The U.S. Is Sprinting Towards Disaster

In the last seven or eight weeks, the president has made a series of unhinged threats to start a war and he has been amassing forces to start it

The Financial Times reports on the Iran crisis that the president has created:

“Who wants this? Nobody wants this,” said [Aaron David] Miller at the Carnegie Endowment. “We’re sleepwalking towards a war, in search of a strategy.”

There is almost no support for a new war, but there is a vocal group of hardliners in the Republican Party and in Washington that has been seeking this conflict for decades. The report mentions Mark Levin as one example, and there are also ideological fanatics in the Senate including Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham. Genocide denier Bret Stephens chimed in again this week with a despicable plea for war. They have been goading Trump to attack, and I fear they are going to get what they want.

The vocal fanatics might not matter as much if they faced real opposition, but there is virtually no one in the Republican Party pushing in the opposite direction. Regardless, Trump has usually been inclined to listen to the hardliners when there is a division in the party. The president has consistently given the Iran hawks whatever they want, and there is no reason to assume that he won’t do it again this time. The vast majority of Americans doesn’t want this, but the very worst people in our country are clamoring for it.

One of the many reasons why the decision to wage war should not be left to any one person is that it is relatively easy for a small faction to control that decision. It is even easier when the president is as ignorant and easily swayed as Trump is. If the decision rested with all of the people’s elected representatives as it is supposed to, there would at least be a chance that more rational views might prevail.

Miller is right that attacking Iran is very unpopular, but I don’t know that sleepwalking is the right way to describe what is unfolding. In the last seven or eight weeks, the president has made a series of unhinged threats to start a war and he has been amassing forces to start it. That feels very much like sprinting towards the edge of a cliff. The president is not sleepwalking into anything, but it seems that his opponents in Congress are fast asleep.

I see claims that the president is trapping himself into a war that he supposedly doesn’t want, but I see no evidence that he doesn’t want to attack. He is doing almost everything that other interventionist presidents would do. The only thing he isn’t doing is going through the motions of explaining to the public why he is doing it. He feels no need to tell Congress or the public anything, but that isn’t an indication that he isn’t going to go through with it.

If Trump doesn’t want war, that isn’t because he doesn’t want to use force. Saying he doesn’t want war is another way of saying that he wants Iran to surrender without firing a shot. He wants to wage war on them, but he would prefer it if they did not retaliate. The president’s idea of peace is a world where he dictates extreme terms to other nations and they gratefully bow before him. He is going to unleash death and destruction on Iran because they refuse to bow.

It’s important to remember that the president’s “deal” rhetoric is nothing more than a smokescreen. He is setting it up so he can claim that he was prepared to make a “deal” but the Iranians refused to cooperate. Trump is trying to make it look as if it is Iran’s fault if there is a conflict when it is 100% his doing. Trump has had at least half a dozen opportunities to change course since the start of the year, and each time he has chosen to keep heading for the edge of that cliff. It is always possible that he could veer away at the last moment, but at this point there is no reason to expect that he will do that.

A wise president would never have done any of the things that Trump has done. A wise president doesn’t fire off reckless threats to attack another country out of the blue. A wise president doesn’t deliver unhinged ultimatums demanding that another government surrender its core interests. A wise president doesn’t send a huge number of ships to carry out the reckless threats he never should have made.

If the president were wise, he would stop all of this and recall our ships. He would drop his extreme unrealistic demands and settle for a reasonable compromise on the nuclear issue. He would lift as many of the sanctions on Iran as he possibly could. In short, he would repudiate his entire Iran policy and try something else.