Spars and strikes: Who backs Iran war?

0:02Shera Avi-Yonah:The Economist.

0:10Rosie Blau:Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Rosie Blau.

0:15Shera Avi-Yonah:And I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

0:24Rosie Blau:So much has happened in the past week. You may not have noticed that France announced a major shift, both in the size of its nuclear stockpile and the shape of its military alliances.

0:39Shera Avi-Yonah:And if you're politically aligned with America's MAGA movement and inclined to manifest that in your choice of beer or pillows or razors or telecoms provider, there are brands out there for you. But turns out, not too many people are so inclined.

1:01Rosie Blau:First up, though.

1:11Rosie Blau:Day six of Operation Epic Fury and the assault on Iran continues. They are toast and they know it.

1:19Jason Palmer:Or at least, soon enough, they will know it. America is winning. Decisively, devastatingly, and without mercy.

1:28Rosie Blau:But while Pete Hegseth, America's Secretary of War, touted the military and intelligence successes, Democrats in the Senate tried to constrain Donald Trump's ability to wage war until Congress had approved the action. A win would have halted hostilities temporarily. Though this conflict is far from American turf, For Trump, the political implications could strike far closer to home.

1:53Jason Palmer:So yesterday, the Senate had a vote on what's called the War Powers Act. And this is an effort by the Democrats to force senators to come out and say whether or not they would support Donald Trump's war in Iran.

2:07Rosie Blau:Adam Roberts is The Economist's foreign editor.

2:09Jason Palmer:The failure of the vote is not at all surprising. We saw the split basically along party lines. Democrats wanted to go against the war. Republicans have gone for it, by and large. But what that does is it puts on record whether or not you supported it from the start. And that could become tricky for senators later on, depending how this war unfolds.

2:29Rosie Blau:Adam, this war is a huge political gamble and a change in style of Trump from a peace president, which he came to power saying he was going to be, to a war president. How's that playing domestically?

2:42Jason Palmer:So yeah, you're completely right to say that the old Donald Trump, the Donald Trump of 2016, if you remember, the one who campaigned against forever wars, who attacked the neocons for dragging Americans into conflicts in distant parts of the world. That old Donald Trump would be horrified by what he's seeing right now. The new Donald Trump is ready to send special forces to Venezuela, to bomb Iran, and now to launch what looks like a full-scale, really big regional war in the Middle East, which it's very hard to see will be anything shorter than at least several weeks long. Pete Hegseth yesterday talked about this being an eight-week-long war.

3:19Jason Palmer:Who's to say at this stage that it won't be even longer? So for Americans, for the core group of people who oppose these long entanglements overseas, Donald Trump's old supporters, this is a really disturbing turn. This is a sense that America is yet again being dragged into a war in the Middle East, that is a war of choice. It's not essential, despite what Donald Trump says. It's not that America was being threatened by Iran, at least not imminently. And so they will find it quite hard, I think, to understand what this war is all about.

3:48Rosie Blau:Before strikes started, the idea of bombing Iran wasn't popular with the US public. Now we're in it. Have we seen a rallying around the flag?

3:57Jason Palmer:A little bit of rallying around the flag is happening. So if you're a Republican, if you're a Trump supporter, as we've seen in other occasions, they tend to swing behind the president, whatever he does. And so there's been a small increase in support in recent days, according to pollsters. But it's still historically a very low level of support for this stage of a war. So if you think back to 2001, when America invaded Afghanistan, at that time, 90 % of Americans thought that was a good idea. The most recent polling we've got for what's going on in Iran suggests that maybe 30, possibly 40 % of Americans think this is a good idea.

4:33Jason Palmer:That's a very low basis for when you're beginning the war. And remember, this is before many American soldiers have died, before we've really felt the consequences of what's happening. So if this war carries on more than a few days, that popularity level is very likely to drop.

4:49Rosie Blau:What about the American alliances abroad? We've already seen some shifts there, right?

4:56Jason Palmer:Yeah, it's very striking how few countries wanted to get in and to support America at the very beginning of this. Israel, of course, is very enthusiastic, and some have suggested that Israel was quite influential in encouraging Trump to go ahead and do this attack at all. But you go beyond Israel, and the Europeans, for example, have been quite cagey. They didn't want to lend their military bases to support the initial attacks on Iran. The Gulf allies were certainly in two minds about whether to go ahead with this. They're scared, for good reason, that the war in Iran will have big blowback on their economies, on the stability of that area.

5:31Jason Palmer:So allies such as Sakhir Starmer here in Britain were rather slow in giving Trump the support he wanted. And that, of course, provoked Trump's now fairly infamous attack on Mr. Starmer.

5:42Shera Avi-Yonah:This is not Winston Churchill that we're dealing with.

5:46Jason Palmer:I think that's not going to really bother Sakhir Starmer very much. He knows that for his domestic voters, being attacked by Donald Trump is usually not a bad thing. But it does point to some caution in this old alliance between Britain and America.

6:00Rosie Blau:What about the countries that might be drawn in, whether they want to be or not?

6:05Jason Palmer:As much as those European countries, for example, were wary of getting involved at the start, they know because they have so many of their people who live or work or visit the Gulf, that they will get drawn into this war in some way, whether they like it or not. So we've seen that the French, for example, are going to deploy an aircraft carrier to the Mediterranean to be closer to this region. The British are sending a naval ship HMS Dragon to Cyprus. Cyprus has already been the target of an Iranian attempted strike in recent days. So we will increasingly see naval assets, but also military bases, those ones that they were reluctant to lend at the beginning, are now going to be used by the Americans, initially for so-called defensive purposes.

6:49Jason Palmer:But I think increasingly we'll see many of the NATO allies and other allies of the Americans getting drawn into this too. There was a very notable attempt by Iran this week to try to provoke an even wider conflagration. So it sent a missile towards Turkey, something it had been very wary of doing in the past. Turkey is a NATO ally, and if that missile had caused damage at an American base which hosts nuclear weapons, that could have really caused a very grave escalation of this crisis. The missile was actually shot down. But you can see a very clear effort by the Iranian regime to say, well, you've started this war and we're going to make it as big and as damaging as we possibly can.

7:29Jason Palmer:And we're going to drag in as many others as we can. If we're going to go down, we're going to bring a lot of people down with us.

7:35Rosie Blau:Adam, we're on day six of Operation Epic Fury. What happens next?

7:40Jason Palmer:I think we'll continue to see a lot of bombing in the coming days. The Americans and the Israelis tell us that it's going extremely well operationally. They say that they're taking out a lot of missile launchers. They're degrading the military capabilities of Iran very successfully. That's what they say. We saw the most remarkable thing happen yesterday in the Indian Ocean, where an American submarine torpedoed an Iranian frigate, killed around 80 people, sank the ship. So I think we will continue to see very intense military escalation, but increasingly dominance from the Americans and the Israelis.

8:16Jason Palmer:But what we don't think we will see is clarity about what this is all for. Beyond the operational success, there has been very poor articulation of what the Americans and the Israelis are actually trying to achieve in Iran. We've been hearing from Pete Hegseth, from Donald Trump, from Bibi Netanyahu, a whole range of contradictory suggestions of what this overwhelmingly devastating operational attack is actually trying to achieve. And as successful as you might be on the battlefield, if you don't know why you're fighting, it's very hard to know where this war will go. And it's even harder to know when it will end.

8:54Rosie Blau:Adam, thank you very much.

8:55Jason Palmer:Thank you, Rosie.

9:06Rosie Blau:And talking of the war widening, in recent days, France's president Emmanuel Macron has deployed the country's flagship aircraft carrier to the Mediterranean, along with a naval escort.

9:27Rosie Blau:But reacting to the conflict in Iran is not the only shift in French defence policy announced this week. As our Paris bureau chief Sophie Pedder explains, much bigger changes are afoot to France's nuclear capabilities and its European military alliances.

9:44Sophie Pedder:On Tuesday evening this week, President Macron announced that he had ordered the Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier to head for the Eastern Mediterranean. It had been in Sweden, and the decision to send it to the Eastern Mediterranean was taken in response to the worsening crisis and the need for France to have that asset in place in case of need.

10:07Rosie Blau:And what is France's stance on the Middle East and Iran specifically?

10:12Sophie Pedder:Well, France, along with the UK and Germany, has long been involved in diplomatic negotiations with Iran. And one of President Macron's first moves was to try and stress the diplomatic side of things. But as the crisis worsened over the first few days, it became clear that France, and he had always left the option open to do this, and France needed to act in order to be able to protect its own national interests. It has a naval base in the UAE, for example, but also the interests of Cyprus, which is an EU member, and of countries like Kuwait or Qatar or the UAE, with which France has a direct defence relationship and agreement.

10:49Sophie Pedder:So this is a defensive posture. France is putting the aircraft carrier there to enable it to carry out defensive actions in response to attacks on any of those interests.

10:59Rosie Blau:Sophie, it's been an interesting week for France's defence in other ways too. Macron announced that France is going to bolster its nuclear capabilities. He announced that on Monday. It's not the kind of decision you take just because Iran's just been struck. But the timing is very striking. What is that about?

11:19Sophie Pedder:Well, it's important to know that this was a speech that Macron made at the French submarine base where I went on Monday, a high security unit in the west of Brittany. It's important to know that this was something that has been prepared for 18 months. So this is not something that was drawn up in response to the Iran crisis at all. Having said that, it is a reminder of how dangerous the world is at the moment. And France's decision announced by President Macron to increase, for example, the number of nuclear warheads it will possess is very interesting, partly because of the timing, but also because of the fact that France has always had this doctrine whereby it has argued you don't need to increase your number of warheads because if you can inflict unacceptable massive damage through nuclear strike, then you don't need X number in order to achieve that.