Annelle Sheline: “If Trump and Israel are not reined in, it is extremely dangerous”

She had the integrity to resign from her prestigious position as an official in the US State Department during Joe Biden’s administration because she could not accept the administration’s complicity in Israel’s genocide against Gaza. Today, Annelle Sheline is a research fellow in the Middle East program of the Quincy Institute in Washington DC. Il Fatto Quotidiano has had an in-depth interview with her.

Did you expect that the Trump Administration would attack Iran?

I was expecting it, given Trump’s previous behaviour, given that the United States under Trump had attacked Iran last summer, and then subsequently, given the extreme build-up in the region, it seemed very clear that he was planning to attack. So when it did happen, it wasn’t surprising. If you had asked me maybe a year ago, when Trump campaigned on no new wars, talking about how he wanted peace in Ukraine and Gaza, I would have been surprised that a year from then the United States would be launching a war on Iran. But when it actually happened, it wasn’t a surprise.

At the same time, this is not an attack on Iran, this is a big war, the kind of big war that the neocons had always wanted against Iran….

I think initially the Trump administration had thought this would be a more limited engagement, and now their timeframe is lining up more with what the Israelis want, which is regime collapse and just utter destruction. It is terrifying to think that Israel, and now perhaps the United States, are pursuing something like what Israel did to Gaza. The lack of any accountability for Israel’s genocide in Gaza is why we are now seeing them applying the same tactics to Teheran.

Why has Trump attacked Iran? Some say it’s because of Israel, others say it’s for internal reasons, like the fact that he is facing midterm elections next November and the midterm elections won’t be kind to Trump, others say the president is in difficulty because of potentially explosive truths from the Epstein files. What do you think?

I think Israel is certainly a big part of it. If we didn’t have Netanyahu pushing for this, I don’t think we would have necessarily gotten to this situation. But I also think that obviously the responsibility still lies with Trump. My understanding is that when Netanyahu suggested this, he was pushing on an open door, that Trump had few compunctions about an attack like this. I think a big explanatory factor is: Trump perceived that the Venezuela operation went so well and he may have thought that an attack that killed the Supreme Leader would cause the Iranian government to just collapse like a house of cards. He talked about the fact that there were other leaders within the Iranian government that the administration had thought perhaps, once the Supreme Leader was gone, they could reach out to them, the way that they had done in Venezuela. And then they flip it and say ‘but we killed them too, so I don’t know who we’re going to reach out to….’. It’s really horrifying.

Yesterday the Washington Post revealed the role of Anthropic’s AI tool Claude. It seems like there is a gap between the military capabilities, enhanced by the artificial intelligence, and the political planning. It seems they killed even people who could be potentially helpful for the political planning after the death of Khamenei.

Absolutely. And I think the use of these AI targeting tools is horrifying in the way they just inject all these potential targets and then they just proceed to murder people and there is no verification. My understanding is that someone is still making the decisions, it is not completely automated, but now it is so fast. While obviously the United States committed horrific war crimes and killed many many innocent people in Afghanistan and in Iraq, to my understanding the decisions were made with some care, and more of an assessment was made of how many civilians were in the area, and if it was determined that the target had too many civilians nearby, sometimes the attack was not authorized. Whereas now Hegseth said himself that they are not going to be governed by the Rules of Engagement, so as I said the approach to Gaza is now being applied to Iran.

The co-founder of your Quincy Institute, Trita Parsi, said that the Trump administration’s plan was that the theocracy would implode shortly after the assassination of the Supreme Leader. and now Trump is considering a Plan B: arming Kurdish separatists. What is the plan here? Do the United States want Iran to spiral into a civil war and become a failed state like Afghanistan? Or do they want to break it up, because they don’t want Iran to remain a unified country?

I think that is certainly what Israel has wanted for a long time. I don’t know that that was initially what the Trump administration had envisioned, because as I was saying, they seemed to have thought they could have just installed, similar to Venezuela, someone else in charge, they really didn’t care too much about what happened inside Iran. Clearly they wouldn’t have minded overly if they had something similar to the Venezuela situation, where the country remained largely intact. Certainly America’s Gulf partners were not interested in having a fully destabilized, at-war, chaotic Iran just across the Persian Gulf, given that – whether it’s refugees or smuggling or drugs, that instability is very detrimental. If Iran is destabilized, chaotic and dangerous, it’s going to be very difficult for Dubai, for Abu Dhabi, for Riyadh, for Doha to once again attract investors and tourists, to go back to neutral transit air hubs. I don’t think these countries are in any way sad to see the Supreme Leader go, and I think would have been very pleased to see a sort of pro-US puppet installed there, but they are not interested in seeing Iran collapse.

Whereas Israel is interested in seeing Iran spiral into a civil war…

Yes.

Trump is upset with European leaders. The Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez, is very vocal in his opposition to the war and is refusing to allow the United States to use military bases on Spanish soil to attack Iran. Do you think any other European leaders will follow Sanchez?

I don’t think so, based on what we’ve seen so far from the Europeans. I think it’s really a sad state of affairs that European leaders have been so ready to line up behind this illegal American war and to support it and just, generally, not offer any criticism. Trump is a bully, but I think if Europe had pulled together and in a unified way had said ‘we reject this, and we’re not going to be part of this, it’s a violation of the UN charter, this war of aggression could be characterised as similar to what Russia is doing to Ukraine,’ just to have some sort of moral code and principle, in terms of parallels. The moral outrage about Russia’s attack on Ukraine and the hypocrisy when it comes to Gaza or Iran, is really striking.

Apparently the Trump administration did not even involve the United Kingdom, their special ally…Is it credible?

I don’t think that the Trump administration has a particularly close relationship to the British government at this point. Kind of all bets are off when it comes to how the US previously conducted its foreign policy.

The Meloni government says that it was not alerted in advance, even if the United States has key military bases and infrastructure in Italy. Do you think it is credible that Italy was not alerted in advance?

Certainly. I don’t think Trump had any interest in trying to coordinate with other countries. Again, going back, Bush and Cheney and that whole administration committed horrific war crimes, but at least there was some recognition that they needed to assemble a coalition, and in the end they did. They illegally launched the war on Iraq, and had pushback from various European partners, from France and a few others. And there was some realization that they needed to take responsibility for the destruction in Iraq, whereas this wanton disregard for human life and willingness to mete out horrific destruction and not care at all what comes afterwards… I worry this is a signal of a very dark future, where powerful countries attack at will, when they perceive it as being in their interest, and as for the targeted countries, there will be no rules, no norms to protect people. I hope these smaller countries will stand stand together and say: this is unacceptable. I know it is very difficult, as the United States remains a security guarantor, but Trump has demonstrated he is not reliable in any way. I know it’s difficult for countries to shift their entire defense strategy and their entire economy, that’s a very long process, but I do think there are measures that countries could take in the short run to demonstrate their opposition, even if it might also hurt their own countries. I believe that in the long run, if Trump and Israel are not reined in, it is extremely dangerous.

What kind of measures could these countries take? And will the United States allow those measures? Their stance is very aggressive. As soon as Sanchez said no to the use of their military bases, Trump said we will stop our trade …

But if the whole world were to say: ‘fine, we are all going to band together, we are going to trade with each other and we just don’t want to trade with you’, I think Trump would be under enormous pressure pretty quickly. I would be surprised if that were to happen, I’m not saying I expect that to happen, but I do think that the only way to get Trump to back down is to use his own coercive methods against him.

What do you think are the consequences for Gaza of this war against Iran?

We’ve already seen Israel shut down all the crossings again. This is similar to the 12-day war last year, when suddenly no one was paying attention to what was happening there. So I very much worry that Israel could use this as an excuse to fully break with the ceasefire, which they are violating every day, but they just could re-engage in a full assault on Gaza. Unfortunately, they would have the capacity to do it, because the United States continues to arm them to the teeth. Now there is an announcement that Trump wants to take the military budget from 1 trillion to 1.5 trillion and has asked Congress for an additional 50 billion. It is reminiscent of the USSR defense spending itself into the ground. The United States can’t keep spending this money indefinitely, and yet there is no appetite – you know, the Republicans used to be the deficit hawks, the Republicans were frustrated by the level of government spending. But under a Republican president, we’re not hearing much about that at all.

Do you think that countries which host military bases like Britain, Germany, Italy, will risk being attacked, maybe terrorist attacks, by Iran, if they allow the United States to use their bases?

I don’t know that Iran has the capacity at the moment to engage in some kind of attack. If it were a terrorist attack, it would more likely be from someone who wasn’t directed by Iran, but simply angry at what’s happening. In the case of Iran directing it, it wouldn’t really be a ‘terrorist’ attack, it would be a coordinated act of sabotage by a sovereign government – usually ‘terrorism’ is understood as committed by non-state actors. However I hope, more from a moral standpoint, that European governments would not allow their territory to be used to launch these illegal and horrifying attacks on a country that, although they’ve been fighting back, don’t possess anywhere near the military might of the United States and Israel. It’s attacking this country of 90 million people that has never had nuclear weapons. This canard of the nuclear weapon is so – you know, Israel is the only nuclear-armed state in the Middle East, and yet I think there has been so much emphasis on this idea of the Iranian nuclear program that people are confused and think, is Iran going to use a nuclear weapon? No, Iran has never had a nuclear weapon!

How will this war end? Are you concerned that it could spiral into a world war?

I don’t think we’re likely to see Russia or China getting involved. I do worry that this could be devastating for the Middle East in terms of refugee flows and just general chaos and destabilisation. Obviously the Kurdish question also has implications for Turkey, for Iraq, so it can certainly escalate to regional war, but I don’t see any indication that Russia or China are going to get involved.