Donald Trump has dedicated the last hours to make balances in stating that he was completely aware of Israel's plan to launch massive air attacks against Iran, at the same time he insists on putting distance with those attacks and denying that Washington has had an active role in the preparations.
The White House message changed radically in a few hours: it went from the initial description of the Israeli attack by Secretary of Marco Rubio state as a “unilateral action” on Thursday night, to Trump's statement on Friday morning that he knew the operation completely and that this, in addition, reached the end of an ultimatum of 60 days that had given Iran to “reach an agreement” on its nuclear program.
“Today is 61,” Trump wrote in Truth Social. “I told them (in reference to Iran) what they had to do, but they simply did not.”
The way in which Trump presents the attack seems to create a bad-political dynamic with Benjamin Netanyahu. The president of the United States hastened this Friday to present the Israeli attacks, which he publicly claimed not to want Thursday, as a means to continue his attempts to convince Iran that he negotiates.
“They should now sit at the table to reach an agreement before it's too late,” he added after the attack.
How much did Trump really know?
However, the United States contradictory reaction to attacks, which includes Rubio's statement on Thursday night, a hurried evacuation of US personnel in the region and ambiguity about whether the United States provided intelligence information or would actively participate in Israel's defense before a probable counterattack, it has raised questions about whether Israel could have advanced to the Trump administration so that Washington had to deal with an consummated fact.
“They made a commitment to Trump,” says Elliott Abrams, former depiplomatic and expert on the Middle East in the Foreign Relations Council, suggesting that Israel had pressed more to carry out the attacks while the Trump administration had sought to maintain a diplomatic route. “The Israelis attacked and Trump has described it as posteriori as 'excellent'.”
Although it seems clear that Israel had notified in advance to the United States of the attack, the claims in the Israeli state media that the plan was fully coordinated have been subject to speculation: was Trump really agreed or was he repositioning on Friday to present the attacks as part of a coherent strategy?
On Thursday, in statements from the East Room of the White House, Trump strongly said that an attack against Iran could “explode” his diplomatic efforts to negotiate with the Iranian dome and said that “I did not want to be interfered with.” However, the US president defended his decision to start evacuating staff because an attack “could happen.”
“The United States began to voluntarily evacuate non -essential personnel on Wednesday, just 24 hours before the attack, which is not enough to get people out of danger,” says Rosemary Kelanic, director for the Middle East of Defense Priorities, a Think Tank that advocates a more contained US foreign policy. “So the question for me is what did the president know and when did he know?”
Of rejection of “we know what is happening”
On Friday, Trump told Wall Street Journal that the attack did not catch him off guard: “If we received a notice? It wasn't a simple warning: we knew what was underway.” He added that he had been informed of future Israeli plans, to the point of ensuring that the “next attacks already planned” would be “even more brutal.”
Senior Israeli officials also began to transfer to local media that Trump had only pretended to oppose an Israeli attack and, in fact, had “green light” for the attack. But specialists like Kelanic consider that Israel could be looking for a way to “catch” the United States in a war.
In any case, it is doubtful that Israel could have prepared the attack on Thursday night without the United States having any knowledge.
Apart from a notice, the US intelligence departments would have detected the preparations for the air attack – which involved the use of more than 200 Israeli fighters to hit more than a hundred objectives throughout Iran – and would probably have understood that Israel was preparing an important attack against Tehran.
US military movements
Late on Thursday, members of the US administration informed Fox News that the US had contributed missiles to replenish the anti -aircraft batteries of the Israel iron dome in recent weeks, in anticipation of an expected counterattack.
In the same vein, in recent weeks, the United States had deployed B-52 bombers in its Air Base of the remote island of Diego García in the Indian Ocean, where several B-2 bombers have also been parked since the end of March. The B-2 parked at the base participated in air attacks against the Hutis rebels in Yemen earlier this year, but the base would also serve as a starting point for air attacks against Iran if the United States decided to join the conflict.
However, there are other explanations for the replenishment of anti -aircraft missiles to the iron dome, particularly after the unprecedented bombardment of ballistic missiles launched by Iran against Israel last year in response to the previous attacks of Tel Aviv.
