Eli Lake, Columnist

Trump Doesn’t Want War With Iran

The president is uninterested in the cause of nation-building that once characterized his party.

January 8, 2020 at 9:40 PM UTC

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.

Not looking to start a war.
Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

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It’s too soon to say whether Iran’s retaliation for the killing of its most important general will be limited to this week’s missile salvo at two U.S.-Iraqi bases in Iraq. As my colleague Bobby Ghosh writes, “The fact that no Americans were killed will do little to slake Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s bloodlust.”

What is clear, though, is that President Donald Trump is not seeking to invade Iran. To start, he put a positive spin on Iran’s retaliation, saying in a speech Wednesday that the regime “appears to be standing down.” If Trump were really the warmonger that his opponents claim, he would not have described the Iranian attack as a de-escalation.