Richard Nixon via Mark Reinstein, Shutterstock
President Donald Trump is acting a lot like Richard Nixon, another Republican president who engaged America in risky military gambits even as scandal destroyed his administration.
“Circumstances were different but the last time an ideologically motivated aspiring hegemon threatened the world’s oil supply was 1973, when the Soviet Union was observed making preparations to intervene in the Arab-Israeli war,” observed Holman W. Jenkins Jr., a longtime columnist at The Wall Street Journal. Jenkins described how Nixon alerted the military to Defcon 3, making him the last president who “resorted to an unvarnished nuclear threat.” After that “nuclear bluster permanently vanished from the U.S. presidential vocabulary, experts in diplomacy tell us, for reasons that boil down to a loss of credibility once Moscow could match the U.S. in nuclear firepower. Oddly, though, this now-standard narrative hasn’t been updated for Donald Trump’s first term, much less his second.”
Jenkins pointed out that Trump threatened North Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen” in 2017 and Iran with “consequences the likes of which few throughout history have ever suffered before” in 2018.
“On Tuesday, in a sequel perhaps underreported given the now-established verbal conventions, Mr. Trump warned against interrupting the flow of oil in the Strait of Hormuz: ‘If for any reason mines were placed, and they are not removed forthwith, the Military consequences to Iran will be at a level never seen before,'’’ Jenkins added. Although “a nuclear attack isn’t in the immediate offing,” he nevertheless expressed concern that Trump’s rhetoric and policies make escalation inevitable.
Jenkins speculated that other governments are also worried that Trump will escalate things.
“Perhaps this is why China’s government has been at pains to signal its desire for this month’s Trump summit in Beijing to go ahead, even as China professes uncertainty about what Mr. Trump will be seeking,” Jenkins said. “Other interceders are also working to put a cap on the war. All concerned have good reason. The U.S., even under a less flamboyant president, would be prepared to risk a great deal to defend its prestige.”
He concluded, “Unless Iran gives Mr. Trump the ‘win’ he needs to end the violence, the American president’s path is likely to be one of escalation.”
This is not the first time Jenkins has returned to the Nixon era to explain Trump’s administration.
“Trump is running far ahead of his political support,” Jenkins said. “It wasn’t long ago Democrats were trying to stir up U.S. military personnel to disobey his orders. If we learned anything from Joe Biden, a president fighting to keep his head above water cognitively is a president who has a hard time keeping his administration adhering to his priorities.”
Indeed, Nixon’s adviser David Gergen told this journalist for Salon in 2018 that Nixon’s erratic foreign policy behavior alarmed his advisers so much that they quietly intervened.
“Nixon was the commander in chief, and [former Secretary of Defense Jim] Schlesinger in effect was saying, ‘We’re going to override the commander in chief if in fact we think it’s coming from some sort of aggressive personality or he’s just pissed off. Whatever it may be,'” Gergen told Salon while reflecting on how Trump’s mental health deteriorated in 1973 due to the stresses of the Watergate scandal and his alcoholism. “And I’ve asked people in the Defense Department, ‘Do you think there’s a similar arrangement today between [Secretary of Defense Jim] Mattis and the four-star generals?’ And the answer they’ve given me back — I don’t think there’s any reason to believe he’s giving such an order … [is] that if they’re given an order that they think comes from an erratic personality, they will double-check it with the secretary before they carry it out.”