Trump’s Iran fiasco has led him into the gravest territory |
Donald Trump has hung nine glowering portraits of himself throughout the White House, each one projecting a variation on the theme of intimidation. But gazing into his narcissistic pool of grimacing images has not calmed him when in his mind’s eye he stares into the abyss of the worst failure of his life.
Trump’s fiasco has inspired him to heightened performances of profane, vile and vicious threats. His grammar of atrocity has escalated from hateful rhetoric to threats of war crimes. What might have initially appeared as rage-quitting the video game that the White House communications department makes of his Iran War has crossed an inviolable red line of international law. His pouting and foot stomping have led him into the gravest territory.
When Trump launched his war, he seemed to have convinced himself that it would be over within days, with the complete capitulation of the Iranians and its oil in his hands to auction off at his whim and self-enrichment. He had been warned by the chair of the joint chiefs, however, that military hardware could not resolve the problem of geography. He waved away the caution as meaningless. The Iranians proceeded to achieve superior leverage by clamping a vise on the strait of Hormuz. The prospect of a lone drone or mine was sufficient to teeter the global economy. Trump had nothing to say to counter the fees of Lloyd’s of London, the shipping insurance firm, which declared the strait a “very high-risk area” and raised the rate of its premium astronomically on a daily voyage-by-voyage basis. The traffic dried up. Trump had the bombs, but not the cards.
Less than two weeks after he had begun his war, on 11 March, Trump confidently said: “Any time I want it to end, it will end.” He knew it would end “soon” because there was “practically nothing left to target”. His greatest monument, greater even than his ballroom, more lasting than the glittering gold appliques he slapped on every wall in the White House, would be rubble and ruin. Two days later, he said he would know when to end the war “in my bones” – presumably not his bone spurs.
In his only significant speech to the nation on the war, on 1 April, Trump blustered that he was “now winning bigger than ever before”. He had “beaten and completely decimated Iran”. The job already done, he passed on the task to “the countries of the world that do receive oil through the Hormuz strait” to “just take it,” which “should be easy”. He added brightly:........