Trump is in a corner and likely to lash out at Iran again. Here’s how to avert that disaster

Once the midterms are over, Trump will be free to pursue vendetta politics. But with will and diplomacy, he can be reined in

As another Iran catastrophe looms, one question matters more than any other: how to stop it before it’s too late? Whatever the eventual outcome of Israel’s election and next week’s US midterm polls, Donald Trump, playing the Lone Ranger, and Benjamin Netanyahu, his badass Tonto, appear hell-bent on resuming the illegal war of choice they began in June last year and expanded in February. Like a Shakespearean tragedy moving inexorably to a bloody denouement, the worst is yet to come. And yet three things seem certain: the US and Israel will again fail to totally destroy Iran’s largely hypothetical nuclear capabilities; its regime will survive; and millions of ordinary people, there and around the world, will pay the price for this unjustified, reckless aggression.

Ducking and weaving, Trump is desperate to dodge the blame for the Republicans’ anticipated midterm meltdown, largely triggered by war-related fuel and consumer price inflation. He claimed Ukraine’s attacks on Russian refineries were responsible, but that didn’t wash. He cut a treacherous diesel deal with Vladimir Putin but, as usual, Russia’s smirking mafioso conned him. He urged US allies to tap their strategic reserves but, unsurprisingly, vilified and sidelined European leaders, who view his war as an unmitigated disaster and declined to bail him out. Trump also reportedly rebuffed last-gasp, electorally driven pressure from Netanyahu to hit Iran this month, fearful it would unleash a Democratic tsunami.

Yet once the midterm polls close, and whatever the results, all these considerations fall away. What voters think will no longer matter to Trump. At that point, he can do more or less what he wants, in foreign and defence policy, for his final two years. And what he wants has little to do with imaginary Iranian nukes, a democratic uprising in Tehran, or any of his other bogus justifications for waging war. Trump will be free to do what he does best: vendetta politics. Iran’s greatest sin is to have defied the imperial will. He wanted an easy Venezuela-style, regime-altering victory (and sweetheart oil deals). What he got was a middle digit, burnt fingers and a forever war. Just as he vengefully pursues opponents at home, so he now victimises Iranians. It’s not rational or ideological. Like everything with Trump, ultimately it’s personal.

Netanyahu’s reasons for wanting another bash are thoroughly dishonourable too, but in a different way. Given his myriad, chronic failures before and after the 2023 Hamas massacres, his trashing of Israel’s international reputation by his criminal actions in Gaza and Lebanon, and his Trump-ish slide into bigoted, ultra-nationalist authoritarianism, Netanyahu is fighting for his job and, potentially, his freedom. He insists, despite his record, that only he can ensure Israel’s security. He suggests, outrageously, that opposition victory could pave the way for Israel’s destruction in a second, nuclear Holocaust. Israel’s military chiefs suspect he may restart the Iran war in order to dominate and manipulate the inevitable post-election coalition talks – hoping to stay in power and out of jail.

The likely, mortifying consequences of a renewed US-Israel onslaught after 3 November should be fully understood. For starters, the price of oil will spike again, perhaps to unprecedented levels, negatively affecting people all around the world. Pentagon officials, possibly peddling disinformation, suggest Iran is preparing to retaliate with missile and drone attacks against Saudi and other Gulf oil refineries, infrastructure and underwater internet cables, while reinforcing blockades of the strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea’s Bab al-Mandab strait. The impact on international energy supplies, transportation and international trade generally could be far worse than last spring.

Trump reportedly plans a shock-and-awe, time-limited assault – primarily on the mountain complex where Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium is supposedly stored, plus its missile bases and energy grid. If this sounds familiar, it is. Trump’s chief gunslinger, Pete Hegseth, and his air-force cowboys claim to have destroyed many of these targets already, some more than once. Total success will probably elude them again. What’s more likely is that the war’s duration will lengthen, and more Iranian civilians will suffer the fate of over 100 schoolgirls killed in a Tomahawk missile strike in Minab in February. For that atrocity and others, Trump and Hegseth have never admitted responsibility.

Other foreseeable consequences include: the spread of related conflicts, involving Iranian allies and proxy militias, to Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Lebanon; attacks on US embassies and personnel from Jordan to Kuwait; intensified, opportunistic settler violence and land grabs in the West Bank; stepped-up Iranian freelance assassination and sabotage operations in Europe; further undermining of US and Israeli democracy from deliberate obstruction of war-zone accountability, official cover-ups and blatant lying, and restrictions on independent media reporting; another hugely damaging split between Washington and its reluctant European allies; and another geopolitical free lunch for the west’s anti-democratic challengers, Russia and China.

Here are two more questions. By what right does the US, in particular, presume to behave in this way? Forget, if you can, Trump and Netanyahu. What does the American public (or at least, those who vote Republican) say? Have they not learned by now, after so many disastrous interventions that the world does not want, and does not need, to be saved by the US? In the age of Maga, this vulgar exceptionalism has surely had its day. Second, reformulated question: how may this looming catastrophe be prevented? Resumed warfare, leading to a wider, globally destabilising conflagration, is not inevitable. But urgent action is necessary now.

A talks process, mediated by Qatar, though neglected and boycotted by the White House, has not completely collapsed. Negotiations could yet produce viable outcomes if given a chance, Badr Albusaidi, Oman’s foreign minister, told the Guardian this week. A longer-term solution, he suggested, could be a non-aggression pact involving all six Gulf states, plus Iran and Iraq, acting on the premise that they, not the US, would be the primary, joint providers of future regional security. As Albusaidi spoke, top officials from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey were in Tehran on a last-ditch mission to pre-empt resumed hostilities. All power to them. At least they’re trying.

It would be reassuring to think Trump and Netanyahu are listening. But the bottom line is that, for their different reasons, both men probably want this war. A firm, united course of rapid, preventive action is required to head them off. Britain, its European allies and like-minded governments took a tentative, defiant step in Istanbul last weekend, urging diplomacy over violence. Now they and all the world’s democracies must stand as one and, in a formal demarche, tell the US and Israel they risk a permanent rupture with immediate and long-term negative economic, diplomatic, commercial, military and security consequences if they ignore global opinion and go to war again.

Trump is not king of the world. And Netanyahu cannot do as he likes with impunity. It’s high time they were told.

Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator