Trump’s cabinet is less hawkish. Will that affect his Israel-Iran response? | Israel-Iran conflict News

Washington, DC – US President Donald Trump surrounded himself with a cabinet and an inner circle which is much less bellicist on Iran than during his first mandate.

But analysts told Al Jazeera that it is not clear if the composition of Trump’s new cabinet would make a difference with regard to the administration of the administration Escalatialize conflicts Between Iran and Israel.

Last week, fighting broke out when Israel launched surprised strikes in Tehran, which prompted Iran to retaliate. This exchange of missiles and explosions threatened a spiral in a wider regional war.

“I think there are fewer traditional republican hawks in this administration,” said Brian Finucane, principal analyst of the International Crisis Group, a reflection group. “And you have more eminent people oriented towards deductions or restraint.”

“The question is: how noisy will they be?”

So far, the Trump administration has adopted a relatively practical approach to Israel’s attacks, which stressed the Secretary of State that Marco Rubio was “unilateral”.

While the United States has increased military assets in the region, it has avoided being directly involved in the confrontation. Trump also publicly opposed an Israeli strike on Iran in the weeks preceding attacks, saying that he preferred diplomacy.

However, on Sunday, Trump told ABC News: “It is possible that we can get involved”, citing the risk for American forces in the region.

He even supervised Israel’s bombing campaign as an asset in current talks to reduce Iran’s nuclear program, despite several high -level negotiators killed by Israeli strikes.

Minister of Foreign Affairs, on the other hand, accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “playing” Trump and American taxpayers for “fools”, saying that the American president could end the fighting with “a telephone call” to the Israeli chief.

“ Our interest is not to go to war with Iran ”

Analysts agree that any Trump action plan will likely transform the conflict. This will also reveal how Trump will react to the depths ideological rift in its republican base.

One side of this fracture embraces Trump’s “America First” ideology: the idea that the internal interests of the United States appear before all the others. This perspective largely avoids foreign intervention.

The other side of Trump’s base supports a neoconservative approach to foreign policy: the one who is more eager to pursue a military intervention, sometimes in order to force the change of regime abroad.

The two points of view are represented among the closest advisers of Trump. vice-president Jd vanceFor example, stands out as an example of a Trump official who called for restraint, both in terms of support from Iran and the United States in Israel.

In March, Vance notably opposed the American strikes on the Houthis of Yemen, as evidenced by Disclosed messages According to a private conversation with other officials on the application signal. In this conversation, Vance argued that the bombing campaign was an “error” and “incoherent” with the message of Trump of global disengagement.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Vance also warned that the interests of the United States and Israel are “sometimes distinct … and our interest is much not to go to war with Iran”.

According to experts, this kind of declaration is rare to hear a senior official of the Republican Party, where Israel’s support remains largely sacrosanct. Finucan, for example, called the “very notable” Vance declarations.

“I think his office can be critical to put pressure on the restraint,” he added.

Other Trump officials have also built careers against foreign intervention, notably the national intelligence director Tulsi GabbardWho said in March that the United States “continues to assess that Iran does not build a nuclear weapon.”

Trump’s special envoy in the Middle East Steve Witkoff, who had practically no previous diplomatic experience, also launched the possibility of normalizing relations with Tehran in the first days of nuclear talks led by the United States.

On the other hand, the secretary of state and the interim national security advisor Marco Rubio has established himself as a traditional neoconservative, with a “difficult Iran” position, during his mandate for several years in the Senate. But since he joined the Trump administration, Rubio has not broken the ranks with the president’s foreign policy platform of the president.

This loyalty is indicative of a broader trend in the inner circle of Trump during his second term, according to Brian Katulis, a principal researcher at the Middle East Institute.

“I think Trump 2.0 has a chameleon cabinet whose main qualification is loyalty and loyalty to Trump more than anything else,” he told Al Jazeera.

Katulis noted that the days of officials who resisted Trump, such as former defense secretary James Mattis, had mainly left – a relic of Trump’s first mandate from 2017 to 2021.

The current defense secretary, the former leader of Fox News, Pete Hegseth, has shown an appetite for having made air strikes on groups aligned with Iran, including the Houthis in Yemen.

But Hegseth told Fox News on Saturday that the president continues to send the message “that he prefers peace, he prefers a solution to the one that is resolved at the table”.

‘More fellower than Maga Antiwar’

All in all, Trump continues to operate in an administration which is “probably more fellows than Magi Antiwar”, according to Ryan Costello, political director of the Iranian American Council, a group of lobbies.

At least one official, the United States ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee sought to assimilate Iran’s reprisals against Israel to targeting American interests, highlighting the large number of American citizens who live in Israel.

Costello recognizes that Trump’s first mandate also had his right part of the falcons of foreign policy. At the time, former national security advisor John Bolton, his replacement Robert O’Brien and former secretary of state Mike Pompeo all pleaded for militarized strategies to deal with Tehran.

“But there is a big difference between Trump’s first mandate, when he raised votes and very bellicarians on Iran, and Trump’s second term,” said Costello.

He believes that this time, skepticism on American participation in the Middle East extends throughout the ranks of the administration.

Costello underlined a recent conflict between the head of the American central command, General Michael Kurilla, and the defense subsecretary for the Elbridge Colby policy. The Semafor media reported on Sunday that Kurilla pushed to move more military assets in the Middle East to defend Israel, but that Colby had opposed this decision.

Schism, supports Costello, is part of a greater change in the administration of Trump and in the republican party as a whole.

“You have many eminent voices, which argued that these wars of choice pursued by the neoconservatives have failed republican administrations and preventing them from focusing on issues that really matter,” said Costello.

Finucan also observed a pivot of Trump’s first term in his second. In 2019, during its first four years as president, Fincane said that Trump’s national security team had given a “apparently unanimous recommendation” to strike Iran after targeting an American surveillance drone.

Trump finally fell from the plan in the last hours, in several reports.

But a year later, the Trump administration murdered the Iranian general Ossetian and cold ‘ In a drone strike in Iraq, another example that brought the United States on the verge of war.

Who will listen?

Certainly, experts say that Trump has a notoriously mercury approach to politics. The last person to speak to the president, observers have long said, will probably have the most influence.

Trump is also regularly looking for advice from the outside of the White House in the face of substantial decisions, consultation with consumer media like Fox News, far -right experts, social media and main donors.

This was the case before the 2019 United States strike on Iran, with Fox News host from Fox, Tucker Carlson, would have urged Trump to withdraw from the attack.

Carlson has since been a leading voice calling Trump to abandon the support of the “eager war government” of Netanyahu, urging the president to let Israeli officials “fight their own wars”.

But Carlson is not the only conservative media figure with an influence on Trump. Conservative media leader Mark Levin pleaded for military action against Iran, saying in recent days that Israel’s attacks should be the start of a campaign to overthrow the Iranian government.

Politico reported that Levin had visited the White House for a private lunch with Trump in early June, just a few days before the American president offered his support for Iran strikes.

But Katulis at the Institute of the Middle East predicted that neither the personalities nor the media personalities like Levin would prove to be the most consecutive to guide the choices of the president. Instead, Trump’s decision on the advisability of engaging in the Israel-Iran conflict is likely to be summed up which world leader gets and when.

“It is a favorite game of the Washington show to claim that the members of the cabinet and staff count more than they really do,” Katulis told Al Jazeera.

“But I think that, in the second Trump administration, it is less who formally makes in his team and more to whom he spoke most recently-whether Netanyahu in Israel or another head of the region,” he said.

“I think it will be more a decisive factor in what the United States will decide to do next.”