In the hours before Israeli warplanes carried out an attack on Iran early Friday, raising fresh fears of all-out war in the region, President Donald Trump made clear it was an outcome he hoped to avoid.
“I don’t want them going in because, I mean, that would blow it,” he said, referring to his diplomatic efforts to curb Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.
The fact Israel went in anyway – without any US involvement, and against the president’s publicly stated wishes – now thrusts Trump into one of the biggest tests of his young presidency.
By his own telling, the strikes risk scuttling his attempts at diplomacy with Tehran, even as his top envoy was preparing to depart for Oman for another round of talks this weekend.
It casts a pall over his already tense relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with whom he has sharply disagreed for months and whom he urged as recently as this week to hold off on a strike.
And it presents him another global conflict without any easy resolution, this one with tens of thousands of US troops potentially caught in the regional crossfire.
Trump will now find himself caught between competing crosscurrents from within his own party. Many Republicans were quick to offer their support to Israel on Thursday, including Sen. Lindsey Graham – a longtime Iran hawk – who wrote on X: “Game on.”
Yet Trump has never quite adopted that strain of his party’s foreign policy, particularly in his second term. His administration is stacked with officials, starting with his vice president, who take a deeply skeptical view of US military involvement abroad without express American interests on the line.
Trump offered no signals in the immediate aftermath of the attacks that he was prepared to use American military assets to help defend Israel from expected Iranian reprisal, as his predecessor Joe Biden did when Israel and Iran exchanged fire last year.
Without American assistance, Israel’s air defenses could be unable to withstand a major Iranian onslaught.
The focus of public messaging from the US administration was instead on protecting American personnel in the Middle East, and warning Iran not to drag the US into the fray.
Still, for all the complicated dynamics for Trump to now sort through, the attack hardly came as a surprise to the president and his team.
President Donald Trump takes questions in the East Room of the White House on Thursday. Win McNamee/Getty Images
Even as he was speaking from the East Room on Thursday, the president and his aides were aware the strikes were likely coming soon, sources said, despite Trump’s repeated attempts at urging Netanyahu to hold off.
As the strikes were getting underway, Trump was appearing on the South Lawn at a congressional picnic. He returned to the West Wing afterward to huddle with top officials, according to a White House official and other sources.
Afterward, a terse statement from Secretary of State Marco Rubio sought to put distance between the US and any role in the attack.
“Tonight, Israel took unilateral action against Iran. We are not involved in strikes against Iran and our top priority is protecting American forces in the region,” read the statement, which was distributed by the White House.
“Israel advised us that they believe this action was necessary for its self-defense. President Trump and the Administration have taken all necessary steps to protect our forces and remain in close contact with our regional partners,” Rubio continue. “Let me be clear: Iran should not target U.S. interests or personnel.”
Devoid of even boilerplate language offering support for Israel and its defense, the statement made clear: this would be Israel’s conflict, not Trump’s.
