Trump’s primary wager is that Iran and its proxies in the Middle East have been so weakened that the US president can cast his intervention as both limited and successful. It is also a bet that a cowed Tehran will swiftly seek a settlement rather than retaliating.

Saturday’s U.S. strike on Iranian targets “was the easy part… once you’ve got a toe in the water, you’ve got a foot in the water and then you’re all the way in,” a foreign policy analyst told HuffPost.