Trump’s Boxed Himself Into a Trap on Iran |
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President Donald Trump is faced with a dramatic choice: either to escalate his war on Iran by sending in ground troops—or to pull out altogether. For the past month, he’s simply been bombing as many targets as U.S. intelligence can identify, on the assumption that massive firepower precludes the need for a strategy.
It’s clear this mindlessness is no longer tenable. He has killed Iran’s top echelons of leaders and blown up a lot of structures, but the basic elements of the regime—a theocratic state fueled by an oppressive elite military, reduced in arms but still powerful, with the stuff of a potential nuclear arsenal hidden away—remain.
Trump may announce, in a prime-time speech tonight, that he has accomplished his aims—but he hasn’t. (He claimed on Tuesday that he has accomplished regime change by killing a bunch of leaders, but this only shows that he doesn’t know what the phrase regime change means.) At the height of the Vietnam War, Sen. George Aiken famously advised President Lyndon B. Johnson to “declare victory and go home.” Trump may be about to do just that. It’s hardly the worst of his options, but it would bolster the growing impression, here and abroad, that the president is a wayward missile who has turned the United States into an unsteady ally—even a rogue nation.
Then again, who knows what Trump will announce tonight—or what he will do in the next days and weeks? In recent times, he has said that the war might be over “very soon” and that it could go on for a long time. He has demanded “unconditional surrender” and shrugged that he might end the war even if Iran doesn’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz. In other words, he might leave the United States and the world worse off than before the war began.
There is a school of thought that Trump acts crazy and unpredictable in order to discombobulate his enemies, even scare them into submission, as Richard Nixon tried (but, it’s often forgotten, failed) to do with his “madman theory.” Maybe. But this trait, if that’s what it is, also boxes Trump—and the rest of us—into a multipronged trap. The enemy will likely take his words seriously and prepare to stave off his threats. If Trump backs down (possibly because he detects these preparations), he risks looking weak, thus emboldening not only the enemy at hand (in this case, Iran) but enemies worldwide who are watching (e.g., Russia, China, and North Korea). And so, because he abhors looking weak, he may act on his threat, against his better judgment, escalating the violence.
According to news reports over the past week, Trump has been weighing three possible missions for ground troops, in hopes of eking out some sort of victory: 1) opening up the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which a quarter of the world’s oil passes, which Iran is now blocking, 2) occupying Kharg Island, the center of the country’s oil production, and/or 3) pilfering Iran’s supply of enriched uranium, which the president said U.S.........