Trump is fanning flames of conflict - only he can stop it

Donald Trump claims to be the leader who will end wars. But by effectively killing the nuclear containment deal with Iran in his first term in office and allowing Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu to run roughshod across the Middle East in his second, the Republican president is instead fanning the flames of conflict across the region.

- MICHAEL DAY

It is Trump's choices that have led Israel and Iran, the Middle East's most powerful military actors, to the brink of all-out war, with a risk of escalation and spread, global economic disruption and mass casualties.

The containment deal, signed by the US, Iran, UK, France, Germany, Russia, China and the EU in 2015, was far from perfect. It failed to clamp down on Tehran's conventional weapons programme build-up and its intentions to arm militia as far west as the Mediterranean - but it did succeed in freezing Iran's nuclear programme.

In persuading Trump to withdraw from the nuclear deal in 2018, Netanyahu triggered the revival of Iran's uranium enrichment, which has led to the current crisis. In doing so, Trump and Netanyahu have, ironically, risked throwing away Israel's huge strategic advantage of being the only nuclear-armed power in the Middle East.

The Israeli premier's obsession with destroying the regime in Tehran is partly due to its enmity with the Jewish state, but also because it represents a politically useful distraction as a convenient bogeyman.