President Donald Trump stood in front of regional leaders during a visit to the Middle East in May and declared a new era of US foreign policy in the region, one that is not guided by trying to reshape it or change its governing systems.
“In the end, the so-called nation-builders wrecked far more nations than they built, and the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves,” the US president said in rebuke of his hawkish predecessors.
Less than a year later, Trump ordered an all-out assault on Iran with the stated goal of bringing “freedom” to the country, borrowing language from the playbook of interventionist neoconservatives, like former President George W Bush, whom he spent his political career criticising.
Analysts say the war with Iran does not fit with Trump’s stated political ideology, policy goals or campaign promises.
Instead, several Iran experts told Al Jazeera that Trump is waging a war, together with Israel, that only benefits Israel and its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
“This is, once again, a war of choice launched by the US with [a] push from Israel,” said Negar Mortazavi, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington, DC.
“This is another Israeli war that the US is launching. Israel has pushed the US to attack Iran for two decades, and they finally got it.”
Mortazavi highlighted Trump’s criticism of his predecessors, who had waged regime-change wars in the region.
“It is ironic, because this is a president who called himself the ‘president of peace‘,” she told Al Jazeera.
