As President Donald Trump’s “unnecessary war with Iran” drags on, it’s become clear that not only does he have just “one approach” to solving the crisis, but that it is “guaranteed to fail.” This is according to conservative Washington Post columnist and military historian Max Boot, who on Monday detailed how Trump’s “schizophrenic” leadership “undermines his own threats and sabotages his own negotiations.”
“There are many reasons for this quagmire,” writes Boot, “but a significant part of the explanation is President Donald Trump’s schizophrenic approach. He veers between conciliation and confrontation, alternatingly praising Iranian leaders as ‘very rational people’ and denouncing them as ‘scum’ — with metronomic regularity.” Such flip-flops have come to characterize the conflict.
“At least seven times since the start of the war, Trump has vowed to launch devastating attacks before announcing that he was instead giving talks another chance,” Boot explains. “Most recently, on Aug. 1, he wrote on social media that ‘the U.S.A. is locked and loaded and ready to go against the Islamic Republic of Iran, at levels of Military Terror, Strength, and Power not seen since World War II,’ but that he would ‘hold off any attack’ because ‘the perimeters of a deal has been agreed to.’ (Presumably he meant ‘parameters.’)”
According to Boot, Trump is “yo-yoing between dealmaking and warmaking in ways that undercut his chances of success in either endeavor. The Iranians no longer seem to fear him because he has made so many threats he has not carried out. Remember when on July 22 he vowed to ‘bomb and destroy ONE BRIDGE OR POWER PLANT’ for every cargo ship that Iran attacked in the Strait of Hormuz? At least three ships have been attacked since then without the U.S. retaliating.”
What’s more, asserts Boot, “While the Iranians don’t fear Trump, they also don’t trust him to make a deal, because he reverses himself so often — and not just on dealing with Tehran. On July 22, for example, the Trump administration announced a nuclear-power deal with Saudi Arabia, only to have Trump add major conditions the next day that Saudi negotiators had not agreed to. The president’s after-the-fact conditions appeared to be a reaction to criticism of the deal from Republican hawks. Likewise, every time Trump veers toward a deal with Iran, he pulls back because of criticism from the same set of hard-liners.”
With all this in mind, Boot asserts that “Trump is his own worst enemy,” arguing, “He needs to decide on a single approach — either confrontation or conciliation — and stick with it consistently for a few months. The conciliatory approach, which builds on the earlier memorandum of understanding, is the smarter option right now despite the difficulty of reaching a deal with Iran’s divided leadership. That would most likely involve a humiliating recognition of some degree of Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz.”
While Trump often defaults to confrontation, according to Boot, he “lacks the political support at home to escalate the war or to suffer the economic shocks from a prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz and possibly the Bab el-Mandeb Strait too. A recent CNN poll found that only 28 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the Iran war. Imagine how much lower support would go if the U.S., which has already lost 18 service members, suffers more casualties. Moreover, the Defense Department is running critically short of the missiles it needs to fight Iran — or any other adversary.”
“The one approach that is guaranteed to fail is the one that Trump is now pursuing,” concludes Boot. “Zagging between war and peace, threats and negotiations, bombastic rhetoric and unctuous outreach. He may think it’s the ‘art of the deal,’ but in fact, as the past five months have shown, it’s simply a formula for an endless and inconclusive conflict — a ‘forever war.’”
