"Has Trump screwed up over Iran?" | David Starkey Talks... to Lee Cohen

This week I was joined my regular correspondent in the US, the columnist and broadcaster Lee Cohen. I had one question for him, has President Trump made a massive mistake?

Up until now during Trump's second presidency, he's shown exceptional judgement in the limited and judicious use of force to achieve a specific outcome.

What other president could have sensed the opportunity last June to debilitate Iran's nuclear programme during Israel's 12 Day War on the country? One single strike delivered a hammer blow not just to the Islamic Republic's capabilities but also to its prestige, and arguably led to the uprising we saw in Iran earlier this year.

And then we saw his incredibly audacious capture of Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro, at a stroke bringing the most hostile regime in the Western hemisphere to heel.

But Operation Epic Fury is quite a different thing. The confused messaging about objectives, the failure to oust the regime, the inability to do anything about Iran throttling the Strait of Hormuz and choking off huge volumes of oil and gas supply. But most of all, the very clear rowing back on a promise that has been central to Trump's appeal from the very start: that he wouldn't get America embroiled in unwinnable wars. All of these things I put to Lee, and you must decide for yourself whether his arguments in favour of Trump's decision are convincing.

There's another aspect to all this. Support for Israel used to be taken for granted on the political Right, but in the United States and even here in the UK there's an emerging right-wing movement that regards the Jewish State with, shall we say, scepticism.

As such the implication, or even the later-dismissed admission by Marco Rubio, that the US launched this operation at Israel's behest, has added fuel to that particular fire. Whether the effects of that shift of opinion are enough to unsettle Trump's authority remains to be seen. But it is certainly something that parties of the Right will bump up against with increasing frequency.

Thumbnail credit: Picture of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in a meeting with a group of Ahl al-Bayt Praisers is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

Map of Iran licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Picture of Donald Trump speaking at CPAC in Washington D.C. on February 10, 2011 is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.