Impotent cycle of empty threats has turned Iran war into Trump’s own Groundhog Day
Being the subject of mockery may be the most intense of all Donald Trump’s known aversions.
Yet more than five months after embarking on a war of choice against Iran, the US president risks attracting ridicule as he struggles to secure a military victory – while repeatedly threatening devastating bombardment against the Tehran regime, only to back down on the pretext of renewed negotiations.
Critics suggest the ultimatum-climbdown sequence has acquired a Groundhog Day quality. By one count, he has adopted the same tactic seven times since launching the war in tandem with Israel on 28 February.
Last weekend saw the latest episode, as Trump told reporters onboard Air Force One that he had suddenly called off “a massive” attack that he said would have been “the biggest since world war two” after an appeal from US allies and because “I think there’s a deal”.
Despite negotiations between Iran and Oman over shipping in the strait of Hormuz, no deal has thus far materialized, and the strategically vital waterway – conduit to a fifth of the world’s oil supply before the war – remains closed.
The pattern resembled one that unfolded on a string of other occasions – including Trump’s memorably dire threat in April that Iranian “civilization will die tonight” unless Tehran capitulated to his demands only to retreat at the 11th hour and agree to a ceasefire.
The US president has also claimed multiple times that the US has “virtually” won the war and that Iran’s regime was clamoring for a deal.
Increasingly, such claims are prompting ridicule.
A recent CNN montage showed 14 separate pieces of footage dating back to March, with Trump insisting peace was at hand because Iran’s leaders “want to make a deal” after being supposedly rendered militarily impotent – assertions belied by a continuing Iranian ability to inflict damage on US and allied targets in the Middle East.
The veteran British journalist and commentator Andrew Neil pilloried Trump’s boasts as worthy of the Nobel peace prize he is known to covet.
“He, in the past five months, has brought peace to the Iran war eight times,” Neil said sarcastically on Times Radio. “What more do you have to do to merit a Nobel peace prize?”
He added: “We waste our time even analyzing it, because it’s either meaningless, or he’s done a U-turn on it within 24 hours … You might as well read the shipping forecasts.”
Trump’s wildly zigzagging messaging on the war betrays an absence of strategy and a profound ignorance of his enemy, analysts say – and threatens to deliver an electoral disaster in November’s US congressional midterms.
Mehrzad Boroujerdi, vice-provost and a political scientist at Missouri Science and Technology University, believes the US president’s failure to understand the individuals leading Iran’s authoritarian Islamic system has misled him into a dead end of ineffective and counterproductive threats. [Continue reading…]