Iran War update #52: Trump is getting played by the mediators

I absolutely think that it would be very bad if the U.S. launches massive air strikes on civilian targets in Iran, as Donald Trump keeps threatening to do. I also think that Trump is stuck in a never-ending cycle of pointless and moronic behavior which is frankly hard to watch.

The cycle goes like this. First, Trump threatens to do enormous damage to Iran with air strikes on civilian targets. The idea, he says, is to force Iran to “surrender” and give up its influence over the Strait of Hormuz. Second, in order to stop the strikes from happening, Iran suddenly pretends that it is going make concessions on the Strait. Trump credits his own deal-making skills with bringing these concessions about and calls off the strikes. Thirdly, it then turns out that fairly quickly that Iran is actually not going to make those concessions, but it takes Trump a few weeks to figure this out, at which point he threatens to end Iranian civilization again.

Although it does have the virtue of not ungulfing the region in a horrific conflagration, watching this cycle is a bit like watching Wile E. Coyote run off the cliff again and again and again. Trump doesn’t seem to realize that this tactic is never going to work because Iran sees no reason to give up its influence over the Strait - in fact, it regards that influence as a key part of its security going forward. On top of that, every time that Trump makes this threat and then backs down, he just gives Tehran another reason to believe it shouldn’t change course.

As I wrote a few days ago, that’s why Iran is currently going for broke. The latest reports say that Iran might actually now launch a wave of pre-emptive strikes on the U.S. and Israel in order to show it really means business.

But another part of this dynamic that interests me is the way that Trump has ceded so much of his decision-making to other countries in the region, and the fact he doesn’t even seem to realize that he has done it.

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