Trump has wanted to humble Iran since 1980. He may be humbling the American empire instead |
Trump has wanted to humble Iran since 1980. He may be humbling the American empire instead
President Donald Trump has wanted to take down Iran since he was a 34-year-old soft-spoken realtor. His first known comment on foreign policy, ever, was in October 1980, when he declared that the clerical regime in Iran—which for a year had been holding 52 hostages—had made the U.S. look “just absolutely and totally ridiculous.”
“I think this country is responsible for that war by its own weaknesses. If we were respected, properly respected, as a country and as a people and as a nation, I don’t think we’d have a war between Iran and Iraq,” Trump told gossip columnist Rona Barrett in an interview on NBC. (In the same interview, Trump also famously declared that he wouldn’t want to be president, because politics “is a mean game.”)
Forty years on and Trump has seemed to change his mind about the president bit, but not about Iran; he’s still trying to scratch that itch, to stick it to the hostile and theocratic regime which had once plotted his murder. In his first term he pulled out of the JCPOA and assassinated military commander Qasem Soleimani, to little reprisal. When the second term came, recent New York Times reporting suggests that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who has long shared Trump’s desire to eradicate the Islamic Republic—made a “hard sell” for the war and convinced Trump that they would easily topple the regime. Iran’s top brass, Trump was told, would be kneecapped before they could even begin to threaten the Strait of Hormuz, the all-important oil choke point. The president bought in quickly and ordered the strikes. Members of his cabinet swallowed their apprehension, ceding to their boss’s confidence, the Times reported.
Trump went to war to scratch his itch: to show the U.S. was not weak. Six weeks in, as the war transitions into negotiations that Washington is not really in control of, it is starting to look like the war will prove the opposite.
There is a name for when this happens, when an empire goes to war to prove it is still an empire. It’s called the “Suez moment,” and it is named for a crisis almost 70 years old with a very familiar plot: a nation desperate to assert itself; an Israeli coconspirator; a strategic waterway; an adversary everyone assumed would fold quickly; and a set of allies the administrations didn’t bother to call. In 1956, the adversaries were Britain and France; the waterway was the Suez Canal; and the enemy was Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had nationalized the canal that summer. British and French leaders were certain the war would be quick and would restore their........