Analysis: GOP hawks left twisting on Iran after Trump resorts to familiar crutch

WASHINGTON — Donald Trump resorted to his familiar time frame of two weeks in opting to give Iran more time to negotiate over its nuclear program, but the move left several Republican allies hanging and capped off a week during which the president had sounded like a hawk one moment and a dove the next.

Trump convened several Situation Room meetings over whether to order U.S. military strikes on Iranian targets and convened another in the Oval Office on Friday as Israel and Iran continue to trade fire with no signs of their weeklong conflict de-escalating. Trump told reporters several times Tuesday afternoon that he would be meeting that evening with his war council, teasing the possibility that an Iran decision could be reached.

But by Thursday, during a rare White House news briefing on a federal holiday, his top spokesperson revealed the president would do the opposite.

“Regarding the ongoing situation in Iran, I know there has been a lot of speculation amongst all of you in the media regarding the president’s decision-making and whether or not the United States will be directly involved,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said. “In light of that news, I have a message directly from the president.”

“I quote, ‘Based on the fact that there’s a substantial chance of negotiations that may or may not take place with Iran in the near future, I will make my decision whether or not to go within the next two weeks,'” she said. “That’s a quote directly from the president for all of you today.”

The statement conjured memories from Trump’s first term, when the president and his West Wing aides often promised major legislation in two weeks, including proposed infrastructure and health care measures that never materialized. More recently, Trump has referenced the same two-week time frame when asked about decisions related to the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

A reporter on Thursday asked Leavitt why Trump should be believed this time when previous “two weeks” declarations haven’t become reality. She pivoted to another familiar crutch of Trump 2.0: blaming former President Joe Biden.

“In those deadlines, as you’ve seen in respect to Russia-Ukraine, might I add, these are two very different, complicated global conflicts, as you know, that the president inherited from our previous incompetent president and the weakness of the previous administration,” Leavitt said.

“The president has spent a tremendous amount of time and effort cleaning up these crises that were caused by the last administration’s just complete dereliction of duty on the world stage and American weakness,” she added, never directly addressing the question.

Leavitt subsequently touted Trump’s hawkish and dovish instincts.

“He is a peacemaker in chief. He is the peace-through-strength president,” she said of her boss. “And so, if there’s a chance for diplomacy, the president’s always going to grab it. But he’s not afraid to use strength as well, I will add.”

‘Trump just blinked’

Aaron David Miller, a former State Department official under Republican and Democratic administrations, reacted to the president’s “two weeks” declaration by writing on social media that “Trump just blinked; and it’s just as well.”

“Give the talking cure two weeks (a favorite presidential time frame) and let the Israelis and Iranians fight it out,” Miller said. “But if the talking cure doesn’t work, he’ll be left w/same decision point: strike or not. And a very unhappy [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu].”

Andrew Weinstein, who was a diplomat in both the Obama and Biden administrations, said the “two weeks” time frame revealed an indecisive commander in chief, pointing to Trump’s Monday social media post warning residents of Tehran to “immediately evacuate.”

“Whatever your thoughts are about US intervention in Iran, telling a city of 10 million people to evacuate immediately and then announcing you’ll make a decision about bombing them in two weeks just reinforces the narrative that Donald Trump has absolutely no clue what he’s doing,” Weinsten wrote on X.

That call to evacuate came just before Leavitt had announced that Trump would depart the G7 summit in Canada a day earlier than planned. In one of the week’s many reversals and contradictions about possible direct American involvement in the conflict, Trump later shrugged off his evacuation warning, telling reporters on Air Force One he merely wanted folks to remain safe.

‘Be all in’

Trump’s oscillations on Iran appears to have left a few congressional Republicans stranded after they had pounced on his midweek consideration of U.S. military strikes to call for him to try to end Iran’s nuclear program.

“We do know that Iran poses a threat, not only to Israel, but also to the United States of America. We see where they use proxy terrorist organizations all around the globe to target American citizens. Iran does have open calls of assassination on a number of American leaders. And this problem has got to end,” Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst told Fox News this week.

“We cannot allow them access to a nuclear weapon, which is what they have been developing,” the Senate Armed Services member said. “They have a very strong ballistic missile program, and it must stop. One way or another, it must stop.”

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham went further this week, embracing an attempt at regime change in Tehran.

“It’s time to close the chapter on the ayatollah and his henchmen,” the sometimes golfing partner of the president said of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

“Be all in, President Trump, in helping Israel eliminate the nuclear threat. … If we need to provide bombs to Israel, provide bombs. If we need to fly planes with Israel, do joint operations,” he told Fox News. “But here’s the bigger question: Wouldn’t the world be better off if the ayatollahs went away and were replaced by something better? Wouldn’t Iran be better off?”

The flurry of statements this week by Trump and lawmakers about whether it was time for direct U.S. involvement in Israel’s war effort had created a cliffhanger by Friday. Trump was expected to remain in close contact with his national security team over the weekend, including a roughly 24-hour stay at his Bedminster, N.J., golf club slated to begin around 3 p.m. Friday.

It evoked memories of his first term, when Trump ordered U.S. military strikes on targets inside Syria and a successful operation to kill Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani on Friday nights.

Several analysts from the left-leaning Brookings Institution assessed the current conflict in a recent report titled, “What happens next?” But no one, perhaps not even the president, really knows the answer.

“President Donald Trump has swung his support behind the Israeli campaign, but for reasons of both politics and policy, an American intervention in the conflict in such a direct and dramatic way is highly unlikely at present,” Suzanne Maloney, who has worked for Republican- and Democratic-run State Departments, wrote in her assessment.

“The same is true for diplomacy. Iranian leaders are insisting that they won’t surrender, the Israelis are shifting to broader targets in hopes of collapsing the Islamic Republic, and Trump is content to let the two ‘fight it out’ for the time being,” she said. “That is a perilous approach in a region where spectacular operational successes have rarely yielded sustained strategic breakthroughs.”

As Trump himself is fond of saying, “Stay tuned.”