President Donald Trump alarmed an international relations expert on Tuesday after he backed down from his latest threat to the Iranian regime.
On Monday, Trump said he planned to impose a 20% toll on ships traveling through the Strait of Hormuz in response to the Iranian regime’s latest attempt to reclose the waterway. The move also called into question the strength of the memorandum of understanding that the Trump administration signed with the Iranians, which was supposed to guarantee the reopening of the Strait without the imposition of fees or tolls.
However, Trump backed down from that threat on Tuesday at the insistence of U.S. allies, according to reports.
Michael A. Cohen, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic Studies, argued in a new Substack essay that Trump’s repeated decisions to back down from his threats have become a strategic boon for Iran.
“To put it mildly, this is no way to run a foreign policy, and it speaks to the extraordinary danger of having a US president so utterly bereft of strategic thought, so completely incapable of sticking to a plan, and so transparent in his deliberations,” Cohen wrote.
Trump has previously threatened to wipe out the entire Iranian civilization and to bomb the country out of existence in response to ongoing skirmishes between the Iranians and U.S. allies in the Middle East. Cohen argued that those threats play into the “madman theory about Trump,” but Trump has often failed to live up to those expectations.
“While once there was talk of the madman theory with Trump, the reality is that he’s more the ‘Chicken Man,’” Cohen wrote. “Iran need not take any of Trump’s belligerent threats seriously because they’ve seen over and over again that he’s afraid to follow through on them. Trump doesn’t want to use force or risk escalation. As he made clear when announcing the Memorandum of Understanding signed with Iran last month, he’s afraid of the “economic catastrophe” that ‘could have happened’ if the war continued.”
“Again, the conclusion likely drawn by Iran’s leaders is that Trump speaks with a big stick but acts softly,” he added.
“To be sure, the Iranians can only push so hard. Complete Iranian recalcitrance could perhaps lead Trump to finally act on his words. But it’s safe to say that Iran currently has all the leverage. They bore the brunt of a US military attack and today are in a strategically more advantageous position than before the war,” Cohen wrote.
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