Donald Trump sees what needs to happen in the Middle East as Israel and Iran take their decades-long war out of the shadows. Push for a ceasefire? Not really. “An end, a real end, not a ceasefire,” Trump told reporters during an early return to Washington from the G7 meeting in Calgary.

Trump added, “a complete give-up, that’s possible.”

The bottom line, as Trump posted on Truth Social, “Simply stated, IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON.”

No lie. The world saw the carnage wrought by Iran when its proxy Hamas butchered 1,200 people, mostly civilians in Israel, on Oct. 7, 2023. That unprovoked barbarism occurred thanks to the sponsorship of an Iran without nuclear weapons.

Now Trump is taking heat from both the left and the right.

From the right, Tucker Carlson went off on conservative “warmongers” who support U.S. involvement in Israel’s war against Iran.

It was a dig that brought to mind 2016 Trump, who campaigned for the White House as a less trigger-happy brand of Republican, one committed to eschewing foreign entanglements; a departure from the previous two GOP commanders-in-chief, both named Bush.

Trump is not the cowboy here. The real warmongers are Iranians who chant, “Death to Israel, Death to America.”

From the left, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., offered, “I am deeply concerned that the recent escalation of hostilities between Israel and Iran could quickly pull the United States into another endless conflict.”

But as Jonathan Schanzer, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, sees it, “The United States has an ally that is doing the hard work.”

If the GOP rallied behind Trump right now, Schanzer added, that would give the president “much more leverage with the Iranians.”

Israel has “total air dominance right now,” Schanzer continued. “They’re operating at will inside the regime’s air space. The regime doesn’t control it and they continue to target assets and then potentially collapse.”

Vice President J.D. Vance jumped onto X to assure supporters that Trump is not war happy, and that he’s looking out for American interests first.

“I have yet to see a single good argument for why Iran needed to enrich uranium well above the threshold for civilian use. I’ve yet to see a single good argument for why Iran was justified in violating its non-proliferation obligations. I’ve yet to see a single good pushback against the IAEA’s findings,” Vance wrote, referring to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Last week, for the first time, the IAEA declared that Iran was failing to comply with its nuclear obligations.

The ayatollah’s intransigence pushed Trump to call for Iran’s “unconditional surrender” by Tuesday; one difference, Trump’s post was all caps.

As I write this, Axios’ Barak Ravid reports that Trump is “seriously considering … launching a U.S. strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.”

Critics warn that the wrong action could lead to endless war, but the same can be said of inaction; and that’s Iran’s game.