By Tom Fowdy
Emboldened by his swift capture of Maduro, Trump has given in to Israeli lobbying and believed he could readily topple the Iranian regime. Now he finds himself locked in to the very kind of war he vowed to "avoid" with catastrophic consequences for the global economy.
Traditionally, Donald Trump has what I would describe as an abrasive, unconventional, yet not suicidal, foreign policy. The President enjoys brazenly violating diplomatic norms by threatening to do unprecedented and crazy things, taking upon himself the appearance of a madman, but with the intended goal of gaining negotiation leverage and forcing an opponent to capitulate quickly before withdrawing from the brink. This predictable style gave Trump a nickname by commentators, "TACO," meaning "Trump always chickens out."
Except when he didn't and actually went to the brink. In the middle of a pretence of negotiations with Iran, the President decided to cave to Israeli lobbying and kill Iran's Supreme Leader instead in a bombing campaign explicitly intended to bring about immediate regime change. While I do not agree with the Iranian state's ideology and values regarding fundamentalist Shi'ia Islam, I find the brazen murder of the 86-year-old Khomeini to be callous and morally reprehensible, entrenching a very dangerous precedent.
However, getting back to the point, Trump taken a gamble on a strategic miscalculation that this decapitation strike would quickly bring down the Iranian state, a goal that Republican and their Israeli handlers have been salivating at for years. Trump's speech calling on the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps to lay down and surrender their weapons, mirrors word for word the same message that Vladimir Putin sent to Ukraine four years ago last week, and it is more ironic that they are premised on the same flawed political assumptions: That the target regime is despised by its population, so if you exert just enough military force to kick the door in, "the whole structure is rotten and will come down", as Hitler ironically said regarding the USSR, and worse still, the attackers will be greeted as liberators.
But if we want an even more specific historic parallel, Saddam Hussein himself invaded Iran in 1980, precisely believing that the regime was fragile and in chaos. Indeed, Iran's regime is domestically unpopular, but it is not weak, and states respond with resilience and unity when being invaded far more than they simply collapse. The Iranian regime is driven by a hardline religious fanaticism that has been radicalized through previous US interventions against their country, including the CIA/MI6 coup of 1953 and the installation of the Shah as a puppet autocrat, and of course a glorification of martyrdom. Trump believed they would simply crumble, but to the contrary, their surviving elite believe they have nothing left to lose and have gone all out in a campaign of retaliation that has involved aerial bombardment of countries throughout the Middle East.
The consequences are going to be felt throughout the entire world. Oil prices will surge, hitting people's pockets and disrupting the global economy. As US servicemen are now also getting killed, Trump, who pledged an end to "forever wars" will face growing domestic unpopularity and opposition. As he has publicly, on multiple counts, set the termination of Iran's regime as the goal, he has little way to climbdown from his quagmire. Iran does not have to defeat the United States or Israel militarily; it just has to survive and endure. It covers a vast geographic expanse of 1.648 million km² and has 90 million people; arguably in power terms it has vastly underachieved, but already it has hit out harder than many people, including Trump himself, were expecting. An ironic outcome from the individual who believes he has an entitlement to a Nobel peace prize for no reason at all, branded his political opponents' warmongers, and created a "board of peace" focused on the Middle East.
While Trump has been callous, yet shrewd in the past, this is officially the step too far, the scenario where his own gambits have not produced a gain he can market as a "win", but an all-out catastrophe he toyed with, but understood not to do. You must wonder what was going through his mind here. In his second term, Trump has been more radical and unapologetic, precisely because he knows it is his last, therefore he must set an irreversible legacy before any succeeding democrat reverses it.
This thinking has absolutely pioneered his approach towards a global trade conflict, as well as other hardline policies, but as the biggest irony of all is his decisions over the past few days might just leave him more comparable to the likes of George W. Bush than he ever intended, which will set back American prestige, public approval, and soft power by at least another decade.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
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