Despite Trump's calls to dial back the fighting, Israel continues to launch drone strikes against Hezbollah terrorists in southern Lebanon, recently making their deepest incursion into the Arab country in 26 years.
Beirut has been mostly spared over the past six weeks, and after a call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and communication with the Lebanese terrorist group through mediators, Trump has announced that "there will be no troops going to Beirut."
Bob Maginnis, president of Maginnis Strategies, LLC, says Trump lacks a strong understanding of the political, cultural, historical and diplomatic complexities of the Middle East, which may affect how he handles negotiations and foreign policy decisions involving countries in the region.
The U.S. generally emphasizes individual freedom, but many Middle Eastern cultures like Iran place a stronger focus on tradition and the role of radical Islam in public life.
"He does not understand that part of the world. He has not understood," the defense analyst observes. "We're pursuing this, expecting them to change. They're not going to change. They'll burn the country down before they'll cave in to Trump, and frankly, I think that that really supports what Netanyahu is doing."
Maginnis recognizes that Trump has diverse interests, but the president is also a dealmaker who is more concerned about the global economy and his own party being reelected in Congress in the fall than he is about the seven million people in Israel.
"It doesn't mean that he doesn't support Israel," Maginnis adds. "It just means that he's getting anxious about what's going on, and it's not helping him. The Iranians are using that as leverage against us."
He says America has demonstrated overwhelming military power in Iran, but he questions whether that has served a coherent political objective in Iran, which has demonstrated political endurance.
Some Americans see it as a failure of Trump's foreign policy, but legal expert and broadcaster Jenna Ellis disagrees.
"I think he has a bigger picture than just kind of the war hawk that a lot of past Republican presidents have been," she recently said on American Family Radio's "Today's Issues" program.
She also thinks Trump was right, initially, to engage Iran because "no one thinks, unless you're a totally crazy Democrat, that Iran should have nuclear capabilities."
Still, she believes Trump should have ended this sooner.
"There should have been a de-escalation plan to not let it continue this far, because I don't see necessarily what our strategic objectives are in terms of perpetuating this longer and basically intervening between Israel and Iran," she said.
Acknowledging that Israel is "our closest ally," Ellis also pointed out that the U.S. does not have a national interest in everything.
"This is where I think … that Trump is giving more ground to the anti-Israel voices that are raising stronger within the base of the party the longer that this persists," she said. "I would like to see him not go for a regime change and all this long-term stuff. I think this will go kind of the way of George W. Bush in some of the post-Iraq War, all of that stuff that he was ultimately criticized for."
Ellis thinks Trump needs to conclude this and return his focus to American policy, "because there are so many things that Americans are frustrated with right now, especially with Congress."
