Almost everything in the Trump administration seems like an implausible pitch for a television show, containing so many oddball plot devices and weird twists that even the most creative showrunner would veto most of them. Wait, what? The president wants to invade Greenland? Marco Rubio is clomping around in the wrong-size shoes? And what’s this about Bobby Kennedy and a dead raccoon?
But nothing compares to “the Iran war” as an off-the-rails subplot that defies comprehension: A major military operation that began with thunderous promises of regime change in Tehran and the remaking of the Middle East is now fizzling out with Vice President Vance gamely standing around in Switzerland while Donald Trump proclaims that Iran needs missiles and the new ayatollah’s emissaries demand more reparations. The whiplash is so extreme, the outcomes so ludicrous, that no sensible screenwriter would attempt to sell any of this as a coherent story.
Four months ago, Trump promised the people of Iran that he was going to bomb their oppressors out of power, and that once the smoke cleared, they could take their government from the mullahs who have ruled them since 1979. Destroying the Iranian regime was clearly the goal from the outset, and Trump—spurred on by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—probably envisioned himself as the honored liberator of Persia.
At least a few people in Trump’s inner circle tried to temper the president’s enthusiasm, but glory is a seductive drug, and Trump decided to forge ahead. In a video released during the first night of bombing, Trump affirmed that the regime would never be allowed to obtain a nuclear weapon. But the final part of the message suggested that Iran’s past transgressions and future ambitions were all beside the point: The regime would cease to exist.
Finally, to the great, proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand. Stay sheltered. Don’t leave your home. It’s very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping everywhere. When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take.
For many years, you have asked for America’s help, but you never got it. No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight. Now you have a president who is giving you what you want, so let’s see how you respond. America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force. Now is the time to seize control of your destiny and to unleash the prosperous and glorious future that is close within your reach. This is the moment for action.
The regime, of course, did not fall, and soon the administration was casting about for new goals. Trump and his aides began cycling, as my colleagues Marie-Rose Sheinerman and Isabel Ruehl noted, through a “buffet” of explanations for the war, including terrorism, nukes, and even the will of God.
[Eliot A. Cohen: War and consequences]
Trump, for his part, started denying that regime change was ever a goal—“I never cared about regime change,” he said a few weeks ago—while asserting at the same time that he had, in fact, effected a change in regime by killing a lot of top Iranian leaders. Trump has since left even that argument behind: He is negotiating with members the same Iranian regime that existed four months ago, but now Trump calls them “very rational people” who are “nice to deal with,” who are “not radicalized,” and who are “you know, looking to help their country.”
Trump has engaged in an equally stunning abandonment of his other ostensible war aims. For weeks, Trump claimed that Iran’s missile capability—the arsenal that rightly worries Israel and the Gulf States—had been, like so much else in Iran, “obliterated.” But Iran, as it turns out, managed to save the bulk of its missile forces, along with the drones that patrol (and menace) the Strait of Hormuz. So Trump rapidly pivoted from obliterating missiles to rationalizing them. Iran, you see, should have missiles; everyone else has them, after all. “I mean, they have to have some,” he said while in France more than a week ago, “because other people have some. You got to have some.” Besides, the president added, “missiles aren’t the problem.” Comparing missiles with nuclear weapons, Trump said: “Missiles, they hurt a little location, but they don’t blow up the planet.”
A little location? Where, one wonders, would count as a little location getting hit by Iranian missiles? The Israelis didn’t have to guess, because Trump soon abandoned another putatively important part of the American casus belli: Iran’s support for terrorism in the region. As the United States went to war in Iran, Israel went to war against Iran’s proxy Hezbollah, in Lebanon. But now Hezbollah—at least according to Trump—is just an annoying “pinprick,” and Trump thinks the Israelis need to get over it all and take a deep breath. When Netanyahu continued to launch attacks in early June, Trump said the prime minister “is a very difficult guy, and to be honest with you, he should be very thankful to us for doing this.” In effect, the president of the United States is siding with Iran and telling the Israelis that they must stop retaliating against Hezbollah.
While the Americans were bringing conventional war to Iran from the air and sea, the Iranians engaged in an asymmetrical strategy and closed the Strait of Hormuz—something anyone paying attention knew that Iran would do except Trump and his secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth. Not only had Iran’s regime stayed intact; it was now wrapping its hands around the throat of the global economy. Trump accordingly added a new war aim, declaring that America would force the strait back open for all to use, with no tolls or fees or anything else going to the wicked regime in Tehran. The strait, Trump said—which of course was toll-free before the war—would be “permanently toll-free.”
Not so fast. A few days ago, Iran and Oman announced that they would form a working group on “the future administration of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz and the services that will be provided in this regard and the costs associated with them in accordance with international standards.” The Omanis are still sticking to Trump’s line that passage will be free, but the Iranians are effectively asserting ownership of the strait—a level of control over the waterway they didn’t have four months ago—and Trump doesn’t seem to know or care that any of this is happening.
So much, as well, for the idea that the Iranian regime could be kept in its cage by bombing it into poverty. At the outset of the war, Trump and his lieutenants crowed that Iran was being “obliterated,” “decimated,” and other words from a thesaurus that did not reflect the situation on the ground. And although Iran has sustained major damage to its military and general infrastructure, it’s about to get a huge cash infusion to help it make a comeback.
[Read: The price of defeat in Iran]
Trump has now swallowed the condition that Iran will get some $300 billion, with a b, in investment as part of a reconstruction program. The money will not come directly from America—thank heaven for small favors—but the Iranians have tacked on the proviso that what they do with the money is up to them and that the Americans can go and mind their own business.
Again, to be clear: A war that was launched to destroy a terror-supporting theocratic dictatorship is ending with the president meekly nodding at a regional plan to rebuild that terror-supporting theocratic dictatorship with billions of dollars that no one but the mullahs and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps will control.
When pushed about all this, Trump resorts to the nonsense claim that the Iranians were “two weeks” from developing a nuclear weapon. They were not. Neither Trump nor anyone else presented evidence that Iran was creating a nuclear device; “two weeks” is a standard Trumpian timeline for almost anything.
Still, let us accept that Iran was somehow closer to a bomb than America could tolerate. Supposedly, this program was destroyed (again, in Trump’s favorite word, “obliterated”) last summer. Weeks ago, Trump demanded that all of the “nuclear dust”—his weird term for fissile material—be handed over to the United States. He even considered an operation to go into Iran and get it, a disastrously stupid idea that his advisers, for once, talked him out of pursuing. Now, however, Trump doesn’t care: He’s basically willing to accept something like President Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (the so-called Iran nuclear deal). But at least international inspectors will go back into Iran to verify the location and status of Iran’s nuclear stockpile.
Or maybe not. The Iranians are already balking at the idea of inspectors, while remaining open to talking about inspections. In other words, Trump—who pulled America out of the JCPOA—is now poised to sign on to a far worse incarnation of the same deal while other nations pay much more money to Iran than Obama’s deal ever conceived.
War, as the great Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz once wrote, is an act of violence to compel the enemy to do our will. The Iranians are the ones imposing their will on us, suggesting that Iran has won this war; Trump is accepting terms from the victor. The question remains why he would so quickly abandon the maximal aims he committed himself to at the outset of the conflict.
[Read: Iran got a great deal that it could still squander]
The answer is that Trump is utterly transactional, and displays no guiding principles beyond his own self-interest. Just as Trump jettisons friends and allies if they become an annoyance or a burden (often with a declaration that he never liked them anyway), the president also dumps policies and initiatives for much the same reason. If something looks like it will benefit him in some way—glory, adulation, money—he’ll do it. And if a scheme goes badly, he will do anything to get out of it, regardless of the costs to others.
Trump’s shallowness means that the United States has no actual foreign policy. The American nation—with all of its considerable economic and military resources—is now like a massive robot that has had its programming deleted and its memory wiped. Trump, the new owner who did not bother to read the instructions, twiddles the knobs of its remote control, spinning dials and jabbing at buttons while the gigantic and powerful United States of America lumbers about, walking in circles, bumping into walls, and smashing things, without direction or purpose.
Trump does not think he surrendered, because surrendering means abandoning important beliefs. He has none. For Trump, capitulation to Iran is just another deal. For the rest of us, it will be something a lot more dangerous.
The post Trump’s Shameless Iran Reversals appeared first on The Atlantic.
