In the years after Barack Obama’s presidency, it became an article of faith that one of his central errors in foreign policy was the Syria “red line.” He had said he would attack Syria if it used chemical weapons — but when evidence emerged that it had used those weapons, he pushed the question of intervention to Congress, which declined to act.
“A disaster,” Donald Trump called it at the time. A cause of “generational and reputational damage,” said then-Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida). Part of “an incoherent maze” of foreign policy, Pete Hegseth argued a few years later. In ignoring a red line that he had drawn, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) explained, Obama had risked squandering American credibility around the world.
Obama’s red line flip flop looks like the model of careful policymaking compared to what we have witnessed since the Iran war began. Last week, President Trump posted on social media that “If Iran doesn’t FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT, the Strait of Hormuz, within 48 HOURS from this exact point in time, the United States of America will hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST.”
The rest of the story is well known. Iran refused to be cowed by this threat and continued its attacks and its closure of the strait. Trump’s response? To quickly climb down and announce that he had postponed any action on energy infrastructure for five days, claiming that — suddenly, overnight — Iran and the U.S. had been engaged in “productive conversations” toward a “complete and total resolution of our hostilities in the Middle East.” The Iranians denied any such talks were taking place. Now Trump says he’s extending the pause by another week and a half.
It is by now clear that Trump is being graded on a curve. When he says he will raise tariffs to 130 percent or that he will blow up Iran’s biggest gas field or that “the war is very complete, pretty much” none of these statements mean much. They could be actual American policies or not, or they could stand as policy for a day or a week after which they will change. After saying that the war was pretty much complete, that same day Trump asserted that “we haven’t won enough” and that “we’ll not relent until the enemy is totally and decisively defeated.” He’s said that he agreed to negotiate with Iran’s leaders but then couldn’t because they keep getting killed — though it is of course his own military (and Israel’s) which is doing the killing. All clear?
Trump’s supporters claim this incoherence is strategic genius, that he is keeping people off guard. Except that policy seems to change for a variety of reasons: Maybe the stock market falls, or maybe the target country lavishes praise on Trump and gives him a gold bar. Trump’s superpower is that he is flexible enough to turn on a dime and has a base that will accept anything he proposes. Once unalterably opposed to Middle Eastern wars, many of his MAGA followers now believe in this Middle Eastern war with the zeal of converts. And while Trump has made clear that he would like to end the hostilities, the problem this time, unlike with tariffs, is that he cannot stop what he started. Iran gets a vote. And it is currently voting to keep fighting, calculating that though weakened, it has enough military power to do damage to the world economy, thereby inflicting pain on the U.S.
For the world there is no longer any such thing as American credibility, just a strange reality television show in which the main actor swerves, bobs and weaves his way through crises, hoping that what he says today will solve the crisis caused by what he said yesterday. The day before he threatened to obliterate Iran’s power plants, Trump had claimed that the U.S. was considering “winding down” its military operations against Iran and implied that protecting the Strait of Hormuz was not his problem and could be dealt with by other nations whose imports passed through the strait. At another point, he said he didn’t need any other country’s help. Businessmen used to rail against previous administrations because of policy uncertainty. Now they line up to praise Trump as his carnival of chaos roils markets almost every week.
Trump has gotten used to playing with the U.S.’s massive power, punishing those who don’t bend the knee and rewarding those who do. In doing this, he is squandering credibility built up over decades to extract short-term goodies — sometimes to the benefit of his own family’s business interests. But in Iran he seems to have come up against an adversary that won’t play by his rules.
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