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Will Donald Trump order a US military attack on Iran? That question captivated the world for the past two weeks, as the US president issued bellicose threats warning the Iranian regime not to crack down on nationwide protests demanding economic and social reforms. On Tuesday, as he was scheduled to be briefed by Pentagon officials on various options for a strike, Trump posted a message on social media urging Iranians to continue their demonstrations and take over government institutions. The president signaled that he was leaning toward ordering an attack, telling protesters that “help is on its way”. But by Wednesday, Trump pulled back from the brink of a military intervention, saying he had received assurances from “very important sources” that Iran had stopped killing protesters and was not moving forward with executions. A group of US allies in the Middle East – including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman and Turkey – seem to have succeeded in a last-ditch effort to convince Trump not to launch airstrikes against Tehran, warning it could unleash a wider conflict in the region. While many Sunni-led Arab states resent Shia Iran’s influence in the Arab world, they are also worried about retaliatory attacks by Iran and its allies, an influx of refugees and a civil war that could lead to the collapse of the Iranian state. For now, the Iranian regime appears to have squashed the protests with a bloody crackdown that has killed thousands and isolated the country from the world by shutting off international phone and internet access. But the theocratic regime that took power after Iran’s 1979 revolution has a long history of biding its time and failing to heed the grievances of its people, leaving Iranians caught between continued repression and potential US intervention. Trump could still order some kind of attack on Iran in the coming weeks – if not missiles, perhaps a cyber-attack directed at the country’s security apparatus – partly to save face. Because of his posts on Truth Social, the media platform he owns, Trump cornered himself into following through on his threats to take military action. On 2 January, the president laid out a red line, warning the Iranian government that if it “violently kills peaceful protesters” the US “would come to their rescue”. As the protests widened and the regime’s crackdown intensified, Trump’s aides said he began to feel obliged to carry out an attack on Iran. In his first term, Trump criticized past US presidents who he claimed had shown weakness by failing to enforce similar red lines, especially Barack Obama, who decided not to attack the regime of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad after it used chemical weapons against its own people in 2013. (During his first term, Trump ordered two sets of strikes against Syrian government forces for their use of chemical weapons in 2017 and 2018.) Trump admires strongmen and authoritarian leaders – and he is loath to project signs of weakness, even if an attack on Iran leads to retaliation against US military bases in the Middle East, or provokes Tehran to close off the strait of Hormuz, a vital trade route, through which more than a fifth of the world’s oil supply passes each day. In other words, Trump could risk a military intervention that destabilizes the Middle East, and disrupts global oil prices, so that he doesn’t lose face and appear weak. Trump has also been emboldened by his apparent military success in Venezuela, where on 3 January, US special forces attacked Caracas to depose and abduct the president, Nicolás Maduro, and brought him to New York to stand trial. Since then, Trump has said the US could oversee Venezuela, and control its vast oil resources, for years. Trump also used the shock of his Venezuela gambit to issue new threats against Cuba, Colombia and Mexico – warning they could all be next in his quest for dominance of the western hemisphere. And Trump’s demand for the US to own Greenland – once dismissed as trolling or a distraction – has shaken Europe in new ways after the attack on Venezuela. Over the past two weeks, Trump showed the world that he’s willing to back up his grandiose threats and imperial ambitions with military action. But most Americans are opposed to foreign interventions, with only a third supporting the US military strike on Venezuela, according to a poll conducted in the days after the raid that captured Maduro. Another recent poll, by Quinnipiac University, showed that 70% of Americans oppose military action in Iran. The US public is tired of foreign interventions, and a segment of Trump’s supporters voted for him because he portrayed himself as the “candidate of peace” who would end America’s legacy of forever wars. In his inaugural address last year, Trump pledged to establish himself as a global peacemaker who would avoid starting new wars and resolve ongoing conflicts, including those in Ukraine and Gaza. “My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier,” he said. So far in his second term, Trump has bombed Yemen, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia and Venezuela. Trump’s warmongering ignores the exhaustion of his own electorate – not to mention the constitutional reality that the power to declare war rests with Congress, rather than a presidential post on Truth Social. And while some of Trump’s acolytes argue that he’s making effective use of Richard Nixon’s “madman theory” of foreign relations – in which a president will act in unpredictable, or volatile, ways as a tactic to throw his adversaries off balance – Trump doesn’t have an overarching strategic policy or goal. He is motivated by showmanship, vengeance and self-aggrandizement. Like much of his foreign policy, Trump’s approach toward Iran has been chaotic and contradictory. In 2018, during his first term, he unilaterally withdrew the US from the Iran nuclear deal and reimposed sanctions that crippled the Iranian economy. Trump tore up the 2015 agreement, which was negotiated by the Obama administration and five other world powers, and had provided Tehran with relief from international sanctions in exchange for limits on its nuclear enrichment. Trump called it “a horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made” and insisted he would be able to negotiate a better agreement with Iran. Trump saw himself as the ultimate dealmaker, and reveled in the fact that he had destroyed one of Obama’s major foreign policy achievements. But Iran was outraged that the US had abandoned the agreement, showed little interest in negotiating with Trump and waited for another US administration to take power. After taking office in 2021, Joe Biden and his aides were too cautious in their dealings with Iran and instead focused much of their energy in the Middle East on brokering a normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia – an expansion of the so-called Abraham accords that Trump had initiated between Israel and several Arab states. When he returned to power last year, Trump was eager to negotiate a new deal with Tehran: in March, he sent a letter to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, suggesting a new round of direct talks. Trump also issued a public threat, warning that if diplomacy failed, Iran’s leaders would be subjected to “bombing the likes of which they have never seen before”. At the same time, Trump dispatched his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, to lead a team of US negotiators to meet with top Iranian officials in indirect talks mediated by Oman. As the negotiations got under way, some Iranian officials tried to stroke Trump’s ego, blaming Biden for the failure of previous negotiations – even though Trump had ripped up the original deal. In April, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, published an essay in the Washington Post in which he appealed to Trump’s desire to be a peacemaker, writing: “We cannot imagine President Trump wanting to become another US president mired in a catastrophic war in the Middle East.” Iran and the US eventually held five rounds of talks, and were planning on further negotiations until Israel launched a surprise attack in mid-June, killing some of Iran’s top military officials and nuclear scientists, and bombing dozens of targets across the country. Trump then briefly joined the war started by the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, when he ordered US warplanes to bomb three major nuclear facilities in Iran. While Netanyahu destroyed Trump’s chance at making a new deal with Iran, the Israeli leader appealed to Trump’s desire to be a strongman who can impose his will through military strength. Trump’s perceived success against Iran last year – in which he declared the US had destroyed “all nuclear facilities and capability”, despite intelligence assessments that showed two of the sites were not as badly damaged as the administration first implied – probably emboldened him to carry out his recent attack on Venezuela. The Iran strikes also reinforced Trump’s contempt for military officers who have tried to warn him of the risks and repercussions of military action. The president seems to have shelved his plan to attack Iran, for now. But Trump also relishes keeping the world’s attention focused on him – and his astounding power to unleash the US military abroad, whenever and wherever he chooses. Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies, and a journalism professor, at New York University