The Board of Peace: A Bait-and-Switch :::: Three converging pressures made the US-Israel attack on Iran :::: Courtesy 'The Raisina Hills' by Nirendra Dev

 The pressure is always harder to quantify but impossible to ignore. The cloud of suspicion over Donald Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein has not been dispelled, despite the justice department’s evident efforts to manage the flow of revelations about the sex-offending financier’s child-trafficking operations. 

The matter has not gone away — and it does not appear that it will. 

The fact of the matter is a toxic convergence of judicial humiliation, midterm anxiety and unresolved political scandals pushed a flailing presidency toward military adventure — at the cost of international law and lasting peace

Three converging pressures made the US-Israel attack on Iran not merely conceivable, but — in retrospect — almost predictable. The first was judicial. The second was electoral. The third was personal, and perhaps the most corrosive of the three.

On February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court delivered what is arguably the most significant loss of Trump’s second term, ruling 6-3 that he exceeded his authority when imposing sweeping tariffs using a law reserved for national emergencies. 

The ruling was not a close call. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, found that Trump’s legal stance ‘would represent a transformative expansion of the President’s authority over tariff policy” — and that the law he had relied upon simply did not authorise him to impose tariffs.

Trump responded with characteristic fury, calling the ruling “deeply disappointing” and declaring he was “ashamed of certain members of the court” — including two justices he had personally appointed — for “not having the courage to do what’s right for our country.” 

Tariffs, it turned out, were deeply unpopular: over 60 per cent of Americans disapproved of them, including nearly a quarter of Republicans and three-quarters of swing-vote independents.  

The humiliation was real. A president who had built his second term’s economic identity around tariffs had been stripped of his primary instrument — by a court he had stacked in his own favour.

The Midterm Arithmetic

The electoral pressure compounded the judicial one. With midterms approaching, the economy — battered by tariff-driven price rises and business uncertainty — had become one of the issues Americans cited most frequently as a concern. Research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that nearly 90 per cent of the costs of the tariff regime had been borne by American firms and consumers, with the Tax Foundation estimating they added around $1,000 to household costs in 2025 and as much as $1,300 in 2026.

A president with declining approval ratings, a rebuked economic agenda and an opposition energised by the court ruling needed a narrative shift. 

War, historically, has provided one.

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Behind the strikes on Iran lies a broader pattern of foreign policy underperformance that has defined Trump’s second term, despite his pre-election bravado about ending multiple wars.

Trump had claimed during the 2024 campaign that he could solve the war in Ukraine in a single day. By August 2025, he was candid about how badly he had misjudged it.

 “I thought this was going to be one of the easier ones,” he said. “It’s actually one of the most difficult.” More than a million people have been killed or wounded in the conflict, and the war continues.

His handling of the India-Pakistan crisis in May 2025 drew even sharper scepticism. A ceasefire was announced on May 10 after four days of fighting, but it addressed few of the fundamental issues dividing the two nuclear-armed states, which have fought three major wars since their independence in 1947. 

Trump subsequently claimed he had secured the ceasefire by threatening to cut trade with both countries. India has repeatedly and strongly rejected that account.  

In November, 2025, Trump promoted what he called a ‘Board of Peace” to the UN Security Council as the only viable path to ending the slaughter in Gaza. 

But by the time the first missiles struck Tehran, it had become clear that the initiative was, as one analysis in the Guardian put it, a bait-and-switch operation — sold to the international community as a multilateral mechanism but designed in practice as a rival body to the Security Council, with Trump in charge.

The Opportunity They Calculated

Israel and the United States had made a calculation: that the Islamic Republic was vulnerable. 

It was grappling with a severe economic crisis, the political fallout from a brutal crackdown on protesters earlier in the year, and military defences still badly degraded from the previous summer’s conflict. The conclusion, apparently, was that this was an opportunity that should not be squandered.

The legal basis for the strikes is, to put it carefully, strained. The attack on Iran constitutes a clear violation of the UN Charter in the absence of any credible, imminent Iranian threat to the United States. Trump offered justifications in generalities — denouncing Tehran’s leadership as a “vicious group of very hard, terrible people” and invoking 47 years of enmity between Washington and the Islamic Republic.  

BBC journalist Jeremy Bowen addressed the legal dimension directly. 

“In their statements, both President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Iran was a danger to their countries,” he wrote. 

But he noted that it is difficult to see how the legal justification of self-defence applies given the enormous disparity of power between the US-Israel axis and Iran.

It is, as Bowen concluded, another blow to the already tottering system of international law.

The Guardian, drawing on multiple sources, offered a pointed summary of Trump’s trajectory: for a man who had far more success as a reality show character than as a property developer, war had begun to look like a better distraction than peace. He had been visibly energised by a daring special forces raid on Venezuela in January, in which US operatives removed President Nicolás Maduro from the country without a single casualty.

The Iran strikes follow that template — bold, dramatic, and designed for maximum impact on a domestic audience hungry for evidence of strength. 

Whether they produce anything resembling a durable outcome in the region is a question that the coming weeks will begin to answer.

(courtesy - The Raisina Hills ) 

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